Beyond Flights of Fancy

A repost from 2006 of this blog.

In his book Stormy Nights and Frosty Mornings,

Paul Dooley writes of going to his first field meet with a hawking club.

He had never been to such an event before and was rather apprehensive as there were a couple of 'names' present who always talked a good game. Later he learned that some of these people, particularly one of the organizers of the meet, had never flown a bird free!

When it came time to actually hunt, nobody in this hawking club wanted to fly their own winged charge at fur or feather -- it was deemed to be "too windy" by some, while another said his bird was an ounce or two over weight and another said his bird "wasn't ready yet". It was Paul -- a novice -- who flew his bird and scored on first flight.

Paul writes: "It was quite an eye opener for me that day. The problem with field meetings for these fake falconers was that there was nowhere to hide. Some of them used to turn up without their birds just to watch. Nothing wrong with that, but why pretend that you hunt a bird when you clearly don't?"

Why pretend indeed! Yet people DO, don't they? And it's not just in the world of hawking.

I mention this paragraph, in part to highlight Paul's book, but also to note that we have the same kind of people in the terrier world, and they exist in other arenas too.

In The Survival of the Bark Canoe author John McPhee writes of Henri Vaillancourt, a maker of traditional Indian birch-bark canoes. For years Vaillancourt had been building canoes based on a mixture of book learning, theory, and pure fantasy. It was only when he asked Vaillancourt to go on a canoeing trip with him that McPhee learned an eye-opening truth: Vaillancourt had never actually paddled his own creations for any distance far from home.

His canoes were beautiful to look at, but the crafts themselves represented design choices unburdened by actual field experience. In the end, McPhee's book is not really about birch bark canoes -- it's about the collision between theory and practical knowledge.

Is it much different in the terrier world?

Not from what I can see. Some people have spent years on Internet bulletin boards, but have never actually dug five feet to a critter. They still do not own a decent shovel, and still do not know what to do with a squalling raccoon at the stop-end of a dirt pipe. Their theory of terrier work is entirely unburdened by field experience. When questions are asked, they do not pay close attention to the answers since it's all romantic abstraction. The purpose of a question is not to solicit an informed answer, but to extend idle chatter. Just as Paul Dooley's fake fliers show up at a hawking meets with birds that have never left a creance, so these fake diggers show up at terrier trials and enter their "one and done" dogs in the working terrier ring.

I was reminded of this collision between reality and fantasy while reading Matt Mullenix's excellent book, In Season, A Louisiana Falconer's Journal.

Matt is not a fantasy flyer. His book is about the reality of hawking -- keeping his bird at the right weight, finding a bit of pasture that has not been mowed flat, painting a cracked talon with Crazy Glue and nail hardener, and balancing the competing interests of job, hawk, children and wife. Every flight is not a glorious thing ending in a brace of rabbits; sometimes it's a soaking rain and a footed sparrow or worse -- mere indifference from a hawk a little too heavy to focus.

With a sense of confession, Matt explains that though his Harris Hawk nails its fair share of swamp rabbits and doves, there are also lot of cotton rats. They are, for better or worse, a primary quarry in his part of the country.

I get it. It's easy to love a rat if you hawk -- just like it's easy to love bluegill and sunfish if you fly fish. Field action of any type beats fantasy and theory seven days of the week.

Matt writes of the rising tension of a group hunt, when there may be too many birds flying, and as a consequence problems can rise up and spin out of control quickly. The same thing occurs with terriers. A solo man and his dog are under no pressure, but put more than three or four dogs in the field at once, and things can move too quickly for the human to avoid real trouble. It only takes one train wreck to ruin a day.

I do not hawk, but I understand Matt because he is actually hunting and his concerns mirror mine even though we hunt different animals on different game in different parts of the country. Matt talks about a hawk's leg turning blue after a run-in with a tree and the calculated risk that two hawks, diving for the same swamp rabbit, will accidentally grip on to each other as well as the rabbit. Is their a digger that does not understand this problem? I have felt the same rising arpeggio of concern, never mind that it is played on a different stage in a slightly different key.

