Posts Tagged → landscape
Long live the Queen
England’s Queen Elizabeth II died yesterday, aged 96 and wise beyond her years. A monarch beloved by so many of The People in an age of individualism, as she was, must be special. What is intriguing is that it is not so much what Queen Elizabeth said, but both how she said what she said, and even more important, what she left unsaid. Her mere dignified if mute presence was all that was required to ensure that some event stood proudly and solidly. That is true power.
Queen Elizabeth stood as a symbol of times gone by and hopefully not completely gone through our fingers. The past times of which we speak here included dignity, respect for others, following the law, placing others above one’s self, making sacrifices in the present for future gains, fealty to a higher order and set of rules than what I myself wants right now, and so on.
You could call Queen Elizabeth the last living representative of Tradition. Not just English tradition, but Western Civilization’s traditions. As much as someone such as I might oppose monarchy on its face (more on this below), I have also come to appreciate and value the role of that tradition. Especially in light of the violent anarchic abyss swallowing up America and Europe as you read these words. Monarchy in general, and Queen Elizabeth in particular, today stand for tradition’s consistency if nothing else. And it is consistency Western Civilization needs so desperately now.
Into the breach steps Charles, Prince of Wales, and soon to be coronated King Charles or perhaps some other historic name. Perhaps he will become a King George, a name which has both greatly positive and also very negative histories. Either way, a change of name will do Charles good, especially if it changes him. It is hard to imagine a person less befitting the role of king than this Charles, because he is a spoiled playboy whose private life often reflected the 1970s’ wilder freedoms and lack of seriousness. That Charles pretends at climate change environmentalism makes him even worse, because his carbon footprint must be the size of…well, a large island I have seen somewhere. Yet he speaks down to us about our own consumptions. Yuck. Nothing undermines authority more than spoiled, contemptible authoritarians like Charles.
If there is one redeemable aspect of Charles it was his prior focus on conserving England’s spectacular countryside landscape. In that he did everything correctly, from outright preservation to careful low-impact development that reflected the ancient dovetail fit of English citizen into life sustaining shire, thatched roofs and all. Oh how I wish that this land conservation ethic had been Charles’ sole love and hallmark. This one cause alone is sufficient to mark a king with greatness and to make him a true leader of his people. England’s spectacular landscape shaped its people, and to preserve that landscape is to preserve its values and culture.
Sadly, Charles is as unstable as water, and stands at the opposite end of the character and intelligence spectrum as his now deceased mother. His endless tabloid blathering on about every ridiculous little leftist cause reveals a weakness of wit and backbone that augurs poorly. One does not know where Queen Elizabeth’s death and Charles’ ascension will take England and Western Civilization, but it is probably going to accelerate the current decline. We all can work hard to advance the cause of freedom, hope, pray, and even don Druid’s robes if it will move Charles in the correct direction as a leader. Success will probably require all of these efforts.
Half of my own family is Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, with very famous ancestors who in the 1770s bravely and successfully confronted an ascendant Britain to win freedom of choice for many from a tyrannical British monarch bent on subjugating everyone through coercive force of arms. I was raised to deride monarchy and aristocracy. And yet here I am, saying Long Live the Queen.
She was not just England’s queen, she was our queen, as well.
Queen Elizabeth, our shared civilization needs you more now than ever. May you intervene for the better from above.
Reflections on 2020 bear season
As if by magic or just the batting of an eyelid, the much anticipated 2020 bear season is now behind us, having concluded at dark yesterday. Sad to see our friends go; we had such a fun time! The last of our bear hunting guests have left, cleanup has commenced, preparations are under way for Thanksgiving, and there are some reflections to be had on bear season.
First, where the hell were the bears? Serious question here. We hunt in a mountainous Northcentral area that is Pennsylvania’s “Bear Central.” And despite us daily scouring a lot of remote, very rugged territory that is usually home to lots of bears, we saw neither bears nor bear poop. None. It could be the warm weather has bears hunkered down under cool overhangs in even more remote places. It could be the low acorn crop has bears going in to hibernation early, because there is no more food for them to eat to put on the extra fat they need to hibernate successfully. The truth is, no bear tracks or poops have been seen around here for months, which is remarkable. I cannot think of any year prior like this.
Second, where were all the hunters? We heard only a few shots between Saturday and Sunday, and either none or one on Monday, and for sure none on Tuesday; and very few hunting parties were on the radio on any day. This means that few large scale hunting drives were going on. Without hunters moving across the landscape, the bears don’t have to move out of their way. They can just sit still and not run the risk of exposing their rib cage to a hunter’s bullet. That means that the bears can loaf about in some remote corner, escaping the unseasonable warmth or just waiting for the wafting human scent to drift away before making their usual rounds again. Which means the few hunters who are out don’t see much action.
