Posts Tagged → Turkey
Middle East ain’t like Mid-Town Manhattan
Despite President Trump’s best efforts at creating “peace” or at least the absence of violence, for a while, in the Middle East, the latest agreement, deal, whatever we call it, is failing.
Of course it is failing. The Gaza “ceasefire” was declared to be the “peace in our time” of most-mistaken Neville Chamberlain, without anything backing it up beyond President Trump’s own public standing. Which is taking a beating now that Hamas has killed a bunch of Israelis, in violation of the supposed ceasefire terms.
Vice President JD Vance said that there is “no mechanism to dis-arm Hamas”, which means the Trump Administration rejects the only mechanism there is: the IDF. Vance is going to Israel momentarily, mostly to strong-arm Israel into not responding militarily to Hamas violence against Israel. This is just going to result in more ceasefire failure and policy failure and more one-sided violence.
President Trump has oddly placed his own personal credibility in the hands of those who support Hamas, Qatar and Turkey.
I give Hamas some credit, for returning the twenty remaining living Israeli hostages. Hamas did get a hell of a boost to their fighting ranks, however, with the simultaneous release of over 2,000 hardened criminals held in Israeli prisons, most of whom with innocent blood on their hands. So it was a careful calculus that Hamas did. Had nothing to do with peace, and everything to do with rebuilding its obliterated ranks.
The mistake that all Westerners make when dealing with Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East (versus the Muslim Arab American guy in the cubicle down the hall from your own office here in America, who has a chance of being fairly acculturated into American values) is believing that if we are nice, they will reciprocate, and that their pledges mean something.
Their pledges -hudna, takiya- don’t mean anything, except for buying time, so Hamas et al can regroup and go back to war better than before.
President Trump is a good man, with good intentions, good hopes, good dreams. He is trying to do good in the Middle East, but he is failing. Badly. He is trying to do a deal there like he would do a real estate construction deal in mid-town Manhattan, where the shared win-win 360-degree rising tide of financial success floats all boats whether they are contractor, union, supplier, or whomever. This is a fine model for rational problem solving in America, and we certainly do need more of it here.
But the Middle East is not Manhattan, and it is not New York, or America, or even Europe, yet. Rather, the Middle East is the martyr-littered place that the Christian Crusaders attacked for hundreds of years, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully. It is the place that is riven by a million bloody blood feuds, run by back-stabbing and suicide bombing and civilian murder as a matter of course. Western ideas of mercy, fairness, kindness, earnestness, honesty etc have no place in the Middle East, and President Trump is only now beginning to learn this hard fact.
Because Israel will go along with most of what President Trump wants or needs, it is natural for the Trump Administration to lean ever more heavily on Israel to acquiesce and bend and absorb the foolish notions, rather than push harder on Qatar, Turkey or Hamas, who will never bend or acquiesce. They will lie, at best. But Israel will once again be put in a weakened position, and this will incite the blood lust of its enemies, and the cycle of violence will begin anew.
Because the Trump Administration wants to “be nice.” For God’s sake.
Similar foolish mistakes:
- Forcing Israel to stop bombing the evil Iranian regime when it was at its most vulnerable and the most change could be brought to the region. President Trump believed that showing the Iranian mullahs mercy would inspire them to act like Westerners and acquiesce. But nope. Iran says they will get the nuclear bomb and the ICBM means to shove it up America’s ass no matter what. Iran learned nothing from Trump’s largesse, and Trump gained nothing from his largesse, and the world is a more dangerous place because of his largesse.
- Giving evil terrorism sponsor and Hamas-hiders Qatar protection from Israel. This inspires Qatar to double down on its active terrorism and rotgut far-left academic investments in American universities.
- Failing to hold Egypt accountable for its unwillingness to accept fellow Arab Muslim refugees from Gaza, and for creating a huge offensive military buildup in the Sinai Peninsula, contrary to the peace agreement with Israel.
- Failing to hold Turkey accountable for its Islamist terrorism machinations and imperialist dreams.
