Connections between auctions, wildlife and the land

This afternoon I went to an auction. Not really a big deal but I don’t go to many auctions. When we first moved to North Dakota we frequented quite a few of them that first autumn and the following spring, all with the intent of getting some of the “stuff” we needed to get started with our new home. We played it pretty close to the chest and always went with a list of what we wanted and how much we would pay. Usually that worked out fairly well for us except for the time we went to an auction where the main item to be sold was a Sixties era cedar wood boat. I wanted that boat and got into a bidding war and the price was up to a couple of grand when the guy who was bidding against me walked over and told me that I didn’t have enough money to outbid him. I stayed with it for another hundred then dropped out. Now, I am glad I did. That boat would have been a deeper hole in the water than the boat I’ve got!

There was something that bothered me about this auction—what people were paying. There were some very nice antiques sold at this auction but they sold dirt cheap. I wasn’t interested in antiques but I did have four items on my list and all of them are for my office. I also knew what I was willing to pay providing the quality was there. When I arrived I walked around and checked the items I was interested in, wrote down what I would be willing to pay and then did some shopping, mostly in the boxes of used books. That was a bust.

When the bidding started my first item was a nearly new color TV to replace the little B&W TV in my office. I had finally gotten tired of trying to figure out the weather maps in shades of gray and wanted a color TV. In store price for a like model TV is $200. My cost at the auction was $5. I was feeling pleased and a little surprised but I figured most people had been frightened off by the digital thing and didn’t realize that if they are using cable it doesn’t matter.

My next item was an office cabinet with an enclosed safe. The condition was excellent and it was what I wanted. I dropped out of the bidding for it after a few bids because I realized the guy I was bidding against was more determined than I was willing to deal with. When I dropped out he got it at a steal. I wasn’t worried, there was a nearly new desk that retails for $400 and I wanted to try and snag it because I am remodeling my office, opening up wall space for books and getting rid of this wall desk I cobbled together.

I never open a bid on anything and when the auctioneer tried to start the bidding at $100 I was ready to pack it in, except no one opened. He tried $75 and still no takers. He dropped to $50, then $25 and finally $10. I raised my hand and he tried to get the bid up to $15 for the desk. He couldn’t even get anyone to raise the bid to $11. I had my desk and I was happy with the price but feeling a little guilty. The auction was the selling of someone’s life history and it was going for a song. The only other thing I bought was a box of nice wine glasses for $1. At past auctions I’ve seen a box of quality wine glasses sell for $50. I doubt that at the end of the day the auction brought in a full $15,000. A lifetime of living in that farm house and it was only worth that much? Something is wrong. One of the auctioneers told me that this year sales are off more than he had ever expected. "People don't have the cash to buy," he said.

On the way home I passed by something else that troubled me and suddenly the prices at the auction made sense—land that had once been in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) was being put to the plow. I stopped and watched the tractor go over the field and I was expecting to see some grouse flush from in front of the tractor but I guess the birds were already gone and looking for a new home. An auction that didn’t bring any money after a lifetime and a CRP field being returned to the till may not seem connected but they are—both are symptoms of an economy in trouble and those troubles are still upsetting homes—human and wildlife. We don’t think about the economy hurting wildlife except for the loss in revenue for wildlife agencies but there is another cost, one that is unseen, and it is in the wetlands and the grasslands where the wildlife is being uprooted by peoples' need to try and salvage something out of this mess. Something for us to think about the next time we read about the recovery finally starting.

PS I also saw lots and lots of nesting ducks including a half-dozen pair of redheads. That is good. glg

From a Little Brown Bird

My goose hunting was a bust. When the roads into the areas where I wanted to hunt were finally passable the snow geese had moved on. We do have a lot of Canada Geese and a variety of ducks hanging around the sloughs to nest and raise the broods. Come fall, if the weather doesn’t chase them out, we’ll have a healthy waterfowl population.

