Shatter that glass ceiling
The so-called “debt ceiling” is a fantasy of a fantasy. It is the undefined, almost whimsical notion that even when the United States citizenry’s representative government has in-effect borrowed trillions more Dollars than The People can ever hope to repay, it is still yet possible to raise that ceiling even further and borrow more, and spend a hell of a lot more, than ever before.
And so we are told in the sternest of tones by DC Beltway bobbleheads like Chuck Todd at NBC, that we must raise this “debt ceiling” or risk going into default. Default! Like our creditors will demand a refund! Which we all know will never, ever happen, because the entire house of cards upon which the planet’s entire interrelated economy is based will come crashing down, to the loss of most, including the communist Chinese, who have the most to lose.
So, default on the debt ceiling is never going to happen. Invoking it is just a scare tactic by DC Beltway banditos to try to screw us citizens out of more money and power. Forget it, let the debt ceiling break. Hell, go ahead and shatter it. Nothing will happen.
Unsurprisingly, massive RINO US House Speaker Kevin “Sweetcheeks” McCarthy has done ye olde reach across the aisle bipartisan BS and agreed to most of what the America-detonating Biden Anarcho-Administration has demanded, in the name of the sacred debt ceiling. Including funding for 87,000 new gun-wielding corrupt IRS agents who will be crawling up my butt and yours looking for loose pennies, and jailing us en masse for penny ante mistakes. And no cutting of the lawless FBI or the rogue DOJ budgets.
The problem with “Republicans” like Kevin McCarthy (and Tom Ridge, Tom Corbett, and 99.9% of the PA GOP here in PA) is that they believe in government first and foremost. They have no problem growing government or in ceding its unaccountable bureaucrats more and ever more power and centralized control over all us citizens. So long as they get a seat at the table and grow their own power and influence, they don’t give a darn about anything else. Shame on all of them. Shame shame shame on all of you fake conservatives.
No, I am wrong. Let me rephrase this. Shame on all of you fake Republican Americans, because you are directly empowering communists destroying America.
Congressman Scott Perry, if you are reading this, please remove Sweetcheeks McCarthy from the Speakership. Cut 80% of the FBI and DOJ budgets. Put your foot down and give these America destroying lowlifes a severe brake check. If they veer off the road and smash the debt ceiling and leave the budget talks a smoking ruin as a result, good; you get extra points. Because American citizens will benefit the most.
GOP Resolution in support of J6 political prisoners
I drafted the resolution below last summer, and submitted it twice. I suggest that every county Republican Committee pass a similar resolution standing in solidarity with the January 6th political prisoners illegally held in Washington, DC, and elsewhere. An article published today about badly tortured political prisoner Ryan Samsel demonstrates how dire the situation is.
If politically active Republicans cannot publicly stand up for and in solidarity with fellow Republican political prisoners who are being held without trial for over two years, then what does being a Republican mean?
Dauphin County GOP Committee Resolution
DRAFT 7/7/22
DRAFT #2 Resubmitted 8/8/22
Whereas, the US Department of Justice has become an unabashedly politically partisan weapon in the hands of the Biden Administration, and
Whereas, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has become an unabashedly politically partisan weapon in the hands of the Biden Administration, and
Whereas, many DOJ and FBI public employees are using their government positions to further their own personal political views by illegally targeting and officially oppressing their political opponents, and
Whereas, a great deal of illegal politically-motivated injustice against innocent American citizens has resulted and continues to result from the aggressive politicization of the DOJ and FBI, such as Ryan Samsel, and
Whereas, on August 8, 2022, the lawless DOJ and the rogue FBI have illegally attacked and invaded the home and person of President Donald J. Trump in Florida, and
Whereas, the Dauphin County Republican Committee stands for the rule of law, the equal application of the law, and the upholding of the US Constitution, therefore
Be it resolved that the Dauphin County Republican Committee hereby formally stands with and calls for the immediate release of the innocent-until-proven-guilty American citizen January 6th political prisoners now being held in jail, some without formal charges, some with only misdemeanor charges, some with improbable and non-violent felony charges, all without bail, all without trial, all without a speedy trial, all without a speedy trial in front of a jury of their peers, and often in inhumane conditions that violate the US Constitution and basic international human rights, and
Be it resolved that the Dauphin County Republican Committee calls on the Governor of Florida to use the Florida State Police to block lawless federal agents from operating there.