- Failing to help establish Kurdistan once and for all.
- Giving the psycho sadist ISIS and Al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria any credibility.
The list of policy failings in the Middle East grows longer every day, and as a result the world becomes less safe and less stable. Again, President Trump deserves credit for trying something new, but now that we all see that it has failed and that his empty threats against Hamas are laughed at (and that his real threats against Israel for retaliating against Hamas ceasefire violations damage Trump’s standing even more), it is time for this incredible president to stop being Mister Nice Guy.
It is not working, so stop it, for your own good.
No Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to President Trump, despite him earning it a hundred times over. No recognition was given to him by the Islamist-run United Nations. Absolutely zero of the so-called self anointed “peace” organizations gave Trump any credit for his peace-making efforts. So, Mister President, forgetaboutit, as they used to say in the Bronx when they spoke American there.
You want to create peace in the Middle East?
Here is how: Tell Qatar that they and their oil fields now belong to America, and that the royal family will enjoy a generous stipend, but that they also no longer run the tiny country. Same goes for the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Take their oil, take their lands, make it ours, and we will see peace like you never believed possible begin to reign across that crazy region. Hell, we will see peace right here in America and in Europe like we have not seen since the 1950s!
This is real out of the box thinking, and it is exactly the realpolitik that everyone in that region understands fully. It will work. The issue is whether or not the Trump Administration has the stomach for it.
Good luck, President Trump! We still love you. We just know what is best for you better than you do. You are blinded by good intentions.
Dogs vs. Drones in hunting recovery, part 1
If you hunt, you are going to end up tracking at some point.
Like it or not, even fatally hit deer, bear, especially elk, sheep, and other wild game animals can and often do run before they expire. Every single deer that I have shot through the heart has run at least 100 yards, sometimes two hundred, despite being mortally hit and having zero chance of recovering. Shot through the heart, a mammal is kaput, done for, 86ed, iced and dead. Nonetheless, all can run while the hydraulic fluid exits.
And the same holds true for animals hit through both lungs with an arrow, a shotgun slug, a bullet, a spear blade, or a round ball from a historic muzzleloader: All game animals can run, many will run, even while they are mortally hit and dying even more with each bound or step.
So, tracking hit game animals is as important a skill as is shooting them accurately with whatever your weapon of choice. Yes, deer often fall over and expire after being hit once, and that’s great if it happens for you. But for a lot of hunters, it just does not happen that way, and the critter runs a bit.
Depending upon the topography and ground cover of your happy hunting ground, your tracking job might be easy or it might be hard. Depending upon your tracking experience, your hunger pangs, your patience, your tiredness, and the amount of ground cover you have to fight your way through, this tracking job might be even harder.
When tracking gets hard to do, we hunters have four options: Call buddies to help us do a checkerboard search, use a buddy’s hunting dog to try to sniff out the hit animal, which rarely works in my experience, three use a drone with experienced operator, or four, bring in a dedicated tracking dog and handler.
Option one, hunting buddies, is the most common way to track down a hit animal. And it is generally successful. Most people just call in whoever is hunting with them, or whoever they know who is closest, and together they start on the expected path of the critter. Many hands make short work, and regardless of whether it is a night time recovery with headlamps or a brutal daytime slog busting through thorny brush, the more people a hunter has helping, the faster and better likelihood of success.
Option two, any dog, or even a “hunting” dog, almost never works. Yes, dogs can smell way better than us humans, but so what does that matter when the dog is excitedly sniffing and chasing every wild animal track it encounters? I recall using my friend’s duck dog to try to track down a gobbler whose head my Remington 870 had literally severed from its body. The headless beast ran unerringly straight across the field to the worst tangle of brambles, deadfalls, timber tops, regenerating forest, and Asian bittersweet on planet Earth, and then took wing. I have had some real bad luck with doorknob-dead turkeys running and flying away, but this one was the craziest example.