In a small part of the book Matt writes of a man who "has no time for falconry." In two weeks this novice had flown his young bird only once, and then when the bird was over-matched. When Matt points out that it's pretty hard to work a hawk on a weekend-only basis, the novice replies, "but that's the time I have."

Matt does not comment. He does not need to.

What the hawker wants is interesting, but it's not really part of the equation, is it? There are some things that are required in hawking, and time with the bird is clearly one of them. Mullenix does not have time for falconry either, but it does not matter; he steals the time from family and job, from sleep and rest. He feels guilty about the theft (an honest man would), but he steals it anyway. It is what you have to do if you are serious.

With hawks, it's either all the way in or all the way out.

The dog world is a bit easier, and perhaps for that reason we are surrounded by more fakes, novices, romantics and bored housewives than the people in the world of hawking. I do not know. Perhaps I am wrong. Paul Dooley suggests falconry has its share of preening pretenders too.

All I know for sure is that the hawkers are a pretty literate and interesting lot. A tip of the hat to them, and a recommendation for this book.

I close on a slightly troubling note. In the UK, some of the mounted fox hunts are attempting to exploit a loophole in the law that allows riders and packs of hounds to hunt fox with large raptors. The result is that dozens of mounted fox hunts have gone out to purchase Golden Eagles and Eagle-Owls.

This is insanity on stilts. There is no tradition of hunting fox with golden eagles and owls in the UK. Exmoor is not Kazakhstan or Mongolia, no matter how loose the immigration laws get.

Add a novice hawker to the mix, along with a rioting pack of hounds, a couple of dozen spooked horses, a large dog fox, and a few overhead power lines and roads, and you clearly have winged disaster waiting to happen. Already, I have a report that two Golden Eagles have died from the sheer stupidity of it all.

And yet, perhaps God does have a sense of humor. There may yet be a punch line to this joke.

It turns out that after being extirpated from the UK for more than 100 years, once-native Eagle Owls have mysteriously begun to show up and breed in the wild.

I have little doubt these are captive birds that have escaped and hacked themselves back into prosperity on a diet of pigeon, starling and rabbit.

Excellent.

Mother Nature may yet bat last, and if the stupid anti-fox hunting law is repealed (as I believe it must and will be), then a fair number of captive Golden Eagles and Eagle-Owls may be yet be hacked back to the wild.

What a glorious day that will be!

Zumbo was (Mostly) Right

Sharp-shooting prairie dogs in South Dakota with a truck-mounted professional-grade shooting stand.



Some years back, I was lurking on several boards and list-servs when PETA came out with an advertising campaign against dairy milk. The folks over at FOL (Foxhunters On Line) went nuts. To listen to them talk, this was the end of the world and PETA's silly campaign was proof that the Anti-Christ was coming.

Over on the Dairy Management list, however, everyone yawned at the PETA campaign, and the talk quickly moved on to more germane matters such as the best low-grade slope to have on a loafing shed (3 percent as I recall).

The point here is that one embattled group -- the fox hunters -- freaked out, squawking like pet store parrots next to a slamming screen door. The dairy folks, on the other hand, knew One True Thing, which is that America will always drink milk.

I was recently reminded of these two divergent reactions when Outdoor Life columnist and Big Game Hunter Jim Zumbo posted a short rant to his blog concerning the use of semi-automatic "assault" rifles to shoot prairie dogs.

The gun community went nuts. Outdoor Life promptly fired Zumbo, and everyone in the Mainstream Media was quick to pronounce Zumbo -- a modest man with a small column in a magazine most people do not read -- as economic toast.

It seems all sides wanted to martyr Zumbo for their own purposes. The black-helicopter-spying, UN-hating, survivalist wing nuts wanted a martyr so they could show that they were powerful. The granola-eating, foreign-aid-giving lefties who assume all depravity is due to deprivation wanted a martyr so that they could prove that the "Gun Nuts" were as myopic, intellectually shallow and intolerant as anyone who ever served on a Taliban governing council.