Third, where were all the other critters, like turkeys and deer? Like with bears, we saw very little deer or turkey poop in the woods. And although I myself saw two whopper bucks and a five-point up close, no one else saw any deer. Nor did any of us see any turkeys. Once again, the absence of these otherwise ubiquitous animals could be due to the relative absence of acorns. Which would push the wildlife far afield to find food sources.
Fourth, despite all of our hunting setbacks, did any of us care a bit? No! We missed all of our friends who could not be with us for various reasons, like fear of the CCP virus, or family emergencies requiring them to stay at home. But those of us who gathered had a lot of fun nonetheless. And with or without a bear on the game pole, we would not have missed this time together for any reason at all. We caught up on our families, our work, our homes, cars, friendships, wives, and politics (yeah, there was a lot of pro-Trump politics). Some people drank way too much alcohol, and we got some great pictures of it all, like the one guy asleep on the cold ground outside. No, we don’t post those here. We ate like kings, that is for sure, and no one lacked for food or drink.
Finally, it is possible that the new early bears seasons (archery, muzzleloader, and special junior+ senior rifle) are removing so many bears from the woods that come rifle season, very few huntable bears remain to be had. According to real-time hunting harvest data posted at the PA Game Commission website, more bears were killed in the early seasons than in the official rifle season this year. This means there are fewer bears available for the rifle hunters. It is possible that many hunters expected this, based on last year’s harvest patterns, and they stayed home or hunted alone, instead of joining the big crew at camp, like usual. As of late today, just 3,138 bears had been killed total this year. That is about a thousand fewer than expected.
Based on this raw data alone, the early bear seasons are actually backfiring. They are not removing the high surplus number of bears that are beyond Pennsylvania’s social carrying capacity. Rather, the early bear seasons are removing the easiest bears and leaving few to be hunted in the later rifle season.
And this new dynamic could be the real story in PA’s bear season: There are so many early season bear hunting opportunities for individuals that they collectively take the wind out of the sails for the regular season hunters, thereby having a boomerang effect on the entire thing and limiting it.
We won’t know what all this data really means for another few years, and by then either great or even fatal damage will have been done to Pennsylvania’s traditional bear camp culture, with its big gatherings and big drives and big camp camaraderie dying out, or we will simply all have to learn to adapt to new ways of hunting. I have to say, there is no substitute for men gathering at a camp to hunt together. The gathered hunting party is the most human of experiences; it is an institution as old as our species. Its purpose was not just making meat, but also social and sociological.
I sure hope these myriad new early bear seasons are not self-defeating, in that they do not kill that traditional bear camp culture by removing its whole purpose ahead of the game. Question for the PGC: What incentive is there to push your body hard through rugged and remote landscapes, destroying your boots, tearing your clothing, and often losing or breaking some of your gear, including damaging your gun, when the animal you are seeking has already been removed?
Below are some photos from one of our trail cameras two years ago. Just days after bear season ended, a bear was caught gloriously and most joyously rubbing its back against a young white pine tree. Almost like a pole dancer. Pretty hot hip shakes there. We haven’t seen a bear anywhere around here since May this year.
Purple woad. Or why hunting leases
Leasing land to hunt on is a big thing these days, and there is no sign of the phenomenon decreasing. Most of it is about deer and turkey hunting.
Hunting leases have been popular for a long time in states with little public land, like Texas, but the practice is now spreading to remote areas like suburban farms around Philadelphia and Maryland. So high is the demand for quality hunting land, and for just finding a place to hunt without being bothered, and so limited is the resource becoming, that leasing is a natural step for many landowners who want to get some extra income to pay their rent or fief to the government (property taxes aka build-a-union-teacher’s-public-pension-fund).
Having been approached about leasing land I own and manage, it is something I considered and then rejected. If a landowner at all personally enjoys their own land themselves, enjoys their privacy there, enjoys the health of their land, then leasing is not for you. Bear in mind that leasing also carries some legal liability risk, and so you have to carry sufficient insurance to cover any lawsuits that might begin on your land.
Nonetheless, some private land is being leased, having been posted before that. And the reason that so many land owners are overcoming the same hurdles that I myself went through when considering land leasing, is that in some cases the money is high enough. Enough people want badly enough to have their own place that they can hunt on exclusively, that they are willing to pay real money.
Makes you wonder what kind of population pressures and open land decreases America has seen over the past fifty years to lead to this kind of change in land use. Makes me think of one anecdotal experience.