I drove to my friend’s house, got his dog Ori (my friend was at work), and drove back to the scene of first contact. Neck feathers and blood were all around where the load of #5s had separated the head from the body, and indeed, Ori started out strong there. She followed the running scent track into the jungle, and went into creep mode. Looked very promising. We stopped at a couple trees along our way, where she looked up the tree expectedly. I looked up too, because hey, I was just the puny human here among mystical animals with superhuman powers. I was just following directions.
Despite following a flight pattern, which has no scent that I can imagine, Ori took me on a pretty straight line through that jungle mess, that in fact directionally tracked with how the bird had run across the field. And also to her credit, at one tree blood and feathers showed where the turkey had crashed into the trunk. How she found that, I can’t imagine. At another tree, Ori found where the headless bird had lain or fallen at the base. I thought surely by now this bird is lying dead right around here. But the certainly dead turkey was nowhere to be found. Gone, vamoosed, vanished.
Another time, we used the purported “hunting” dog of the man whose son had hit a doe right before closing time. Scene of the hit was easy to see, and the initial tracking was easy. We hung bits of tissue paper along the blood trail and followed what projected as a straight death run.
Dark fell upon us, but blood was everywhere, the path seemed self evident, the deer was obviously hard hit, and our feeble head lamps gave us the impression that we could see. But no luck. The dog was then got from home and brought in. He started out on the actual blood trail, but then started going off in wide tangents. We quit at midnight, shaking our heads. When we returned the next morning, that damned dead doe was lying a few feet away from where several of us searchers, AND THAT DAMNED DOG, had walked many times the night before. It just blended in with the forest floor, and the dog’s nose never picked it up.
So, don’t waste your time with option two, a dog not trained to track wounded game, unless you enjoy telling hunting stories of woe and frustration.
Part Two on Dogs vs Drones coming up soon.
PA Game Commission changing leadership
Kind of a wildlife management wild ride here in the Keystone State, though it is tough to tell if anyone really noticed or if anyone really cared. I care. People who care about animals should care.
In just a few weeks the Pennsylvania Game Commission has gone from from a very traditional conservation leadership style and background to a new style and background we have not seen in over a hundred years. I think this is a good thing, though I am sad about how it happened.
Recall that several months ago, attorney Steve Smith was promoted from director of the PGC’s Bureau of Information to deputy director of the agency, second in command to executive director Bryan Burhans. A good choice, as Smith is the very image of the dutiful, honest, earnest, hard working, straight shooting, unemotional, careful, procedurally diligent government employee. While PGC is a long way from the colorful Wild West frontier culture it once had, it still has a shadow of a bunker mentality and insular culture that do not serve the agency, its employees, or the public, and Steve is not representative of that.
Where Bryan Burhans had worked at the American Chestnut Foundation and other iconic conservation and wildlife management groups, with direct personal contacts in the nonprofit and foundation world, Steve Smith is an attorney who just happens to hunt, fish, and trap, and of course share the wildlife and habitat conservation ethos that animates hunters, trappers, and “fisherpeople” everywhere.
A devoted family man, Smith worked in private legal practice before joining PGC’s legal staff about 16 years ago. Where Burhans carried the mail for nonprofit advocacy groups both out of PGC and in it, which is the traditional model for wildlife management agency leaders across America, Smith has been long focused on public agency nuts and bolts. Dotting I’s and crossing T’s in the shadow of big speeches and public policy debates.
There is a gigantic world of difference between these two men, Bryan and Steve; their backgrounds, personalities, and outlooks could not be more different. Again, we are going from strength to strength with the change.
Bryan Burhans gets tons and tons of credit for gently, sometimes assertively molding the PGC into a more publicly accessible, publicly responsive public agency. Unlike most of his predecessors, Bryan was not a former Game Warden. And so from his own get-go seven years ago he was less insular, less committed to the law enforcement view of all things wildlife.