The editors at Outdoor Life, of course, simply wanted to continue to pimp out America for their corporate advertisers. Zumbo must die so that another ad for something you do not need can be tossed into a land fill at the end of the month.

What no one seems to have actually asked is what was Zumbo actually trying to say in his blog? This is, after all, a man who has spent his entire life buying, carrying, cleaning and firing guns. He has shot deer in every state of the Union and knows how to skin a bear with a pocket knife. Is it really possible he woke up one morning possessed by the demon spirit of PETA-founder Ingrid Newkirk? I seriously doubt it.

While a lot has been written about "L'affaire Zumbo," I think most writers have missed the point -- perhaps because not too many of them actually read what Jim Zumbo said.

Here's a little of that original missive:

"While at the SHOT Show recently, I ran into a guy who complained that too many hunters were taking excessively long shots. He’s an outfitter, and witnessed plenty of people shooting at elk at distances greater than 350 yards. He suggested that that was too far, primary because the majority of those hunters had no clue of ballistics. Most were 'Hail Mary' shots. I agree. We read about people making 500 yard shots and more, and that, to me, is ridiculous.

Then at the SCI convention last week, I talked to a guy who bragged that his custom gun kills deer out at 800 yards and better. To each his own, I suppose, but that isn’t hunting. It’s shooting. And I don’t care how great a marksman you are. The risk of wounding an animal at extremely long ranges is high, and where’s the sportsmanship, the ethics, the satisfaction of taking outrageously long shots? I understand there’s a group in PA that shoots deer at 1,000 yards and more. More power to them. Just don’t ask me to support that kind of 'hunting.'”

Zumbo was making a point: there's a difference between shooting and hunting. We do not call range-shooting hunting, and we do not call skeet-shooting hunting.

In the English language, hunting means something and we all know it, and should be working to preserve and protect it.

Now, where Zumbo strayed on to thin ice is when he began to talk about marmots. I know something about marmots, and I think a man like Zumbo should just leave them the hell alone.

Marmots, you see, are a special problem. While Zumbo the Great White Hunter is definitely the man you want with you shooting elk in the field, he is not the man you want leading a charge into the dangerous thicket known as marmot politics.

In Zumbo's defense, let me point out that he is not the first ship to wreck on these rocks. In the last election cycle, when my friend Andy (a great Medicaid policy mechanic) stopped by my office to tell me he was going to South Dakota to work on the Rosebud Indian Reservation as an election monitor, I was the first one to give him the bad news: Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota was political toast. Andy wanted to know why I thought so. "Simple," I said, "He's soft on Marmots."

Andy thought I was kidding. He gave me a weird look (I get those a lot), and changed the topic to something I might have real expertise in: the pricing of anti-psychotic medications.

When Andy came back two weeks later, however, he admitted I was right. "The entire election hinged on marmots," he said. "Marmots!" He was amazed. I was not.

Prairie dogs have long been an emotional issue in parts of the West. In truth, these little animals do no harm and quite a lot of good. Of course, that's not the way cattlemen see them. In arid and marginal country, ranchers are always anxious to blame their misfortunes on something more tangible than the weather, and so they take it out on coyotes, prairie dogs and the IRS, not one of which has the slightest impact on a herd of Angus.

While government-sponsored poisoning is the main cause of prairie dog mortality, recreational shooters also have an impact.

Notice what I called these folks -- shooters. They are not hunters. A prairie dog colony does not move. This year it will be exactly where it was last year, and the year before that. There is no "hunting" for prairie dogs.

Nor is there any woodcraft involved. The shooter knows nothing about marmots nor does he care about them. For the shooter, marmots are simply a small target shot from a great distance.

If you hang out on the prairie-dog and groundhog-shooting sections of varmint-hunting bulletin boards and list-servs, you will find that these folks do not talk about the gestation period of their respective marmots, the symbiotic relationship between the prairie dog and the buffalo, the depth of the burrows, the importance of prairie dogs to black-footed ferrets, or the call structure (both audible and sub-sonic) of marmots. A marmot shooter does not know -- or care -- about these kinds of things.