On the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend of 2007, I drove up to Pine Creek to dig the footers for our barn. All the way up I shared the road, in both directions, with two motorcyclists headed in my same direction. That is it. In addition to my pickup, a grand total of two vehicles out for a Sunday drive in the country were on Route 44 and Rt 414.
Fast forward 13 years and my gosh, Pine Creek Valley has nonstop traffic in both directions at all hours. It does not matter what the time of day or night is, there are vehicles going in both directions. And not just oversize pickup trucks possibly associated with the gas drilling occurring around the area. Little tiny dinky tin can cars are going up and down the valley, too. There are literally people everywhere here now, in what had been the most remote, undeveloped, quietest corner of rural Pennsylvania. Even if you go bear hunting on some sidehill in the middle of nowhere up in Pine Creek Valley, you will encounter another hunting gang or two. Which for bear hunting is actually a good thing, but the point being that there are people everywhere everywhere everywhere in rural Pennsylvania.
OK, here is another brief anecdote. Ladies, skip ahead to the next paragraph. About ten years ago I was fishing on the north end of the Chesapeake Bay. When I was finished for the day, I drove back north toward home. At one point I had an urge to pee, so I began looking for a place I could pull off and pull out, without offending anyone. Yes, I have my modest moments. And you know what? The entire region between The Chesapeake Bay’s northern shores and the Pennsylvania Mason-Dixon Line, is completely developed. Like wall-to-wall one-two-three-acre residential lots on every inch of land surface. At the one place that finally looked like I was finally going to get some relief, I stepped out of the car and was immediately met with a parade of Mini Coopers and Priuses driving by on the gravel road to their wooded home lots. There was literally people everywhere, in every corner, in every place.
So what happened here?
There are more people and there is more land development, both of which leading to less nice land to hunt, fewer big private spaces for people to call their own, and so that which does exist is in much higher demand.
Enter Pennsylvania’s new No Trespassing law. AKA the “purple paint” law.
Why was this new law even needed? Because the disenfranchised, enslaved Scots-Irish refugees who originally settled the Pennsylvania frontier by dint of gumption, bravery, and hard work had a natural opposition to the notions and forms of European aristocracy that had driven them here. Such as large pieces of private land being closed off to hunting and fishing. And so these Scots-Irish settlers developed an Indian-like culture of openly flouting the marked boundaries of private properties. Especially when they hunted.
And this culture of ignoring No Trespassing signs carries forth to this very day.
Except that now it is 2020, not 1820, and there are more damned people on the landscape and a hell of a lot less land for those people to roam about on. Nice large pieces of truly private land are becoming something of a rarity in a lot of places. Heck, even the once-rural Poconos is now just an aluminum siding and brick suburb of Joizy.
So in response to our collision of frontier culture with ever more valuable privacy rights, Pennsylvania now has a new purple paint law. If you see purple paint on a tree, it is the equivalent of a No Trespassing sign. And if you do trespass and you get caught, the penalties are much tougher and more expensive than they were just a few months ago.
And you know what the real irony is of this purple paint stay-the-hell-out boundary thing? It is a lot like the blue woad that the Celtic ancestors of the Scots and Irish used to paint their bodies with before entering into battle. Except it is now the landowner who has painted himself in war paint.
Isn’t life funny.
On Being a Dinosaur
I am a dinosaur.
In so many ways, my beliefs, ideals, values, education, outlook, hobbies, lifestyle, and behavior seem as outdated and as uncommon as the dinosaurs that died out long ago.
Put another way, I am one of the Last of the Mohicans, certainly not THE last, but one of a dwindling group that sees the world differently than the corrosive pop culture fed daily to Americans by Hollywood.
And I am proud to be this way, to be a patriot, to exalt individual citizen rights and liberties above government intervention, to take risks and make sacrifices in a free market capitalist society that rewards hard work and penalizes laziness. American Sniper, Act of Valor, and Lone Survivor are the only movies that moved me in many years because I believe in military heroes, although the Lord of the Rings productions are highly entertaining.
Meanwhile, pop culture would have every American equally unhappy, equally deprived of their rights and liberties, equally planted on a couch eating junk food and watching mindless TV shows that are at war with the underpinnings of Western Civilization.
(A short, hard-hitting article about Hollywood’s destructiveness by one of its most famous writers is here.)
And I am also an old-fashioned “Hook-and-Bullet” conservationist, a hunter, life-long gun owner and fisherman, an NRA member and even more so, a FOAC member who means it when I say “You can have my guns when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.”