Yes, if you read some news reports about Bryan’s departure a couple weeks ago, you will then read about some state lawmakers griping that the agency is still not as accessible or responsive as the PA Fish & Boat Commission. I am sure that is true, and for good reasons. But compared to where the once insular and bunker-mentality PGC was, say, ten years ago, or especially twenty-five years ago, it is light years better now. Much improved. And, gasp if you must, the PGC actually now employs women in senior positions. This may be not big news to most people, but it is a fact that wildlife agencies are notoriously hide-bound and ultra traditional, the PGC having rung the bell in this regard for a long time. Celebrated wildlife biologists like Mary Jo Casalena may work for PGC, but it is as rare as hen turkey teeth that they also then get into senior management positions.
What is interesting about Steve Smith’s elevation to executive director upon Bryan’s departure is that we are actually seeing Pennsylvania wildlife management style return back to the days of Kolbfus and Pinchot – Americans without the supposedly key wildlife science “credentials” who simply care very much about wildlife, environmental quality, and habitat, and who have the intellectual capacity and personal management skills to implement the necessary policies.
PGC’s executive director is going from an outspoken advocate (albeit occasionally for things unrelated to wildlife management) to a quiet, humble, careful, almost reticent thinker. I am lamenting Bryan’s good-bye, because he did an outsanding job, and I am also really welcoming Steve’s hello. I believe that the many passionate watchers and stakeholders of PGC will be happy with Steve’s leadership there. Of course, those hunters who demand more deer than the landscape or society can sustain will never be satisfied, and I feel sorry for those people.
Update: Long and interesting interview with new ED Steve Smith is here.
talkin turkey
Spring Turkey Season is almost upon us here in Pennsylvania, and around the country. A great deal of the wild turkey breeding season is already behind us, and the significant challenge of calling in a “lovesick tom” at the tail end of the breeding period is now laid before several hundred thousand dedicated and novice turkey hunters alike, here in PA.
Couple of reminders, and one big observation:
- Please do not drive up and down country roads making hen calls out the window of your vehicle, waiting to hear a gobble in response. While it may bring some hunters a premature auditory orgasm to hear the lusty gobbler responses, all this activity really does is educate turkeys about fake calls by fake hen turkeys. And when tom turkeys get unnecessarily educated by guys peeing in their pants with excitement, said toms become a zillion times harder to hunt and bag. It takes the fun out of an already difficult hunt. Don’t do it. Please.
- Clearly identify your male turkey’s red or white head before pulling the trigger on its neck. If all turkey hunters only pulled the trigger when they had absolutely positively identified their target, there would be no heartbreaking hunting accidents during spring turkey season. And when you read the facts surrounding those hunting accidents or negligent shootings, you realize that some people are about to pee in their pants with excitement and so they shoot a human being “in mistake” of a turkey. By only putting our trigger finger on the shotgun trigger when the gobbler’s head is both clearly visible and in range, we bypass a lot of dangerous excitement.
Finally, in a certain nook up north, I have been enjoying the sounds once again of spring gobblers sounding off for probably six weeks now. Few have been the wild turkey gobbles there over the past ten to twelve years, an absence always correlated with the physical evidence of a resident fisher. In other words, fishers have eaten the hell out of our wild turkeys, and only after someone traps the local fisher do the turkey populations begin to rebound. This fact has been driven home for me year after year across southcentral, central, and northcentral PA; fishers have been real hard on our wild turkeys.
Not to say that fishers don’t have a place in Penn’s Woods, they do, of course. But the policy implications of widespread fishers should have been better considered before the giddiness of super-predator 100% ecosystem saturation overtook wildlife managers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And now Pennsylvania is contemplating releasing pine martens into Penn’s Woods…..knowing already that they eat the hell out of grouse, and that PA’s grouse are in very bad shape.
I don’t mind having a decent population of fishers and pine martens up north in the Big Woods, where they will have the least amount of impact on other wildlife across the entire state. What I do object to is sacrificing the enormous wild turkey conservation success story on the altar of “more predators are better than few” mindset of some wildlife managers. Sometimes, we just have to accept that we can’t wind the clock back to the year 1650, or even 1750, because the few successes we have managed to rack up, like wild turkeys brought back from extinction, is as good as it can get.