What interests the prairie dog shooter is not the prairie dog, but the ballistics -- the grains of gunpowder used, the feet-per-second, the effect of wind, and the flatness of the trajectory.

Prairie dog shooters have a fetish for physics. The animal itself is simply a convenient excuse to drive out into the countryside with a couple of sandwiches, a cooler full of beer, and a few small sandbags to help steady the barrel on the hood of a car or portable bench.

Zumbo does not "get it" because he is a hunter, and not a sniper. Zumbo seeks to be involved with the animal and its habitat, while the prairie dog sniper cannot be bothered to leave the hood of his car.

While Zumbo's idea of a proper gun is a well-made bolt action rifle or shotgun with a carefully engraved walnut stock and a history behind it, the prairie dog shooter prefers high-end technology and may even be living a kind of Walter Mitty fantasy, with himself as the deeply embedded Marine Corps sharpshooter, and the prairie dog serving as a proxy for the commandant of a Viet Cong prisoner of war camp. Pull the trigger and you get a "red mist" either way.

In truth, there is a fine line between a hunting rifle and a weapon of war. Vietnam-era snipers used to go into the field with their own guns -- carefully calibrated bolt-action hunting rifles originally crafted for deer. Today's military, of course, has specialized sniper rifles, but in truth some of the better off-the-shelf semi-autos like the AR-15 are about as good a shot as the old Vietnam-era sniping rifles. And so they are used by a certain percentage of prairie dog Fantasy Camp snipers, never mind that using a military-looking semi-auto on a prairie dog looks more than a little bit ridiculous.

Zumbo was remarking about this ridiculousness in his since-removed blog posting.

Now a prairie dog is just as dead with a .17 Hornady as he is with a AR-15 (or even a grenade), but is there anyone in the modern era who thinks image does not matter? Do not ALL of us in the hunting community bear the burden of being forced to carry the dead weight of the most reckless things that the stupidest among us do?

That is what Zumbo was trying to say, and here is what he wrote:

"As I write this, I’m hunting coyotes in southeastern Wyoming with Eddie Stevenson, PR Manager for Remington Arms, Greg Dennison, who is senior research engineer for Remington, and several writers. We’re testing Remington’s brand new .17 cal Spitfire bullet on coyotes.

I must be living in a vacuum. The guides on our hunt tell me that the use of AR and AK rifles have a rapidly growing following among hunters, especially prairie dog hunters. I had no clue. Only once in my life have I ever seen anyone using one of these firearms.

I call them 'assault' rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I’ll go so far as to call them 'terrorist' rifles. They tell me that some companies are producing assault rifles that are 'tackdrivers.'

Sorry, folks, in my humble opinion, these things have no place in hunting. We don’t need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them, which is an obvious concern. I’ve always been comfortable with the statement that hunters don’t use assault rifles. We’ve always been proud of our 'sporting firearms.'

This really has me concerned. As hunters, we don’t need the image of walking around the woods carrying one of these weapons. To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let’s divorce ourselves from them. I say game departments should ban them from the prairies and woods."

Now where Zumbo overstepped the mark is in the last line. You don't need the last line. You see, if Zumbo -- who spends a heck of a lot of time in forest and field shooting and hunting -- has not actually seen assault rifles in the woods and fields, is there really a problem?

I think not.

The good news is that these assault-rifles (or look-a-likes of the same) are mostly in the hands of wanna-be tough guys, ballistic shooters, and a few kids who would be quickly laughed out of deer camp if they showed up with one.

The simple truth is that if you need a 32-round banana clip to kill a deer, you are a joke on legs and no one is going to go hunting with you -- ever.

But the Ballistics Boys who shoot prairie dogs are not hunters. They are shooters, and among this particular tribe, there appears to be a few who are a little low in common sense and a little over-caffeinated to boot.

Apparently there are more than a handful of Walter Mitty fantasy snipers who want to use an AR-15 Bushmaster -- the gun made infamous by D.C.-beltway sniper John Allen Mohamed -- to shoot prairie dogs.