Respectfully submitted by Josh First,
Committeeman for Harrisburg City 14th Ward
Tomorrow is PA Primary Election Day
Candidates Josh Prince and Patricia McCullough are the key votes you can cast in tomorrow’s primary election, and you should vote for them. Josh is running for Commonwealth Court, and Patricia is running for Supreme Court. They each face a PAGOP-endorsed insider establishment opponent who is either not qualified at all or not nearly as qualified as Josh and Patricia.
Running against Patricia is GOPe-supported Carolyn Carluccio, a Montgomery County trial court judge, who, I am told by attorneys who have argued cases in front of her, cannot point to a single case where she she has upheld the constitutional rights of We The People. Carluccio + RINO = spineless jellyfish = The People Lose Again.
McCullough is the opposite, having spent her time on the bench doing what judges are supposed to do, which is protect the rights of The People.
Josh Prince is a well-known attorney in Pennsylvania, who has devoted himself to protecting our individual rights. We wrote about him earlier. He has been my guardian angel battling a lawless Harrisburg City’s illegal anti-gun ordinances. Incredibly, his opponent has never even argued a case in a court room. How does the political establishment even come up with candidates like this? So lame.
Please vote for Prince and McCullough tomorrow, Tuesday May 16th. You will not be sorry.
Thanks to Mothers Everywhere
Today is Mother’s Day in America. It is a day in which we give thanks and show our appreciation to our mothers, most of whom have sacrificed their own interests to ensure that we, their children, get the care and support we need to reach our basic goals. Some have done more than others, some have been better at it than others, but almost all mothers have sacrificed so that their child/children can do OK.
Today, beautiful, wholesome, gentle motherhood and the mothers who do it are celebrated.
At odds with this ancient, simple, and universally acknowledged beauty is the modern Western sexual insurrection against all traditional human norms, including motherhood and mothers. For some odd reason, there are adult people in America who actually disclaim knowledge of how to define a woman, who is the mother of all life. Katanga or Kitanji Jackson, whatever, recently appointed to the US Supreme Court on the sole qualification that she is a black woman, is one such odd adult.
For those hard of understanding, let us provide some basic guidelines for today:
Mother: Definition 1, a woman who conceives, gestates, and then gives live birth to a human child through her uterus and vaginal canal. Definition 2, a woman who gives live birth to a human and then nurses it on naturally produced breast milk from her body lactated through her breasts.
Motherhood: Definition 1, the nursing, nurturing, caring for, raising, and general sacrifice of her own needs and desires by a mother for her child. Definition 2, general aphorism for unconditional love and nurture of young animals and humans by a female of the species. Definition 3, the source of all life; all that is good; wholesome; healthy.
In a world of deliberate confusion and outright lies and the damned liars who tell them, like Injustice Kitangy Jackson, let’s rally around absolute truths that can and always will withstand momentary cultural fetishes and weird blips on the radar of human existence. Motherhood and mothers are one such absolute truth, along with the womanhood that makes them possible. There is no substitute for motherhood and there is no faking it. You can’t simply put on lipstick and a pair of high heels and declare yourself a mother.
Thanks, Mom.
Fight fire with fire, or lose everything
It seems that the inhabitants of places like New York City and Washington, DC, have seen the political legal memo, and they are following it. No matter what the legal case against you looks like, hole-ridden Swiss cheese or stinky Limberger, if a civil lawsuit or a criminal prosecution can be brought against a conservative in these far left venues, the jury will not be of your peers, or impartial, but will instead be filled up with strongly partisan activists who hate every fiber in your conservative body.
You, the conservative, will not get your day in court in these places. You won’t get a fair hearing. You won’t get justice. You will be dragged through the mud, the judge will toss the rule of law out the window and instead use his or her office to artificially hamstring your defense, gag you without reason (First Amendment rights are the first thing the left goes after), and the District Attorney or plaintiff’s attorney will be allowed every thing they want, every bit of crazy evidence. And the jury will sit and consider your case for maybe a few hours.
And you will lose.