But did I mention that conservation is a huge part of my identity? You know, farmland preservation, wildlife habitat protection, forest land acquisition for public ownership, and wilderness areas where I can hunt, fish, camp, and hike without seeing or hearing another human being for as long as I am out there.
And why is it so hard for so many traditionalists to see that traditional American values are directly tied to, and derive from, rural landscapes? And that our remaining rural landscapes are precious fragments of the great American frontier, on which our national identity and Constitution were forged?
So why wouldn’t a conservative want to conserve those rural landscapes that gave birth to his identity and values, that enshrine Constitutional rights and self-reliance?
For some strange reason, an increasing number of gun owners are not hunters, and do not really show that they care about wildlife populations or wildlife habitat, or about land and water conservation. When I attend meetings at different sportsmen’s clubs, like Duncannon Sportsmen, and I hear the Conservationist’s Pledge, my heart wells up and I nearly get as teary-eyed as when I hear the national anthem, or the Pledge of Allegiance. It doesn’t help that most of us in the room are sporting lots of white in our beards and on our heads. The next generation seems to have taken a lot for granted, because all of the battles we fought decades ago bore such abundant fruit.
All this makes me a dinosaur, and although I recognize it, I am not happy about it. I feel like I am watching the greatest nation on Planet Earth disintegrate under my feet, and it scares me, makes me sad, and makes me want to do what I can to try to prevent it from happening.
I do not want traditional American values to go extinct, like the dinosaurs, because although those values may not be in vogue right now, America was founded on them and the nation cannot successfully continue on without them.
Wile-y Coyote, knows the way
On my way out the door this morning, a call came in: “I think you have a coyote,” he said.
Knowing how wiley those coyotes are, I was skeptical and hopeful.
Surely enough, when I arrived the sets were undisturbed, and a second call went like this: “Yeah, we figured out he was mousing, you know – pouncing on mice under the snow,” and then eating them with great pleasure.
So what had appeared like one behavior was in fact something else, entirely. The coyote had not been trapped, but rather had merrily and quite freely zig zagged his way across the snowy field, chasing tasty mouse morsels. Human perception has misunderstood things of far greater consequence before, and will again, but the symbolism was instructive.
Once again I am surprised to see how entrenched most people are in a single perspective, as if their own living place, their own community, their own home, their own food, whatever surrounds them, is in fact (and must, must be) a true reference point for everyone else. As if rural citizens relate to land the same as city slicker flatlanders, whose use for open land is a place to casually watch for deer as they serenely drive to their next appointment. As if the flatlanders exist for the sole benefit of the rural folks….
How often do we hear activists and religious leaders invoke “peace,” as though what they are doing will actually bring peace, or that they would even know what someone else would call peace. The take-away for me today was how entrenched in self most individual people are, and how they often (mistakenly) believe that their world view is dominant, “normal,” and correct. And I’d say that this applies across the board, to all people, and most assuredly to me.
Central PA is a fantastic place to live, work, play
Today the Dauphin County Planning Commission held its second annual awards ceremony for outstanding development projects around the county.
Held at the historic Fort Hunter barn, and funded in large part by engineering firm HRG and other private donors, the spartan but hard-hitting event showcased how advanced central PA really is, and why it is that way.
At one point in my life, I lived in the Washington DC area. Few people there actually liked living there, and the few pockets of satisfied residents were limited to historic areas with parkland and small downtowns with attractive antique homes. Northern Virginia and some of the old, well-planned communities along the major roads into Washington come to mind. I myself hated the heck out of the area, because its dominant feature was suburban sprawl, a sterile hybrid of city and country.
Happy was the day when I returned to my beloved Central Pennsylvania, and for many good reasons: Little to no real traffic, nice people, beautiful landscapes, lots of protected open space to hunt, fish, camp and hike in, low-cost housing and low cost-of-living, and many other amenities.
At today’s award ceremony, the audience was reminded again and again by speakers just how great a place this area is to live in, raise a family, work, and play, as in camp, canoe, hunt, fish, picnic, hike, etc. That is true. Having traveled extensively, my heart and mind always return to central PA. It’s a great place to live.
On that note, a personal note to new Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse: Good luck. Our city has been in trouble. Signs are everywhere that a lot of hard work lies ahead to get it out of the rut it is stuck in. But early signs of Papenfuse’s administration are positive; not so much statements, but actions, like hiring competent staff to serve the citizens.
Harrisburg is PA’s capital city and the regional hub. Ten years ago, everyone wanted to move into the city. I hope that the awards handed out today for hard work, exciting vision, and high standards are an indication of Harrisburg’s new-found success.