There was one casualty of the long, cold winter—I found an LBB—Little Brown Bird—in my yard. It was at the base of the clothes line pole and I found it when the last of the snow had melted away. The bird had sought protection from the freezing cold, probably during one of the early winter storms, by huddling beside the pole. It had frozen to death there and when I found it the bird hadn’t been discovered by any of the neighborhood’s stray cats so it was in the same huddled position it had been in when it was overtaken by the cold and died.

What bothered me about the bird’s death was that it sought shelter beside the metal pole, a pole that would transmit the freezing cold down from above the snow to the ground. The bird had no chance of survival but yet its instinct had been to seek shelter there. I wondered if its instincts have been altered by human manipulations of the world and the reason it turned to the steel pole that was sticking above the snow was because it connected the pole to people. Have we spent so much time altering our world that the wildlife that once depended on their instinctive wits to survive may have turned too much to us? The thinking that set these thoughts in motion came from the essay I’ve been working on for a month or so. In the past century and-a-half, since Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, the relationship between people and animals has undergone a drastic change. Neither in the Romantic period nor in the Age of Enlightenment was there a concentrated effort to establish a kinship with animals such as exists today, but among some people Darwin’s views have inspired this kinship. When I was holding the nearly weightless little bird and feeling its light, feathery softness, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of guilt. Should I have been feeding the birds around the house more food? Or, was the little bird’s death just nature acting out her own population controls?

Rather than put the bird in the trash and condemn it to the landfill I decided to bury the bird. I dug a little hole in the still frozen ground and buried the bird beside our rhubarb plants. I put it back into the cycle of life. After that chore was finished I went back to raking the yard. For the past two weeks while I have been noting the ducks, geese, grouse, pheasants and partridge I have also thought of the little bird. In a strange, very mental way, the Little Brown Bird made a small part of our world a bit clearer to me. The distance between the game birds I have been watching and the LBB is very narrow. We understand that our support of game, whether it swims, flies or runs, also supports all other species and to prove this we usually offer the habitat argument without really explaining the deep connections between all wildlife, habitat and ourselves. But, the LBB was, for me, proof of the argument. It isn’t Darwinism that has created the kinship but how we have altered the world. The more changes we make the greater our responsibility is to the world and as we recognize that responsibility we develop a deeper relationship with nature. The Little Brown Bird was, for me, a reminder of just how deep our responsibility is. The truly sad part is that the person who condemns hunting (or fishing) is ignoring that relationship and trying to replace it with an artificial Darwinism that is feel good emotion and not science—hard or soft. It isn’t the kinship with animals that insures their survival, whether a Little Brown Bird or a Giant Canada Goose, but is our willingness as people, hunter or non-hunter, to accept our responsibility to the world and to act on it.

Thoughts? Glg

Copyright, 2009 by Galen L. Geer.

Thinking about hunting ethics

This spring has been a roller coaster ride of weather and nature constantly waving her little finger over the land causing floods with evacuations, roads being washed out, and in general making life difficult in North Dakota. There is light ahead because in some areas the rising waters are beginning to stabilize—sort of—there is still a lot of water in the fields to flow down to the rivers. Shoot, the way it is going it is going to be a few more weeks before I’ll be able to go fishing. Right now however, what I’d like to do is find a field that I could actually reach that is under the flight path of the thousands of geese around here. In time I know the rivers will return to their course, the bogs will shrink to sloughs and the ground will be dry enough to walk on without sinking past your ankles. If I am lucky it’ll all happen while the snow geese are still in the area and I’ll be able to get in some good snow goose hunting. Until then I’ll have to be content to watching the thousand-bird flights that pass over my house several times a day. Maybe tomorrow on my drive to Fargo I’ll be able to get some photos of the geese rafting on the flood waters. It is an amazing sight!

How many of you are familiar with the writings of Jim Posewitz? He hasn’t written any best sellers but he has written two books that I believe are very important to the future of hunting, Beyond Fair Chase and Inherit the Hunt . These are small books and each one can be read in just a couple of hours. What I believe is important about these books is that Posewitz tackles the tricky question of hunting ethics.