Look at the ridiculous lawsuit against Trump in NYC, by this EJ Carroll lady. She vaguely alleged that some time in 1995 or 1996, which is year unknown, and also month unknown, day unknown, hour unknown, that President Trump had raped her in a dressing room in a department store. Mind you this is nearly thirty years ago, and she never filed a police complaint or told a friend. Only when Donald Trump became President Trump and was surrounded by a leftist shark feeding frenzy did this partisan Democrat lady make her accusation. In other words, her complaint should not even have made it into court. There is no evidence and she looks like a complete partisan fake.
But New York City is not a normal place with equal justice for everyone. We see NYC’s DA Alvin Bragg turning the city into a zombie apocalypse by turning violent criminals free and criminally charging those people who merely defend themselves against deadly force from the zombie felons. So the ridiculous case against President Trump was allowed to continue by politically partisan judges, and today a jury actually found him civilly guilty of somehow molesting this strange lady, despite there being no evidence at all. Plus, the jury also agreed that President Trump’s denial of her allegations was a form of defamation.
By disagreeing with a leftist, by refuting a leftist’s vague accusation, you are guilty of defamation…got it?
And in Washington, DC, non-violent January 6th protestors are being found guilty of all kinds of crazy made-up crimes for which there is zero evidence, and they are being sentenced to decades in prison, by politically partisan juries who hate everything about the defendants and who will use their position on the jury to attack and hurt the defendant, no matter how little evidence there is to support the criminal charges against him.
All the prosecutors have to do is get the defendant into court in Washington, DC, and the partisan judge and partisan jury will take care of everything else. Doesn’t matter that you could not possibly have done the things you are accused of, the Democrat jury got that memo about the need to be partisan, and pow, you, an innocent man, are going to jail for decades.
Are Republican elected officials across America paying attention to this? They should.
Because if your goal is to win the power game by any means possible, what the Democrats are doing is how you win. They don’t follow the law or the Constitution, they don’t treat people fairly, they are lawless and ruthless and merciless. They will not allow anything to get in their way from destroying their political enemies. They use bogus lawfare and crooked courts and partial juries to hurt people who should not be hurt, but who are of the wrong skin color…excuse me…they have the “wrong ideas.”
Most of America is conservative and dominated by Republicans. For every New York City or Washington, DC, there are a hundred or two hundred small towns and rural counties where Republican DAs and Republican sheriffs and Republican judges live and work. If these Republican officials wanted to play by the same rules the Democrats play by in New York, Washington, Austin, and Seattle, they could. They could easily turn 90% of America into no-go zones for leftists, activists, registered Democrats, etc.
Oh, but Josh, that would not be right, you say.
Right? What is right in this situation? We have one political party using the same exact lawfare tactics the communists used in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Romania after World War II, to destroy their political opponents and impose one party rule. End of democracy, by using semi-democratic processes. It is where America is headed right now, especially if there is no resistance.
So if one side is playing by their own set of rules, and setting everyone opposing them on fire, then why the hell wouldn’t the other side do the same thing? Fight fire with fire. That is how you win a fight, a war, a dispute. Rolling over and playing dead means you lose. Waiting for the next election to be stolen so you can have your hopes dashed again is also a losing method.
Here is one way this can work out:
Sheriff’s Deputy in East Succotash: “Ma’am I see your tail light is out, can I see your driver’s license and vehicle registration, please?”
Registered Democrat Activist or Politician: “My tail light is not out.”
Sheriff’s Deputy: “Ma’am, I need you to step out of the car.”
Registered Democrat Activist or Politician: “I don’t know why you are doing this, what have I done?”
Sheriff’s Deputy: [sounds of a violent struggle as he forcefully pulls the Democrat activist or politician out through her car door] “Stop resisting! Stop resisting!”
Four Hours Later
Sheriff’s Deputy: “Book her for assault on a law enforcement officer, DUI, failure to obey commands, resisting arrest…”
Republican Judge: “Sorry, no bail for you, Miss Arrogant Democrat Politician. You have committed terribly grievous crimes here in this jurisdiction, and we will not tolerate it. Go to jail and stay there until we get this sorted out.”