No doubt they also put grease paint under their eyes to cut the glare, and slip on genuine Vietnam-era camouflage before they pretend to be muscular Green Beret commandos on patrol in the Laotian Highlands. Never mind that they are actually pudgy office workers shooting 3-pound marmots on BLM land in Colorado.

Real hunters like Zumbo tend to go the opposite direction. Instead of looking for more fire power and more accuracy, a good shot who really knows the land and his abilities may handicap himself a little bit in order to increase the challenge. He will not shoot over bait. He may chose to hunt wild turkey with an ancient French-built .16 gauge rather than a brand new American-made .12 gauge. He may forgo a high-powered scope, or lower the caliber on his rifle.

True experts handicap themselves in all sports, from cards and golf, to fishing and hunting. The fastest growth in hunting today, I am happy to say, is in the area of black powder shooting -- the very antithesis of semi-automatic fire power. At a time when the entire nation seems to be neck-deep in whitetail deer and turkey, the average hunter is not trying to ramp up for slaughter, but trying to dial down to keep an element of sport in the game.

So was Zumbo wrong? Not at all. Shooting wild game with an AR-15 is such tremendous over-kill that no one needs to say it, and damn few are actually doing it.

Sure there are always going to be some redneck idiots who want to play Rambo, but the proper response is not to legislate or to litigate, but to laugh out loud, draw a few cartoons, and make a joke to their face about the need to "overcompensate for their inadequacies" (And by that you mean shooting inadequacies. If they want to take it another way, that's their problem).

It is a simple truth, that mockery often works better than manifesto.

There is no need to legislate AR-15s from the woods, when laughter alone will work just fine.

_____

• To read more on this topic, see "The Zumbo Flap" by net-friend Steve Bodio (author of Good Guns and many other fine books) and "More Zumbo" by net-friend Matt Mullenix (author of In Season: A Louisiana Falconer's Journal)

.

Whippet Good

Matt Mullenix and Rina the Whippet, with Rina's first brace of rabbits. The title to this post was stolen from an email from Matt -- a reference to an old Devo song.

One of the unplanned benefits of this blog is that I have met, online, some pretty cool people who, though they may hunt differently than I do, share the same three- and four-species trials, tribulations and thrills of making it all work in the field while hunting.

Along with the folks that hunt with ferrets are the long-doggers and, perhaps most interesting of all, the hawkers and falconers. This last group is, without a doubt, the most literate group of complex-primitive hunters.

The picture, above, is of Matthew Mullenix and his young whippet Rina. There was a hawk in this hunt, of course, but as Matt explains it (quoting Gregg Barrow, another online friend), "The first season belongs to the dog," and these rabbits are purely Rina's.

The first season, of course, refers to the dog's first season -- not the hawk's or the human's. Matt's well-written and insightful journal this season is more about Rina the whippet (at least so far) than his veteran hawk Smash.

It was on Matt's blog that I learned that his old bird, Charlie, is now in stud at the Coulson's down in Louisiana (Tom and Jennifer Coulson are Harris Hawk breeders, fliers and mentors par excellence) and that Charlie had sired the new Harris Hawk that digger and hawker Teddy Moritz is now flying in New Jersey. A small universe, eh? Teddy's new hawk nailed its first bunny back in mid-October -- a development I learned on Matt's blog.

Matt took a long hawking swing around America recently. To read a little about his visit at Steve Bodio's, see the Querencia blog where he and Reid Farmer also blog with Steve.

Steve Bodio and Reid Farmer are another pair of interesting writers I stumbled upon due to this blog -- the kind of people who write about Turkish pigeons (No Dear, not Turkish prisons, Turkish pigeons), and the commonalities found among petroglyphs across the world. Three voices and three interests make for a rich gumbo at Querencia -- with occassional dashes of good stuff from other bloggers, naturalists, hawkers and doggers to spice it all up.

OK, back to dogs -- specifically hawking dogs.

I observe that a very rich and diverse variety of canines are found in the hawking world, and that the choice of dog may have less to do with the hawk than with the countryside being hawked and the collateral game than can be had in non-hawking seasons.

