the land ethic

WE HADN’T BEEN IN THE BLIND FIVE MINUTES WHEN HE STEPPED OUT OF THE TIMBER. 

“Good Lord,” I whispered to Buster. “Look at that rack!” The bases of the antlers were as big around as a man’s wrists, and the beams spread at least a foot on either side of the buck’s ears, then curved up and up into five massive points on each side. He was an orgasmic trophy. “How big do you think he is?”

“Hang on a sec.” Buster leaned over his laptop and flicked the mouse. “That’s 1403. Let’s see . . . he’s at 327 typical this year. Not bad.”

“You must live with these deer. How can you tell which buck that is from here?”

“Well, I do spend a lotta time out here, but figurin’ out which deer is which ain’t no problem. Look.” He flicked to another screen. It was a GoogleEarth map of the preserve. Superimposed on the GIS layout were several hundred fluorescent dots.

“See, we’re here.” He moved the mouse to the lower left corner and put it on one of the dots. “And this is him.” A dialogue box popped up. “1403, male, 327T, BD: 5/28/2015.”

My jaw dropped as I looked at the screen. “How’s that work?”

“Well, we useta put GPS collars on all the deer, but the clients didn’t like ‘em much, so we switched to subcutaneous transponders. Under the skin. They bounce a signal out to the satellites and give us real-time locations. Handy.”

“Well, I’ll take him,” I said, reaching for the .270.

Buster put a hand on my arm. “Wish you wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“That rack’s got at least three more years’ growth coming.  Could top out near 360. If you shoot him now, there’d be a surcharge for foregone potential.”

“Foregone potential?”

“That’s what our lawyers call it. He’ll be worth at least another five grand before he’s done.”

I put the .270 back in the rack.

B.C. “Buster” Pointcounter is the manager of UltraDeer®, Inc., a 10,000-acre shooting preserve near Whitetail City, Kansas. When Buster and his partners invited me to visit UltraDeer®, I figured it was just another quality-deer operation, but they assured me the trip would be worthwhile. Among other things, they guaranteed I’d kill a whitetail that would rank in Boone and Crockett’s top five. That’s the kind of guarantee a deer hunter just has to test.

“No brag, just fact,” Buster told me when I asked him how he could make such an offer. “For most of the last hunnerd years, deer management was stuck in the dark ages— bunch a’ state biologists wanderin’ around, tryin’ to figure out how many doe licenses they had to sell to keep a wild herd from eatin’ itself out a’ house and home.

“Then quality deer management came along: Feed those deer; make sure they got the minerals they need; use yer hunters to clean up the genetics, and when you let somebody kill one a’ yer trophies, make him pay fer the privilege. That was thinkin’ in the right direction— they just didn’t take it far enough.

“We’re thinkin’ out a’ the box. Lemme show you.”

We jumped in his pick-up and drove around the lodge to a complex of buildings that looked a lot like the U.S. Veterinary Health Labs at Iowa State University. Some had fenced compounds outside with carefully tended grass and shrubs to give their four-legged residents a sense of security. Others were more substantial. We drove up to the door of the largest of these, and Buster led me inside

“It’s all about genetics,” he explained as we checked in with the receptionist, took out our security badges, and went into the shower room to put on our hospital scrubs.

“The quality-deer folks had that right,” he said as we emerged into a vast laboratory. “Trouble was the way they tried to control gene flow. Shoot the little ones and let the big ones grow? Way too primitive. You can’t tell fer sure what a yearling buck’s potential is just by looking at his horns. Is he just a spike?  Well, what if he was born late because his momma didn’t get bred in her first heat last fall? Case like that, he might have a lot of potential, but he’d be dead in a quality-deer operation.

“And what about his momma? She’s half the genetic equation and a quality-deer manager don’t know a thing about her. Naw, we figured there had to be a better way to breed fer quality bucks. That’s some of what we’re doin’ here.”

“So how does UltraDeer® go about it?”

