Keep The Hell Out!

That means you photographer, and you bird watcher and you hiker, and you, and you, and you – unless you’re hunting or trapping of fishing.

On January 25 the Board of Game Commissioners will consider a proposal to make it unlawful to “Hike on foot or ride a nonmotorized vehicle, conveyance or animal from the last Saturday in September until the third Saturday in January, and [before 1p.m.] from the second Saturday in April through [the last Saturday in May] Memorial Day inclusive, except on Sundays or while lawfully engaged in hunting, trapping or fishing.” on over one million acres of State Game Lands throughout Pennsylvania.

We’ve heard it said, almost boastfully, that hunters purchased those State Game Lands. Most people who say that hunters paid for the Game Lands forget, choose to ignore, or were never told, about the tracts acquired by land trusts and conveyed to the Game Commission, or lands purchased by the federal government and later transferred to the Game Commission, or land acquired by everyone's tax dollars for the Game Commission. 

The proposal in question would even seem to make a law-breaker of a hunter doing pre-season scouting or taking a walk on Game Lands, as well as non-hunters who purchase a hunting license to help fund wildlife management in the state, since they would not be “lawfully engaged in hunting, trapping or fishing”. 

The argument has been made that other users disrupt the experience of hunters and can ruin their chances of bagging their quarry, therefore those other folks should be excluded from Game Lands. As a photographer, I’ve had opportunities spoiled by horseback riders, hikers, mountain bikers, runners – and hunters. That’s what can happen when we’re on publicly-owned land in a society of over 300 million people with diverse interests.

It’s easy to see how the Game Commission’s proposal, if adopted, could lead to the posting of additional private land in retaliation – land owned by non-hunters, and perhaps even some hunters, who would have spent time on State Game Lands had they been permitted there. Were that to happen it would certainly be counter-productive for Pennsylvania’s hunters. Many non-hunters are reluctant to be in the woods during any hunting season due to a perceived threat to their safety. Imagine the reaction if those non-hunters engaged in a campaign to close Pennsylvania’s State Parks to hunting.

Purchasers of hunting licenses total less than seven percent of Pennsylvania’s population and the number has been on a downward trend for years. At some point the Pennsylvania Game Commission will need significant funding from non-hunters; if those non-hunters get the impression that the Game Commission is an adversary that neither cares about them nor wants them on its land, that funding will be hard to come by. Unfortunately, it’s Pennsylvania’s wildlife that will suffer the most.

Tracks In The Snow

There was between one and two inches of snow in the Big Woods; enough to show tracks of the wildlife that had been moving about, but mostly too fluffy to produce sharp, well-defined tracks.

Nonetheless, in places the snow did provide identifiable tracks:

White-tailed Deer –

Bobcat –

Gray Squirrel – 

Coyote –

Gray Fox –

A maze of gray squirrel tracks crisscrossed a well-defined path that a coyote had followed for a while; there the coyote’s tracks were pretty clear. Shortly, the coyote tracks became blurred and undecipherable and it became apparent that something else had walked over them –

After a little way some of the tracks were quite obvious: A fisher had walked on top of older coyote tracks –

The fisher had traveled in the coyote’s tracks, following them virtually step for step as the coyote detoured around trees and deviated from the trail to investigate old stumps  and clumps of vegetation and then returned to the trail again. The paired tracks went along like that for well over a quarter mile.

Earlier in the season hair, blood and disturbed leaves showed that a hunter had used the trail to drag a deer out of the woods. So, I assumed that the coyote and fisher might have been headed for the pile of entrails that the hunter had left when he field-dressed the deer. Wrong! Suddenly the fisher tracks disappeared – it had climbed a trail-side tree, a tree with a large cavity where the fisher was probably spending the daylight hours.

The coyote tracks continued on for almost another quarter mile and then veered off the trail and up a steep hillside. Neither of the animals had been headed for the remaining scraps from the deer.

Eagle On A Pole

Walked along the river for several miles and saw nothing special other than a few common mergansers bobbing in a stretch of fast water. Being mergansers, they would occasionally duck their heads beneath the surface or dive as they searched for fish.

On the way back to my parked car I saw an adult bald eagle landing on a nearby utility pole. The eagle was carrying prey, which at first I assumed was a fish plucked from the nearby river.

Looking through the telephoto lens as the eagle fed, it became obvious that the prey wasn’t a fish; the prey had a furry tail because it was a gray squirrel:

After a few minutes the eagle moved to another pole –

Did the eagle kill the squirrel, was it a roadkill, might it have been electrocuted, did the eagle take the squirrel from another predator? As so often happens in the natural world, there are more questions than the information at hand can answer.

The Compass

Finally caught up with my reading, gradually working through the magazines that had piled up over the past months. Only a bit over a year and several months late, and deep in the pile, I eventually got to the November 2013 issue of Smithsonian and there, staring out from the page was a photograph of a compass that looked amazingly familiar.