Teddy Mortiz, for example, hawks under a small pack of long-coated miniature dachshunds -- dogs that are useful for busting rabbits out of the tight thick stands of multiflora rose that are found in the East, but which also do double dirt dog duty on groundhog, fox, raccoon and possum.

Steven Bodio, who lives on one of the high flat stretches of upland New Mexico, has a love affair with the type of Turkish long-dog know as a Tazi -- a function of the jack rabbits, coyotes, and vast open spaces he has in his neck of the woods.

Hawker Rebecca O'Connor recently acquired a nice red Brittany. Her first Brittany was so well acclimated it licked the Falcon on the face and the bird actually tolerated it. A small all-pupose bird dog, Brittany's do well in a wide variety of cover -- a good all-rounder for California.

In other parts of the country, Jack Russells and beagles are popular for busting bunnies out of brush, while down in Louisiana, Matt has a fondness for whippets which are good warm-weather dogs for swamp rabbits and cotton rats as well as for busting birds out of tall tropical grasses.

For more on the subject, see >> Rabbit Hawker's Dogs.




A young male Harris Hawk and a longhaired dachshund named Fitz (as in Fitz-in-dens) which has an 11 inch inch chest, both owned and hunted by Teddy Moritz. The young tiercel Harris has been doing the business on eastern cotton tails.

Good Writing, Good Reading

Thanks to Querencia -- the excellent blog written by Steve Bodio, Reid Farmer and Matthew Mullenix -- I was steered to Rebecca O'Conner's well-written essay on duck hawking (or falconry if you want to be fancy) in The South Dakota Review (link is to a PDF). It's recommended reading for all.

Rebecca's blog (as well as the Querencia blog previously mentioned) are permanent links in the right-hand margin of this blog.

Rebecca's piece, entitled "Mercy" is about the mixed feelings we all have at the conclusion of a hunt and the need to kill quickly -- far quicker than death naturally occurs in the wild.

Humans have a sense of mercy -- a falcon, a fox, a cat or a coyote do not. And neither does disease or the infirmity of old age.

On a wild animal's last day, the best it can hope for is to find itself in the hands of an experienced hunter.

A Shot of Expresso in the Morning

“…Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can…”

The reason I hit Querencia -- the blog of Steve Bodio, Matthew Mullenix and Reid Farmer -- pretty often is because the three guys that blog there can write their ass off, and they always get me thinking.

The above quote is from Moby Dick, and starts up a musing on the burden of blogging in hawking season and the creaking of age as it begins to show up in your bones (and if it has not yet, just wait).

Everyone does their own thing in the morning. Mine is to dash off a few emails and correct the typos in what I put up the night before and to check a few web sites before I scurry off to work and get on the wheel and make it go around again in the pet shop window.

On the train I read or edit more stuff. On walks from the subway station to work I think a bit about the things I have read, and they crawl up the old rock of my brain to sun themselves on top like a lizard.

Sure I read newspapers and books and magazines -- quite a lot of all of them actually -- but where else but on the internet do you get Moby Dick worked into a discussion about hawking and blogging and aging? And so, out of the millions of web sites that are out there, I have chosen a few to read regularly, and Querencia is one of them.

Paving Paradise for Parking Lots

Jonathan Hanson wrote a nice piece on the value of roadless areas in The Arizona Republic a few weeks ago. His blog -- The Alpha Environmentalist -- has a permanent link on the far right (scroll down and look around).

It's nice to hear Republicans talking ahout environmental protection. Once upon a time it was quite common. It is not an accident that conservation and conservatism have the same entymological root.

Hunting Greens ought to be the largest tribe in this nation, but the lunatic fringe on the Far Left and the Far Right want to divide us, and they have largely succeeded at their mission.

If you hunt and fish in the United States today, you already know a lot about habitat loss. Joni Mitchell predicted it all: We have paved over paradise and put up a parking lot. My friend Diego writes that sediment from logging roads is killing his trout streams in Idaho, while Matt Mullenix writes about losing his hawking fields to Wallmart parking lots. The rise of more and more plastic houses in farm country means more posted land, and the decline of the rifle everywhere east of the Mississippi.