Republican DA: “Daggone, look at this crazy lady, all hopped up on her self importance. We need to make an example of her felonious lawlessness.”
Four Months Later
Jury Forewoman: “Your honor, we have deliberated for a long and difficult three minutes, and we find Miss Arrogant Democrat Politician here guilty of all charges.”
Republican Judge: “Miss Arrogant Democrat Politician, you of all people should know better than to have behaved this way. I am going to hold you accountable to the maximum allowed by law, so I am sentencing you to thirty years…no, make that sixty years in prison without parole, to begin immediately.”
And that is how you fight fire with fire across 90% of America. The entire country would turn into a no-go zone for the same exact people who are right now uproariously joyous at the lawlessness “their side” is inflicting on hundreds of innocent people, including President Donald Trump.
Dear elected Republicans across America: Do it, or get out of office and let a fighter in who will. Because if you won’t fight back and fight now, eventually these sadistic leftist people will catch up to you, and then you won’t be able to fight back at all. You will lose everything.
Lot more conservative jurisdictions than leftist ones. Each red place here is an opportunity to give lawless Democrats a taste of their own medicine. Call it “Saving American democracy” and you’ll feel better about doing it.
The king you got, not the king you wanted or needed?
Two days ago was Coronation Day in England, whereupon the former very very longtime Charles Prince of Wales became Charles King of England AKA King Charles III. Even in The Year of Our Blessed Freedom From Monarchy 2023, this is still a big deal, because like it or not, kings and queens can matter when they want to, for better or worse.
This new king follows on the heels of his most amazing and impactful mother Queen Elizabeth, whose traditional values and top notch leadership skills many people miss. It appears Charles also wants to matter, like his mother, to be of consequence, to make what he believes is a positive difference on Planet Earth. So, we take note of his ascendence. He may not be the high caliber of his mother, who many would have liked to have seen replaced by another woman or man of equal qualities (good luck finding such a person anywhere in Western Civilization today), but Charles is nonetheless now the monarch. For better or for worse, or most likely a mix of both really bad and some good, King Charles is not going to be invisible.
Setting aside the die-hard monarchists for a moment, there was still a lot of worldwide public interest in Saturday’s coronation, if only because several mini-dramas played out in the coronation process. One being the role of His Most Spoiled Brattiness Prince Harry (strategically blocked from camera view at the actual coronation by a tremendous red feather plume in his aunt Anne’s hat in front of him), two being the marked absence from the coronation of Harry’s horrendous harridan of a wife, MeGain Markle, three being the final and hard public point being put on Charles’ longtime relationship with Priscilla, which had been openly maintained even while Charles was married to the most glamorous human being ever to grace the earth, Princess Diana Spencer. Many people never forgave Charles for his affair and disrespecting of Diana, but now, it’s officially all over. Charles and Priscilla are officially married and officially King and Queen of England.
Surely there are other notable features of this coronation, but to me, the one that matters most is the one that almost no one (that I could find) took notice of, and that is King Charles’ masculinity and his love of field sports, notably hunting. With guns, and occasionally spears. In a world of the establishment war against boys, against masculinity and manhood, of forced and artificial feminization of men at every turn (like Bud Lite’s Dylan Mulvaney debacle in the USA), King Charles’ quiet but absolute manliness is a crucial symbol for normal people and for those who should want to return to being a natural, normal, healthy human.
If nothing else, King Charles may end up being a potent symbol of How To Be A Man. Laugh if you want about this, but at one time not too long ago, 99% of boys naturally wanted to become masculine men when they reached adulthood, to be service-minded police officers, brave firefighters, adventurous cowboys, heroic soldiers, and hunting was a bedrock experience that trained many boys for these fields. In a western world now under siege from within our borders and from within our own governments that are captured by our worst enemies, who among other things are doing double duty to weaken us by erasing manhood and masculinity from our population, having public symbols of masculinity and manhood, like King Charles, is more important than many people realize.
Setting aside his many bad policy positions, King Charles is no dithering dandy, no fop. Quite the opposite. He speaks firmly, rides tall in the saddle, properly and expertly handles rifle, pistol, and shotgun, and is not afraid to kill his own dinner or get blood or dirt on his hands or clothes. This is a king I could like and who we all need, if only because he is a real man. Long live this manly king.