Sometimes, good is good enough, and the rest we just need to leave well enough alone.
A fisher in New Hampshire, from wikipedia. Fishers are giant weasels. They eat everything.
Decolonize Islamic Imperialism
All this mindless jibber jabber about “decolonization” in the Middle East. Please. Spare us. The biggest colonizers in the Middle East are the people implementing Islamic imperialism there. And there is no bigger symbol of Islamic imperialism than the golden dome in Jerusalem, built on top of the indigenous Jewish temple.
You want to end colonization, occupation, and imperialism? Send all of the so-called “Palestinians” back to Turkey, where they came from, and send all the Muslims back to the Arabian Peninsula, where they came from. These people are not indigenous to Israel, they are interlopers, thieves, colonizers, occupiers, imperialists.
For those hard of understanding how chronology works, the first things, the things and people and events and religions and nations that exist first, are those whose stuff appears first in the timeline. In Jerusalem, the capitol of the Jewish People for the past 3,500 years since King David selected the site, a certain golden dome is built on top of the indigenous Jewish temple. This much more recent addition to Jerusalem is the ultimate symbol of imperialism and colonization by people who do not belong there. But they have no problem claiming other people’s stuff as their own.
All the nudniks and uneducated fools blocking traffic and yelling bigoted slogans against Jews and America should take a few moments to ponder their irony. They are actually advocating for the very colonization and imperialism they say they are against. No wonder most Americans think you are idiots.
Some Middle East FAQs
Wow is the Internet burning up as a result of the “troubles” in Israel and Gaza. And not just the Internet, but the public streets across Europe, London, Washington, DC, and New York City. Marches full of people shouting about killing the Jews and destroying Israel, and carrying signs about destroying America, and battering the gates of the White House in Washington, DC, and tearing down flyers on lamp posts showing the faces and names of Hamas’ hostages – innocent people from 28 different countries and multiple religions and aged from 6-month-old babies to 80-year-old grandparents – show us that the so-called “occupation” thing is just another fake excuse for the same old bullsh*t religious hatred and violence.
So in response to what I see and read on the news and on the Internet, here are some absolute facts. You will not hear these mentioned by the mainstream media, which is an arm of Hamas (which explains why the mainstream media is constantly trying so hard to destroy Western Civilization), but these are true facts, and honest people want to know the truth, however uncomfortable it is.
- Jews are the indigenous people of Israel/ Judea/ Samaria/ Judah. They have been living there in an unbroken chain for 4,000 years, albeit not always the masters of their own political fortunes. The region’s greatest history for 4,000 years is written the entire time in Jewish blood. This is their home and their land.
- Arabs are from Arabia, AKA the Arabian Peninsula.
- Muslims are from the Arabian Peninsula
- Most of the so-called “Palestinians” are Turks who arrived in the area with the Ottoman Empire, which oversaw and administered the area they called the “Sanjak of Jerusalem” from around 1500 to 1920
- Turks are from…Turkey, and its surrounding region. If you are a Turk living in Nablus or Jenin or Jabaliya or Gaza City, you are not indigenous to anywhere except Turkey, regardless of how you self-identify or what language you speak
- The “Apartheid” that exists in the Middle East is the Muslim Arab countries’ unwillingness to allow Jews to live anywhere in the Middle East, despite Jews living there long before any Arabs showed up.
- From 1946 to 1956, one million Jews were ethnically cleansed from across North Africa and Egypt and the West Bank and Jordan and Syria and Iraq and Iran, forced out of their homes by bloodthirsty mobs and greedy governments, and forced to take refuge hundreds of miles away in the new state of Israel. THAT is the true ethnic cleansing that has happened in the Middle East.
