Help Amber Fund Her Education and Find a Safer Home

Hello! My name is Amber Merical. I am an avid conservationist, animal lover, and also a bit of a nerd! I've been working with animals since I was fourteen and have always worked to pursue a career where I could truly make a difference conserving our world's precious wild spaces and species.

So, in alignment with that goal, I am now pursuing a Master's of Forest and Nature Conservation at Wageningen University in the Netherlands! Wageningen is a world-renowned university and research institution that consistently ranks among the top universities in the world in the fields of Agriculture, Forestry, and Environmental Sciences. To put it mildly, it's a pretty cool institution!

After quickly cobbling together my application and hurriedly submitting it, I eagerly waited for a response! Imagine my excitement when I awoke to find an acceptance letter waiting in my emails just two weeks later! Now that the first step of the process is complete, now onto the hard, less fun part, paying for it all. Hence why I’m here begging for money on GoFundMe!

But first things first, let me do my favorite thing! Rambling on and on, using unnecessarily exuberant flowery words to eloquently designate my requirement for financial assistance. Or to summarize, tuition is expensive, and America is kind of scary right now… So anyway, let me tell you a little about myself. I am a graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where I studied wildlife and fisheries science. During my college years, I traveled around the world working with jaguars in Belize, African wild dogs and cheetahs in Namibia, caracals in South Africa, and American red wolves in North Carolina. After graduating, I moved out to the beautiful, but freezing (in the winter), Logan, Utah. I worked for the USDA at the Millville Predator Research Facility where I helped care for the facility's colony of ~100 coyotes as well as assisting in the rehabilitation of orphaned black bears so they could be re-released into the wild.

Currently, I am living in Washington state working for Northwest Trek Wildlife Park at an offsite propagation facility for one of the world's most endangered canids, the American red wolf. I love the work that I do, and working with red wolves has been a dream come true! It’s certainly hard work, and as much as I love the wolves I work with, unfortunately, the United States has become an increasingly hostile place to live. In addition to being an avid conservationist, world traveler, and all-around incredible person (I’m not, I’m actually pretty boring, I mostly just play D&D and games with friends), I am also a transgender woman.

Unfortunately, as America becomes more and more hostile to our community, I have been forced to highly consider not just leaving the country but also leaving a job I love and fought so hard to get behind. I am not making this decision lightly, and after a lot of agonizing and deliberating on the decision, I have concluded that leaving is just the best option. Nevertheless, leaving the U.S. doesn’t mean I’m giving up on my dreams of making a difference in the field of conservation. That’s why I’m here, that’s why I’m going for a master’s degree.

There are not many trans people within the conservation field; I can count the number of other trans people I know of that work in this field on one hand. I would still have some fingers left over too. I have agonized about the decision to leave for a while; sometimes it still feels like I’m giving up, but I don’t believe that’s true. I may be leaving the U.S., but I’m not giving up on making this field more accessible to queer people like myself. I’m not giving up; I still aspire to do everything I can to ensure that more queer people can make their way into this field if they wish, and so that future generations get to experience the richness and beauty of our world’s wild spaces. Conservation isn’t easy, and neither is being transgender, especially in today’s political climate. It’s only through community that we have made it this far, and with that community, we will continue to endure.

If you’ve made it this far (I wasn’t kidding when I said I like to ramble on and on), I greatly appreciate your time. If you can afford to help me reach my goals, if you can help me cover the considerable tuition costs of attending a graduate program outside the U.S., it would mean the world to me. Thank you again for checking out my page. If you can’t donate directly, consider sharing this page around. Every bit helps.