Thanks to Westley Richards for this photo
That curious Rural-Urban divide thing
That curious Rural-Urban divide thing is really bugging me, and I want to share some personal experiences and observations about it with you.
If we could just please get away for one minute from the Justice Sonia Sotomayor bribery scandal, please. Yes, far-left Justice Sonia Sotomayor took over THREE MILLION DOLLARS IN BRIBES from Penguin Random House to protect Penguin Random House when their critical lawsuit arrived before the US Supreme Court, and no, Sotomayor did not step aside and recuse herself or anything high-minded like that. She just blatantly ruled in favor of her three million dollar friends at Penguin Random House books, like nothing was the matter. Even though this is very much The Matter because bribes are a big no-no.
With all of the talk these days about ethics on that Most High and Illustrious Court, we would think that Justice Sotomayor’s blatant and impeachable criminality would be the main public subject of ridicule and hate these days. But we would be wrong, because evidently America’s urban people are really hating the rural people right now, instead, and they would rather discuss Naughty Rural People than that crooked, lying, cheating, impeachable Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
OK. So be it.
Seems like the general happiness, low crime, and high quality of life among rural residents is drawing the vengeful eye of the jaded urbanite. Rural people hunt, own lots of guns, commit almost no crimes with said guns, and yet are being told by the angry urbanites that they must nonetheless give them all up, and get in line for their creepy crawly bug breakfast.
Also bothering the Most High, Superior, Better Edumacated and Definitely Unhappy urbanites are things like “rural people smell bad”, “rural people drive large pickup trucks that expel a lot of carbon”, “rural people cut down trees and own chainsaws”, and a real big complaint is that rural people drive tractors and spread animal manure on fields. Pee-yew it stinks and is dirty! Stop it!
I know that in a rural bar a person could sit down over a cold Coors Lite or a delicious Yuengling Lager and have a reasonable, quiet conversation with a clueless-but-judgmental urbanite about how the rural people grow all the food and fiber and pretty wood that the urban people eat and use, and that rural people fill their stomachs with clean and cleanly killed wild game instead of mass-murdered industrial factory beef and chicken, and that rural guns hardly hurt anyone. But such a conversation is about as likely to happen as Justice Sotomayor is likely to resign her corrupt big ass from the US Supreme Court.
Liberal urban elites are similarly mysterious to rural hunters and their neighbors. For example, most American urban areas are crime ridden hellscapes with high taxes, high cost of living, low quality of life, poor public services, and yet…all the “educated” “knowledge jobs” are located in these sh*tholes. Supposedly these catastrophic urban areas are elite and nonetheless superior to rural places. They just are.
The real question I see is whether or not an urban person can overcome their prejudices, rise above their own fragile ego, and move to a healthy mental place (please do not move to my physical place, unless you become a NRA Life Member) that works for them and for rural people. The live-and-let-live nature of rural life tells us that rural people don’t sit in judgment of others, they are simply happy when left to themselves. It’s a pretty cool way to live, and mystified urban people could learn a thing or three from them.
Step one in your urban person learning process? Leave us the hell alone. Mind your own damned business, quit criticizing us, and stop telling us how to live while your own communities and people are in massive disarray and melt-down.
Step two, if you move to our rural communities because they are pretty, undeveloped, safe, and friendly, do not continue to vote and behave the way you did in the urban sh*thole place you just ran away from. Your former urban jackass lifestyle ruined your former hometown, and we don’t want any of it polluting our little slice of heaven out here in the sticks. So, if you move to a rural place, register as an Independent voter, buy some guns, learn to hunt, become self-reliant and less judgmental, and learn to hear what other people think. You might come around to thinking a US Supreme Court justice taking bribes is a bad thing.
Why Court Candidate Josh Prince Must Win
Josh Prince is a candidate for Commonwealth Court here in Pennsylvania, and his day of reckoning is coming up fast: May 16th is Primary Day, where registered Republicans vote for Republican Party candidates and registered Democrats vote for Democrat Party candidates. This form of selecting partisan candidates to then square off against each other in the Fall general election may be imperfect, but it is far superior to ranked voting. And Spring time primary elections are actually as important as Fall general elections.