- There is zero “occupation” of Gaza. None. There were Israelis in Gaza from 1967 until 2005, but then any semblance of an occupation ended. In 2005, Israel pulled its own people out of Gaza, left everything behind, and Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin was killed by one of his own bodyguards over it and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was struck down by a “hand of God” stroke as a result. There is no justification for Hamas, except what their charter explicitly calls for: The murder of all Jews and Christians around the world.
- Israel controls electricity and water to Gaza out of necessity, because Gaza diverts all of its money and resources into building terror tunnels and rockets out of public water pipes.
- Gaza could easily have been transformed into its own beautiful oasis, similar to what the Israelis had done with their part of it. Gaza has everything it needs to succeed – beautiful beaches, the Mediterranean, adjoining the majestic Sinai and close to the beautiful Red Sea, and next to high tech powerhouse Israel. When Israel abandoned their Gaza settlement in 2005, they left behind incredible greenhouses and seawater desalination plants. Entire communities that ran on sustainable re-use of limited resources, something out of Dune. What did the Gazans do when the Jews left Gaza? They destroyed the desalination plants and the greenhouses, they scrapped everything made of metal, and ruined everything beautiful that was handed to them for free.
- We must be honest. Gazans are a backwards people, educated to hate everyone and kill everyone, and live miserably amongst themselves. They are indeed a sad case, but they and their misery are of their own doing. Maybe they should go back to Turkey and start anew.
Please do not pet the landowner
A few weeks ago, my wife looked up, startled. Her eyes were fixated on something over my right shoulder, and then she said “There are some men on the porch. Were you expecting visitors today?”
Uh, no, I was not only not expecting any visitors that day, I was not expecting any visitors the entire weekend. Because I was alone with my wife and relishing our rare private time together in a quiet out of the way dead-end location.
Just as I stood up from the table and turned towards the front door, an older guy with a greying stubble knocked. Another guy in his fifties was standing near him, and both were dressed in casual-to-ratty-on-the-crick clothes. I did not recognize either of them, and reflexively felt for the grip of “Biden’s Lung Buster” at my side.
Opening the door and stepping outside, I buried my rumbling fury under a big steaming pile of humor: “Hi boys! You can put the free beer here on the porch and help yourselves to load of firewood on the way out.”
With big smile, of course.
The two men were nice enough, and laughed at my joke. They explained that they had been fishing down in the creek that morning and had heard a gobbler up above them on the mountain. And that had set them in motion trying to figure out a way to get to the gobbler, to hunt it, without trespassing on what they acknowledged is very clearly posted private land all around the gobbler.
After what they said was a lot of driving around and walking and consulting maps, they determined the best way to attain their goal was to drive up the posted and very long gravel driveway to the remote home nestled way the hell back in the woods, and then to knock on the door and ask permission to both hunt the gobbler at present time and in the future cross over our property to access state forest land farther up the mountain.
“You two bastards are lucky as hell I didn’t come busting out here buck naked with an AR to run you off, because the angry naked old man thing is about a hundred times worse than the gun,” I half joked.
The two interlopers chuckled at the joke, and started getting the hint. After all, the land AND the driveway are all posted for a reason. Privacy is a valuable and rare thing, and because many Americans today seem to have been raised without any manners or a sense of self-preservation, big yellow posted signs, buckets of purple paint, and gates are now a necessity to preserve what shreds of privacy people have remaining to them.
But these guys had purposefully ignored all of the legal and physical barriers designed to keep them out of my private life.
“Yeah, I have had that same bird in gun range twice this week, including earlier this morning, and I have decided to let him live, because he is a rare survivor up here,” I explained, truthfully.
Wild turkeys used to be plentiful in Northcentral PA, and for the past fifteen years they are now as rare as hen’s teeth, due to a combination of factors like mature forests and craploads of nest-raiding predators.
“Well, could we at least cross over your land to get to the state land?” the second guy asked, having taken a step backwards off the porch and onto the steps.
To which I replied with bare naked contempt: “Why would we let strangers walk through our best hunting ground so they can go hunt where they want? We leave that area as a sanctuary so we can hunt it carefully, and having people walk through it would just ruin it for our hunting, to say nothing of our privacy up here. And it is remote and quiet up here…right? Guys, there are over two million acres of public land within an hour’s drive of here, and you guys need to be here, right here, on us?”