 

It was a photograph of the compass Meriwether Lewis carried on the Corps of Discovery (Lewis and Clark) expedition that President Thomas Jefferson sent west to map and explore the Louisiana Purchase. The journey to the Pacific Ocean and back lasted from May 1804 until September 1806.

 

The reason the compass looked familiar is that in 1960 I purchased a Model 5600 “Forestry Compass” made by Kuffel & Esser Company. At the time it was the premier hand-held compass used by foresters, geologists and surveyors.

 

The compasses aren’t identical: Lewis’ compass was made with a wooden case, mine with an aluminum case; Lewis’ compass has a set of sights in the form of two slotted posts that are aligned to take a bearing, mine has a sight line milled in the lid – but they’re remarkably alike given the 150 year difference in their ages.

 

Compasses are rapidly becoming obsolete as professionals as well as hikers, hunters and other outdoor folks adopt electronic Global Positioning System (GPS) devices that can determine their location to within a few feet anywhere on the earth. GPS receivers are now even in cars, cameras and cellphones – some will actually speak to you.

However, in reading the reports of rescues it quickly becomes apparent that relying on GPS is fraught with potential problems – from people who, following the directions given by their vehicle’s GPS, use roads that are closed in winter and get marooned in deep snow; to hikers relying on a GPS receiver until its batteries give out and they’re totally lost. If a GPS receiver can’t “see” enough satellites it won’t give a reliable reading – think about beneath dense foliage or in deep narrow valleys – and if water gets inside …

There’s a lot to be said for an old-fashioned compass and map – no batteries to fail; they work beneath dense foliage and in deep valleys; and no annoying computer-generated voice – this old codger will keep using his old compass.

Christmas Count

This is the time for the 115^th annual Christmas Bird Count. For those of you who aren’t familiar with what is commonly called the Christmas Count a bit of detail: In the late 1800s eastern forests had been decimated by “cut and get out” logging; wildlife populations were under tremendous pressure from unregulated hunting, including market hunting; the passenger pigeon’s billions of birds were on the brink of extinction; the bison’s millions had been reduced to a remnant population in Yellowstone and in zoos and private preserves; egrets and songbirds were killed to adorn ladies’ hats. It was common for folks to take to the field on Christmas day, guns in hand, form teams and kill as many birds as possible. The team with the most birds won.

Canada Geese

In an effort to reduce the slaughter of songbirds the early leaders of the Audubon Society organized the first Christmas Bird Census to count birds rather than kill them. In the intervening years the Christmas Count evolved into an effort to count all the birds in a circle 15 miles in diameter on one day. There are over 2,300 Christmas Count circles throughout the world, most in the United States and Canada.

Hermit Thrush

Recently I participated in a Christmas Count I’ve been doing for over 30 years, covering the same portion of the circle for all those years, an area that I know well. It’s an interesting area with a diversity of habitats – mature woodland, cutover forest, tree plantations (young and old), cropland, abandoned fields, ponds, wetlands and small streams. Because of the diversity of habitats it offers a wide variety of bird species. The Christmas Count is great fun, whether I do it with friends or family or alone; a chance to revisit an area I like, wander through all those habitats and see other wildlife in addition to the birds.

White-breasted Nuthatch

It’s interesting to see the trends in bird populations as the habitat changes – as fallow fields are put back into agricultural production; after the owner of a large acreage clearcut a significant area; one year the ponds are frozen, the next they’re not; when new houses spring up in what had been fields or forest.

Black-capped Chickadee

Some folks call the Christmas Count “citizen science” and researchers have spent countless hours and reams of paper and megabits of data compiling and analyzing the results. But, like all scientific efforts, the value is dependent on the quality of the data collected and how it’s used. But there are also serious concerns about the value of the data  – especially about species that are hard to identify or uncommon in an area. Many people just don’t have the skill to identify species correctly, aren’t interested in being cold or wet or don’t cover their area thoroughly – is the information they collect worth having? How good is the “citizen science”?   

Purple Finch  -  House Finch

Enough for the Scrooge stuff, for now I’m going back to photographing birds.

Pileated Woodpecker

Ice Storm

Northcentral Pennsylvania receives fairly frequent ice storms when supercooled rain falls and freezes almost instantly when it hits the ground, trees or other objects. Two days after a light freezing rain I headed to a wooded park in the Big Woods to hike out to an old abandoned farm.

All of the trees and shrubs and dry stalks of herbaceous plants were coated with a thin layer of ice:

The branches of a hawthorn –

A small crabapple still hanging from a twig –

White pine needles –

Goldenrod and aster stems weighted down by the ice –

The buds containing next spring’s mountain laurel flowers –

And a dry sweetfern leaf –

Sweetfern actually isn’t a fern; it’s a shrub related to bayberry and more distantly related to walnut and beech trees.  

This ice storm didn’t result in enough ice forming on the trees and shrubs to cause any damage, but a few years ago what began as light snow changed to an ice storm that resulted in major damage to many trees over large areas.