Josh Prince has to win this election because, like much of America, Pennsylvania is turning into a lawless single-party uniparty state where political party does not matter, nor does the rule of law. We citizens need strong people of high character to resist this evil tide. Josh Prince’s legal mind and his ironclad principles are needed now more than they have been since the 1850s, and I hope you will vote for him. I have known Josh Prince for many years, and I respect him very highly. I am excited to be able to vote for him.
Both the Republican Party establishment and the Democrat Party establishment have much more in common with each other than they do with their respective voting bases, although it is crucial to point out that the Democrat Party is also completely responsive to and loyal to its voters, while the PAGOP doesn’t care much about its voters. The Pennsylvania Republican Party only cares about its voters a little bit, and briefly, when it needs them in the Fall election. And even then it is a dismissive kind of caring; they take Republican voters for granted…
…because the PAGOP business model and culture is to be perfectly happy with minority status, so long as the pre-selected and party boss-anointed Republican Party insiders are in the existing official slots and holding power, protecting their small inner circle’s narrow interests. As soon as someone from “the outside” (like Josh Prince) tries to take up one of those slots, the entire PAGOP goes into action, defending their castle from the marauding barbarian.
Prince is running against Megan Martin, who was endorsed by the PAGOP (this is hardly a vote of confidence for the average citizen!), and who has never stepped foot in a courtroom – not a trial court nor an appellate court. Rather, lawyer Megan Martin has spent around 30 years in the government as a functionary, a bureaucrat, a politician’s lawyer. Nothing necessarily wrong with this history, but is this what you want sitting in judgment of you?
Megan Martin has a legally unimpressive resume that she now wants to bring to the Commonwealth Court, where we citizens can rest assured she will look to what Republican Party bosses want most. As opposed to attorney Josh Prince, who has quintessential, unbending, uncorruptible, traditional American principles, as well as an incredible and fearless track record in court, including representing me and Firearms Owners Against Crime against brazenly illegal and unconstitutional anti-gun ordinances here in Harrisburg.
Josh Prince is not the political establishment’s pick because he will only uphold the law as it is written, and he will only uphold the US and PA constitutions as they were originally intended. Josh is not and will not be a judicial activist who uses the court as a private legislature. And of course, that’s not what the PAGOP wants…they want people like Megan Martin, who will be all bendy and malleable like Gumby and do the bidding of the party bosses, as they quietly horse trade for private financial benefit with America’s sworn enemies.
You and I need a judge like Josh Prince on the Commonwealth Court. You and I cannot afford another spineless jellyfish PAGOP RINO insider political hack who has been hand-picked and endorsed by political bosses.
Please vote for Josh Prince for Commonwealth Court on May 16th, and please pass this around, so that other loyal, patriotic, America-loving Pennsylvania voters know that they have a great candidate they can be happy voting for.
Turkeys and the critters who eat them
Wild turkeys are one of Pennsylvania’s great conservation success stories. When I was a kid, wild turkeys were like a fable, a mythical animal inhabiting far distant wild lands, that could be seen and maybe heard if you were one of the lucky few. They had been decimated by market hunting in the 1800s and early 1900s. When I took my hunter safety education course at the age of ten at the old Army Reserve building out in the farmland on the east side of State College, the Pennsylvania Game Commission staff proudly showed us films of their successful trap-and-transfer program, where wild turkeys were lured with bait into the range of nets, caught, and then driven to the far reaches of Pennsylvania’s rural areas. Usually State Game Lands with fields.
From the 1970s until the early 2000s, Pennsylvania’s wild turkey population grew and grew, until they seemed to be everywhere, including well south of I-81, the old imaginary dividing line between concrete civilization and wild man country. Apparently turkeys are adaptable to concrete wilderness, because they took up urban residence all over the east coast. Not content with being colorful freeloaders along with the ubiquitous and nasty pigeons and rats in these urban areas from Massachusetts to New Jersey, wild turkeys also provide much hilarity as they attack everything that moves in a display of misguided dominance, including mailmen, soccer moms and their kids, and dogs being walked. Look up the “incident reports” of wild turkey muggings of disbelieving urbanites; lots of funny videos to go along with them, too.