The question of hunting ethics is the source of many debates and I often find myself being at the heart of many discussions over hunting ethics. What has caught my eye in Posewitz’s book Beyond Fair Chase is that he has offered a comprehensive ethic for hunters and I’ve been working with it in the last installment of my three-part series for Whitetails Unlimited. Here is what he has posited as a Twenty-first century ethic for hunters:

“A person who knows and respects the animals he hunts, follows the law, and behaves in a way that will satisfy what society expects of him or her as a hunter.”

This is on page 16 of Posewitz’s book and in the next few chapters he takes the short, three-part statement apart and offers his evidence on how and why it works as a hunter’s ethic. What I have found, in my own work, is that Posewitz has written what I believe is a workable ethic. There is a great deal more to the discussion around the question of ethics in the Twenty-first century but the Posewitz Ethic can be applied to nearly every problem—at least that is how I see it.

What do you think? glg

Ice Markers from flood

I took these photos in Mayville, North Dakota and they are interesting because they show the levels the water reached, then frozen before retreating and leaving the ice markers behind. In some of the photos the ice markers look more like fungi growing on the trees and the playhouse than ice.

The ice table that was left behind really impressed me. Across the river you can see the huge slabs of ice on the banks.

glg

Red River Flood

The Army Corps of Engineers is warning the people of Fargo and others along the Red River that it will crest over 41 feet and could reach 43 feet. I don’t care what your belief is but either send a prayer or a positive thought to the people of Fargo. They are fighting for their homes and their city. They are doing it the way Americans have always done it—by standing shoulder to shoulder with people they may never see again. It does not matter whether they are Democrats or Republicans, gay or straight, hunter or anti-hunter, they are all Americans and they are in a fight for an American city that is in peril. I’ve been all over the world and I’ve always been amazed by our willingness to set aside all differences and stand together, even when it is against the odds.

If they get the dikes high enough and if the dikes hold back the ice cold waters of the Red for the duration of its long crest then Americans will have witnessed a triumph of spirit over adversity that this nation has not seen in quite some time. The experts who know dikes and floods are quietly admitting the people are fighting against all the odds.

The next time the nightly news shows video of Fargo think about what you are watching. A nine-year old filling a sandbag, his grandfather tying it and handing it to high school student with a pierced nose who hands it to a college student who passes it to a homeowner, to someone who lives in a bare-bulb apartment and it goes down the line. Every person in that line, from the truck to the dike, has a different story, a different life and politics, but when nature turns on their town these people join together to save homes they will never step inside, business where they cannot afford to shop and apartments they wish were in another block. But for the present there is nothing more important than saving their town—their homes and the homes of others and God willing they will do it.

I think that is what makes us special as Americans.

ND Floods, Environmental groups and hunters

Geese! Actually I could hear the birds two days ago but the fog had wrapped them in its impenetrable shroud and I wasn’t sure where they were. Ever since I first heard them I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to go scouting and try to figure out where I can set up for some pass shooting—after the present flood crisis is over. Would you believe that in the last 48 hours we have had rain, ice storm, fog, snow, melting snow, more rain, more snow and now floods! At least our small town (Village? Hamlet? What should I call it?), is on a high spot and it would take a whole lot of rain and flood before we would be threatened. At least it shouldn’t be but we have another problem. ALL of the surrounding countryside was quick frozen last fall after late autumn rains saturated the fields. In other words, as the snow melts and the spring rains fall they don’t soak into the soil but run off, or as the soil thaws the mud is incredibly deep, trapping any implements and as the frozen soil thaws it causes the freeze-thaw movement of the soil to crack and even cave in some basements. I’m having a small problem in my basement that makes me think I’m making a war movie and I’m in a submarine, but it is nothing compared to some others. Two homes in the area have fallen into their basements because the running water and thawing soil weakened the basement or foundation, or washed out the backfill.