Meanwhile, we have the Democrat party talking about reaching out to hunters and anglers even as their consultants rent direct mail lists from the Humane Society of the United States and Handgun Control Inc.

On the other side of the coin, we have wingtip-wearing corporate Republicans posing with borrowed shotguns even as they vote to encourage sprawl, widen roads, clearcut forests and strip mine the mountains.

In the middle are the Green Conservatives and the Hunting Liberals. We remain a tribe looking for a candidate. The fakery now being tried by both parties ("We're your friend -- vote for us."). is transparent to serious hunters and anglers who are used to spoting crap on game trails, and shadows moving through dark waters.

The right candidate, when he or she comes, will know which way to go when it comes to roadless forest protection.

This is not about left or right, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative. It's about protecting an essential part of the American Experience so we can pass it on to our children and grandchildren to come. Nothing is more liberal -- or conservative -- than that.

The Arizona Republic, July 10, 2006

Hunters, Anglers Should Back Roadless Wild Areas by Jonathan Hanson

As a Republican, 4x4 owner and hunter, I don't fit the current paradigm of an "environmentalist." But just like my mainstream environmentalist friends, I pay close attention to the management of our public lands, the birthright of all Americans.

The nation's national forests provide vital habitat for wildlife, protection for pure water sources and abundant hunting and fishing opportunities. The parts of those forests that remain roadless also offer the knowledge that even in the 21st century we can explore country that is similar to what the first pioneers experienced.

One endangered management policy - the Roadless Area Conservation Rule - ensures that future generations can share that experience. Roads and illegal off-road vehicle routes already crisscross many formerly pristine hunting grounds, reducing the quality of habitat for deer, elk and other species.

It's up to us to save what's left.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department is hosting a series of public meetings so hunters, anglers and others who care about wildlife can weigh in on this issue. The Phoenix meeting is today, and the Mesa meeting is Tuesday. For other places and times and to submit comments, sign on to www.azgfd.gov.

The original Roadless Area Conservation Rule was adopted in 2001 after a two-year process involving more than 600 public meetings. The Forest Service received 4 million comments on the proposal - more than for any other issue in its history.

Polls indicated that more than 80 percent of hunters and anglers supported the plan. The Outdoor Industry Association, which represents 4,000 companies involved in the $20 billion outdoor industry, supported it. Even the corporate headquarters of KB Homes sent a letter of endorsement.
But a recent Bush administration policy change means we must vote once again to maintain those protections.

The Roadless Rule prohibits new road building on only a third of all national forest land. The rest is still open to logging and other resource extraction, as well as motorized recreation, along 386,000 miles of existing Forest Service roads - enough to circle the earth 15 times.

Some say we need more roads for fire crews to fight wildfires. But according to the Forest Service, destructive fires occur much more frequently in roaded and logged areas than in roadless areas, and human-caused fires are almost five times more likely to start near a road. The Roadless Rule allows firefighters motorized access to fight wildfires within roadless areas.

Some hunters say roadless areas make hunting more difficult. But as true conservationist hunters, we should consider the health of the game first, our own convenience second. Several studies have shown that roadless areas make the best wildlife habitat. And I'm happy to work hard to enjoy a quality hunting experience in wild country unspoiled by the noise of vehicles.

America needs lumber and minerals and oil. We also need space for fans of motorized recreation. That's why most national forest land remains open for such activities - and existing motorized trails will remain open if the 2001 protections are reinstated.

The Roadless Area Conservation Rule is supported by a solid majority of Americans (and Arizonans) and is backed by sound science. Hunters and anglers in Arizona must support protection for our remaining roadless areas and show support for Gov. Janet Napolitano's view of the issue. The writer is an author and correspondent for Outside magazine, and a founding member of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. He lives in Tucson.The writer is an author and correspondent for Outside magazine, and a founding member of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. He lives in Tucson.

