The most amazing part of owl banding is not the owls themselves, but the people who climb the mountains, enter the woods, wire up the owl callers, raise the nets, and stay up all night in order to add a few more small bits of information to science.
These are the people that make American wildlife science, conservation, and management the very best in the world.
Steve Huy, my host for a couple of nights on a mountain overlooking Frederick, Maryland, is one of those people. He has been banding owls for 17 years and has, in fact, been netting and banding birds of one kind or another since he was 7 years old. His daughter Rowan, now age eight, started helping her father when she was just four years old!
Across America there are unsung heroes like this who band owls, who track ravens, who participate in nesting bird surveys.
Postmen are recruited to count squirrels and chipmunks, and retirees sample and test waters along a thousand streams.
Sportsmen and women agree to pay more in taxes so that fish can be stocked and millions of acres of public lands can be set aside.
Traps are set to capture and relocate mink and fishers. Trucks move elk from Utah to Kentucky, and from Kentucky to North Carolina and Virginia. Dedicated wildlife biologists count bear scat and monitor winter dens.
Transponders are inserted in rattlesnakes, and attached to deer and wolves, butterflies and turtles.
And from it all, we gather more data and more information.
We map it, run it through statistical analysis software, develop theories and test those theories.
None of this is romantic. A lot of times, it is suspiciously like hard work, and only rarely is anyone thanked.
And yet, what a poor place America would be were it not for the unsung heroes like Steve Huy!
You see, we once shot out almost all the deer and most of the bear on the East Coast.
The beaver are all reintroductions from Canada, the turkeys all reintroductions from Arkansas.
We poisoned most of the great rivers like the Potomac and the Hudson, and we watched dumbfounded as bald eagles, osprey, Canadian geese, and peregrine falcons disappeared to the point they were barely a memory.
And yet today, we are neck deep in geese and deer. We have more turkeys in America than we did in pre-Columbian times. Largemouth and striped bass can be hauled from the Potomac below my house, along with shad, perch, pickerel and catfish. I pass by a bald eagle nest every morning on my way to work.
How did it come to pass?
It was not a miracle. It was due to men and women who studied wildlife and wild lands, and who worked tirelessly to find the sweet spot where all sides could live together.
Mountains of data were gathered and carefully boiled down to PowerPoint slides and a few pages of testimony so sparse and clean than even a brain-dead politician could understand the conclusion.
Select pesticides were banned. Riparian areas were protected. Contour ploughing became the norm, and forests were planted, expanded, and protected.
As a consequence, things have slowly turned around. Thing have gotten better.
And still we gather data. We try to fit the pieces together and understand the larger tapestry of nature, and our place in it.
And behind it all are thousands of unsung wildlife stewards like Steve Huy, who go up the mountain to trap the owls, count the crows, test the water, track the snakes, monitor the bobcats, and reintroduce what has been lost.
For that, we should all be eternally grateful. This is why America is great. It is not an accident; it takes effort.
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