The second guy looked chagrined, and I felt only the slightest twinge of regret for having spoken so plainly.
“Well, we thought it wouldn’t harm anything if we asked,” said the first guy, who was studying his feet.
And that’s the thing. The signs around the property and at the gate on the private driveway do not say “Hunting By Written Permission Only” or anything similar about asking for permission to hunt on the land.
Rather, the myriad signs and purple paint say keep out, stay out, do not enter, do not trespass, no access, no anything, private land don’t even ask. And frankly, every square inch of private land in the valley (which is about 93% public land) is heavily posted and jealously guarded, so physically asking anyone for permission to hunt is both a fool’s errand and a deliberate theft of someone’s valuable privacy. It is an invasion of someone’s sanctuary.
Folks, don’t try to pet the landowner. He is likely to bite, because he was sleeping comfortably in his quiet little corner when you came up to him, woke him up, and acted like petting him was the best thing he could have ever expected or wanted. When in fact all he wants is to be left alone in his quiet little corner. He never asked you to pet him and doesn’t want you to pet him. He doesn’t want to see or hear you, either.
For some odd reason, a lot of people across America believe that public land sucks to hunt on, and that private land is where all the wild game is holed up. Nothing is farther from the truth than this incorrect notion; almost all of the trophy deer and bears I have killed were on public land. If getting to a piece of public land is difficult, then you should do everything legal you can to get there, because in my extensive experience, hardly anyone else will be hunting that area. But one thing you cannot do is badger the adjoining private landowner. Sending a letter explaining yourself, or placing a friendly phone call, is the only correct way to ask permission.
Giving Thanks for Being an American
Thanksgiving Day may have originated three hundred years ago, when the first Pilgrims were starving to death in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and they were saved by local Indians who took pity on them, but it is still our big national holiday for the same sort of reasons today.
Native pumpkin squash, beans, wild turkey, and cranberry jelly that is native to the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts have ever since been the symbolic food at which we rejoice for our great good fortune for living in America, no matter where we live.
America is the freest country with the most opportunity available to the most people in the world. What an incredible place.
The symbolism of our unique national holiday food – turkey, cranberry sauce, pumpkin squash etc – is similar in meaning to the food of other nationalities and cultures. For example, the matza “bread of affliction” flatbread eaten every Passover by religiously observant Jews is a reminder of their own escape from hard slavery into newfound freedom. Many South American cultures form round breads from maize (corn, which is native to the Americas) and yams that are symbolic of how they eat together in a family circle. The French (and Italian) diet of bread, cheese, and wine may seem hedonistic on its face, but when one considers that even free French (and Italian) peasants had fertile land to farm and live on, their national food and drink make perfect sense. And so on for so many other cultures.
Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Americans. Enjoy this day together, unified as one people in union, heading on the same path of freedom together. We might be in tough times together right now, but we should take every opportunity to celebrate our shared identities. During the first (or second) American Civil War, soldiers on both the Union and Confederate lines would gather on Thanksgiving and Christmas nights to serenade each other with religious songs. In World War One, both German soldiers and Allied soldiers would sing Christmas songs back and forth to each other across the waste lands filled with destroyed men and war machines. My God, friends, if they could gather in peace one night a year, then how much more so can we Americans today gather together and wish each other
HAPPY THANKSGIVING, for we each have much to give thanks to God for!
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.
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When one of our guys is finally browbeaten into washing dishes after years, it is cause for “Notify the media” acts like taking his unhappy picture. This is back in 2015. He still has to be browbeaten into washing the damned dishes
Lycoming County is the boot-looking shape in the northcentral area. Its northwestern corner is where we hunt. The darkest township there demonstrates the importance of organized hunting drives. A bunch of large hunting clubs are located in this area, and their members put on highly coordinated, obviously successful drives.