_______

The writer is an author and correspondent for Outside magazine, and a founding member of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. He lives in Tucson.

A Polar Bear in a Roadside Zoo

The internet is this beautiful thing. It's a million times more powerful than the ancient library that burned in Alexandria, and a million times larger than all the coffee houses of Vienna. And though a lot of true ugliness comes out of it, sometimes some really great people are located and some shining talents rise up to smack you in the head

This is one of those stories.

A daisy chain of good things started with a note from Gregg and Soo Barrow in Texas. Gregg is houndsman and breeder of working Giant Schnauzers. He had been reading the blog from time to time, and had also stumbled across a speech I had given on street drug markets. He liked the speech and shot me a line to say so -- much appreciated

Gregg, in turn, mentioned the blog to Matthew Mullenix, a hawker in Louisiana who has his own web site and blog. I love hawks (I used to work for Audubon). It turns out that Matthew and I have at least one common acquaintence in the hawking world. It is a small world, after all.

Mathew, in turn,, mentioned this blog to Steve Bodio in New Mexico, another hawker and dog man who also happens to be an author.

Steve shot me a line to say "hi" just as I was coming to his essay in David Peterson's anthology on hunting ("A Hunter's Heart").

How odd is that? Pretty odd.

Well, to be make a short story long, I started reading Steve's Blog which he writes with Matthew Mullenix and Reid Farmer, and then I started reading the blogs linked to that blog. And then I ordered off for two of Steve's books.

Let's start with a quick book report. The blogs are great but the books are really good stuff. I will not review two books at once, but this is what I wrote Matt as I started the first:

I got one of Steve Bordio's books in the mail yesterday (On the Edge of the Wilds) and I am just 9 pages into it and am knocked out. It's depressing to find smart sons of bitches who can really right and actually have something to say, 'cause basically you know you will never be able to say it half as well. On the other hand, it's exhilirating too -- new ideas and turns of the phrase that just pop in your brain. I feel like an apartment dog taking his first long walk though a zoo. Pretty grand this place!

In the pages I've covered so far, Steve's talking about the smug disdain that the well-bred, over-fed, I-got-me-a-medical-plan and a college education crowd feel towards people that work with their hands and, conversely, the folks that actually own large ranches and farms.
It's more than the fact that Steve says it all very well (smooth, smooth); it's that he has something to say that really needs to be said and (as far as I know) has not been said before. I think it must help to be from the East and have gone West and stayed and really paid attention -- it is an expatriot journey every bit as clarifying as what deToqueville did (and certainly just as far geographically). It is an old observation that to write best about Somewhere it helps to be from Elsewhere -- Hemingway in Idaho and Florida writing about Paris, etc. Anyway, it is at some level depressing and inspiring to read something this well put together. Writing this good reminds me that done properly writing is more than typing -- it is craft.

All of this to say that I have finished the first book, and will start the second today. A third book on pigeons is already ordered.

Does any more need to be said? This is a writer worth reading and I am going the distance with the books. And the blog is a link off this one now -- as are the others.

As I told Matt after reading Steve's Blog (and Matt's and Reids) and several of the blogs linked off of it (The Alpha Environmentalist, Operation Desert Dove, the Nature Blog):

"For the longest time I have felt a little like a polar bear at a road-side zoo -- pretty sure there must be others like me, but without much evidence of that reality. Now I see there are others out there with a similar bend in the brain -- not a lot of us, but more than one, and that's a pretty thrilling thing on this end. I know some professional environmental types, but I have to say most seem to know almost nothing about critters -- it's either an academic excercise or a romantic thing, or a legal construct (lots of lawyers!) or else it's just the fear-mongering tribe they chose out of college. For whatever reason, there is often not much real connection to things that snap or go squish under foot, or that fly up or bite back in the hedge. A dissapointment."

But not a permanent disappointment. One of the great things about the internet is that all of the red-headed Eskimos on the planet can now find each other.

There may be only a few of us in the tribe, but the world as we know it did not really start with too many more than that.

Two will do, and we already have more than that.
.