“First, you gotta know every deer. When a fawn is dropped on this preserve, we get our hands on it the first day.  Tattoo the registration number on the inside of the lip, stick a transponder under its hide, and follow that critter the rest of its life. Here, take a look at this.”

Buster stepped over to a computer terminal and called up a file.

“Here’s the kind of records we keep on every deer. Birth date, birth weight, all the vital statistics. DNA analysis. Whole pedigree, too— that goes back ten generations now. What buck was bred with what doe . . .”

“Wait a minute. How the heck do you control the breeding?”

“Well, you can’t maximize the potential a’ these here bucks if you don’t control the breeding. There ain’t much— how can I put this delicately fer yer readers?— there ain’t much lovemakin’ between deer on our place. We took a page out a’ the livestock industry’s book— several of ‘em, in fact. We electro-ejaculate our best bucks. The whole operation runs on artificial insemination.”

“So you chase the bucks around while they’re in rut, catch them, then run them through your semen harvesting operation?”

“Oh, we don’t haveta chase ‘em; they come in on their own.”

“Huh?”

“Well to tell you the truth, some of the bucks kinda like the process— you hadn’t oughta print that. But we got other ways to lay our hands on ‘em. The quality deer folks was thinkin’ the right direction on that, too, but they didn’t take it far enough.”

“Ah, you use feeding stations.”

“Well, yeah, but not the way you’re thinkin’. Feeding’s important— you can’t get yer whole genetic potential out of a buck if you don’t control his diet. We’re doin’ research on that, and we got a good mix. But deer are pretty skittish. You go trappin’ ‘em at feed stations, messin’ with their privates, they may not come back.

“So we took the whole thing another step. When our deer come into a feed station, they gotta squeeze in, and when they do, they get an injection.  It’s all automatic. We give ‘em some antibiotic— that’s another page from the livestock industry, helps ‘em grow— and a little somethin’ else, too. After they get that first shot, they’ll be comin’ back fer more, no matter what.”

“They’re addicted! What do you use— heroin?”

“We don’t like the word ‘addicted.’ Let’s just say they like the stuff. Keeps ‘em calm, helps ‘em grow better. I can’t tell you what we use— it’s a trade secret. Comes from Colombia, though.”

“So you hold the does here while they’re in heat . . .”

“Used to. Now we gotta good bead on the way all that works.  Catch ‘em at the injection station when they’re ready and do the whole thing there. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.”

“It all seems a little . . . tame,” I said.

“Yeah, well, you gotta put aside some a’ these romantic notions if you wanta make money. Nice thing about the AI is it gives us another revenue stream. We useta’ sell a few of our bigger bucks to quality deer operations.  Now, we can sell semen instead. Get a’ lot more bang fer yer buck that way. Heh, heh . . I kind a’ like that. . . .”

I’ve got to give you this, Buster. Looks like you’ve got this genetic issue pretty well solved.”

“We’re comfortable with the way we’re working things right now, but we’re not done. Not by a long shot.”

“What else is there?” I wondered.

“Oh, the R&D guys got some great ideas. Here the last couple years, they been working on gene splicin’. Great opportunity . . .”

“What do you mean?”

“They found the gene that makes elk antlers.  Three of ‘em, actually. Spliced ‘em into some a’ our whitetails. We had a buck last year scored almost 500 Boone and Crockett. That was some rack!”

“I guess so!  Can I see him?”

“Nah. He died. Couldn’t hold his head up. We’re workin’ on that, though. If we can find the elk genes fer neck muscles, we figger the sky’s the limit on racks.”

I pondered the idea of a 500-point whitetail rack for a minute or two. The fossils of the extinct Irish elk came to mind, stags whose racks spanned up to twelve feet and weighed up to ninety pounds. UltraDeer® was on its way to recreating that trophy. Then another side of the operation came to mind.

“Who are your customers, Buster?”