So when turkey populations began to decline in Pennsylvania and parts of New York starting ten years ago, people knew it was not due to the birds’ lack of tenacity. Something new and powerful in the old bird + habitat equation was having an effect.
And in fact in many places here in PA, formerly huge turkey populations are now really low or non-existent. I myself used to look out my windows and watch three separate flocks cycle through our clover-planted yards. When I hunted spring turkeys there (northcentral PA), I would start the day surrounded by gobbling toms, and usually had a couple different opportunities to harvest one within the first few days of the hunting season. It was exciting and fun and a great way to begin the work day, although I will say that by the end of May, I was a hollow shell of a human, having run myself ragged either chasing toms myself, or calling for friends who had not yet filled a tag.
Bottom line is, those old flocks of twenty to thirty birds no longer exist. We are fortunate to see one or two wild turkeys at all on our place. And we have excellent habitat with grouse.
What caused the loss of wild turkeys in PA has generated a discussion similar to the one surrounding the demise of the once amazing world famous smallmouth bass fishery in the lower Susquehanna River. It seems that almost everyone involved has a reasonable opinion about it, and the official experts are being second-guessed by people who have witnessed circumstances different than those described by said experts. The ubiquitous use of trail cameras since 2000 has accompanied this growth in sportsman observational opinion, and very often individual hunters will use their cameras’ footage to make very compelling arguments that contradict official wildlife managers’ narratives.
Something similar happens in the aquatic environment, when thousands of fishermen experience and see something different than what they are being told through official government channels.
So now PGC is toying with the idea of releasing martens into the wilds of Pennsylvania. Similar to the fisher that was released back in the 1990s, martens are a furry little weasel-type animal that, like all weasel type animals everywhere, has an insatiable appetite for everything they can catch and kill. Not necessarily kill and eat. All members of the weasel family (wolverines, fishers, martens, mink, otters, weasels) have periods where they become “surplus killers.” That is, they will kill many more animals than they can eat, just because they seem to enjoy the hunt and the kill. Question being now, What will the new marten do to our turkeys?
Will martens do more of what fishers have so clearly done to PA turkey populations, which is to climb up into trees and eat them while they are roosted and asleep? Will martens only eat turkey eggs? Who knows? And so it follows, why release martens into our forests and farms if we don’t know what impacts they will have?
The question I have, and which I know so many other sportsmen have, is: What kind of studies have been done to date that provide confidence that reintroducing marten will have a net-benefit result, and not a net-negative/cost result?
Most of us agree with government biologists that biodiversity in general is important, and we agree that increasing biodiversity is a worthy goal. But, what are the costs and benefits of doing so? What costs and benefits do marten bring to our forests? I can imagine quite a few costs, mostly impacts on ground nesting birds (like wild turkeys, grouse, pheasant, woodcock, and a zillion species of cute little migratory dickie birds) that are already under tremendous pressure from overpopulating (thanks to urban sprawl) raccoons, skunks, possums, feral cats etc., and I wonder if the benefit of a few hundred citizens annually catching a view of one of these cute and elusive furry weasel-like animals is worth the inevitable costs.
One of the things we must struggle with today is that, as much as we would like to return to the pristine conditions of three hundred or four hundred years ago, where humans had a measurable but relatively minor impact on the environment, the reality on the ground today is totally different. The social carrying capacity among different human groups is one consideration. The carrying capacity of other wildlife is another consideration. I imagine that before people go petitioning or pushing to have these newest predators released back into our forests, we should know what their likely impacts are going to be first. I am willing to sign a petition to have PGC thoroughly study this subject, but I would feel irresponsible to ask the agency to jump before knowing what lies ahead and below.
I will say that I like knowing fishers are in our forests, but I do not like the tremendous impacts they have had on squirrels, rabbits, and turkeys. Everywhere a fisher takes up residence, the small game and turkey populations drop dramatically. Personally, I would prefer to know that there were a few hundred fishers living across Pennsylvania, instead of the thousands we now have that are over-impacting a lot of other equally valuable wildlife (and I enjoy recreationally trapping for fisher every year).
I am not saying that adding martens to Pennsylvania will necessarily be pouring fuel on the fire burning up wild turkey populations, but we really should know. That is the responsible thing to do.