All of this should serve as a reminder to us that we really are not in charge here. You can believe it is God who is in control and is sending the weather to remind us that we don’t control our environment—regardless of what we do. Or, perhaps the weather patterns sweeping over our nation is “us” which is just what Pogo said. Are we slowly and irreversibly creating our own doomsday?

I don’t buy all of the Global Warming theory; although I find more truth than daydreaming in it. I’m not willing to embrace the tree theory of the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson, either. On the other hand I am 100% convinced that the world’s weather patterns are going through drastic changes but I don’t believe we can see far enough into the future to be able to offer realistic solutions.

While watching the weather change drastically several times in the course of a few hours I was thinking about the weather, the environment and the role of sportsmen and sportswomen in environmental issues.

I believe that we, as the sporting community of the outdoors, have an obligation to be at the forefront of many of today’s environmental issues. Some members of the community of anglers and hunters try to claim that because the origins of the conservation movement are fixed in the concerns of nineteenth century sportsmen (and women) that conservationism is where they owe their allegiance and not to environmentalism, insisting that the environmental movement was born out of the conservation movement and therefore the latter is the true conservator of nature. I disagree. For the conservation movement to be viable it has to be part of environmentalism. From what I’ve seen, the radical elements of environmentalism rarely spring from the environmental group but from outside elements—which points to one of the weaknesses of our entire sporting culture—an unwillingness to participate in groups outside our immediate concern. A result is our rights are often trampled by tiny radical elements of society, elements that try to form links with environmental groups to validate their claims. Consider PETA, CASH and Wayne Pacelle’s infamous HSUS as examples of this validation effort. Each one of these organizations, and Pacelle, has at one time or another tied itself to the Sierra Club (usually at state levels) as “proof” of their connection to nature conservation. A little scratching at their claims (rarely do you need to dig very deep) quickly reveals the fraudulency, or at least weakness, of their ties to true environmental concerns. These groups attach themselves to real concerns as a means to advance their agendas aimed at ending sport fishing and hunting. The presence of well informed anglers and hunters in the environmental organization is often enough to discourage these anti fishing and hunting groups from attempting to tie themselves to real issues.

A thought?

Sunrise in North Dakota

I don’t know how many of you read NorCalCazadora’s very good post on the problem with ‘our” outdoor media but she really nailed the issue. Personally, I’d like to see viewers who are fed up with trash on the outdoor networks go on the offensive against the shows and the networks by writing letters, email and refusing to buy products. But, I don’t hold out much hope.

Before I forget to do it I want to thank all of you who responded to my question about the length to my posts. I do appreciate the kind words. I hope I can live up to them.

This morning I had appointments at the VA hospital in Fargo so I had to be up and out of here just about dawn—it was okay with me because the early appointments gave me a good reason to drag my sometimes sorry carcass out of bed and into the dawn. I figured if there were any geese around I’d find them. Nope. I did see something else that I always enjoy—the rising sun—this morning it was a massive orange orb that was climbing off the horizon and I could watch it as I drove. I know that what I was seeing was the virtual image caused by the refraction of light through the atmosphere but the magnificence of the image stayed with me all day.

There were strips of clouds that it climbed through and as it made that transition from the horizon’s orb to burning sun there was a general peace in my world. Snow that had re-frozen during the night after the day’s warmth had worked on it, still holds everything in its grip. I knew that outside my truck everything was cold and covered with frost, ice and snow. That grip and all the cold wasn’t enough to keep the wildlife from sharing some early morning glory. In those very quiet moments the world I drove through was populated with dozens of deer; they were spread from near the road to the crests of the breaks along the elm river. I also saw a covey of sharptail and a rooster pheasant near my wife’s family farm. I didn’t see an eagle today, although Michelle saw a bald eagle yesterday, but I did see several hawks. When they are hanging around the waterfowl are not far behind.

Winter isn’t over but it is losing its grip and the wildlife, whether they fly or run, know it. I guess people are often the last to get the message—eh?

glg