“Clients. We call ‘em clients. When you’re payin’ $25,000 for a basic hunt, plus trophy fees, you got a right to a little respect. They’re mostly men, like you’d expect. In six years now, I don’t think we’ve had more than a couple a’ women come to hunt, and they came with their men. Most of the guys are on the shady side a’ sixty. Made their millions, now they want to enjoy some a’ the good things in life. We put ‘em up in the lodge— nice place, dontcha think?— feed ‘em real good, and give ‘em the chance to kill a once-in-a-lifetime trophy.”

“They’re all hunting out of your blinds?”

“Yep. They don’t wanna walk, and we don’t want ‘em walkin’ anyway. Just stirs up the stock. And, when you’re out walkin’, you can’t use the computer; no computer means you can’t ID the bucks you’re lookin’ at. The blinds work better. They’re set up right there at the injection stations. Clients get a good look and an easy shot. Electrical outlets, heat, T-1 hook-ups fer the laptops.”

“I see in your brochure that you provide meat processing and packaging along with taxidermy.”

“Oh, yeah, we’re a one-stop operation. The taxidermy sideline’s been good for us. The meat processin’, not so good.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, turns out most of our clients ain’t interested in the meat. Just want the trophy. But that’s okay. We recycle the meat they don’t take.”

“Recycle?”

“Yup. Now this is off the record. We’d been lookin’ for a high-protein supplement for our deer feed, and it struck us— why not use the meat? That there’s another lesson we took from the livestock boys.”

We spent the rest of the afternoon touring the facilities, then at a little before five, Buster looked at his watch.

“Oops. We’d best be headin’ out to the blind.”

“When do they start coming out?” I asked.

“There ain’t no ‘start’ to it. The buck you’re gonna shoot’ll be at his injection station at 5:20 sharp. Number 2508. Ain’t the best buck we got on the place by a long shot, but he’s scorin’ 205 typical this year. That’ll look good in the book.”

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, Buster. Your operation really is one of a kind.”

“UltraDeer®, man— no brag, just fact. By the way, you gonna want yer meat?”

———–

“WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT: THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL; THAT THEY are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  The philosophical underpinning of the great American experiment.  Words to stir the soul.

And perhaps that’s enough.  Maybe it’s too much to expect a rallying cry, a declaration of independence, to be internally consistent as well as inspiring.  Still, as I recall these words after a long life watching the turbulence of American governance, I find myself pondering the tension in the rights Jefferson and his colleagues guaranteed to the citizenry of the new nation.

For the purposes of this essay, I’ll set aside the most glaring injustices these guarantees ignored: the protection of slavery, the disenfranchisement of those who did not own property, the callous disregard for women, and the implicit hostility toward the peoples who had occupied the continent for millennia before the arrival of the first European.  These prejudices were deep-seated and corrosive; after more than two centuries, they continue to gnaw at the foundations of our system, demanding solutions we still struggle to impose or even identify.

But I want to focus on an even more fundamental contradiction in Jefferson’s words: the antithetical concepts of equality and liberty.

“All men are created equal.”  Is that true, as Jefferson claimed?  Clearly not.  Even in the eighteenth century, it was obvious that people were born with different intellectual and physical abilities.  Besides the reality of birth defects, there was the simple reality that some people were bigger, stronger, prettier, more thoughtful, more dexterous, more inventive than others.  Add to that the part that blind luck plays in success, the hard reality that some talents are worth more than others in the marketplace and that this scale of value shifts over time.  The abstract computational and engineering aptitudes that were necessary to build the modern computer could well have condemned their owners to prison or execution in another era.  For uncounted millennia, the need for raw physical strength, speed, and endurance were crucial to the survival of any social group; today, they are relegated almost entirely to sports arenas.  A talent for training and managing horses was once a valuable commodity; these days, it’s a novelty with little practical value.  The capacity to read and write, indispensable in modern American culture, was useless over most of the span of human history.  The standard of feminine beauty has changed over and over again, to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others.

While there have been many efforts to interpret Jefferson’s statement in a way that bears some faint resemblance to the facts, to twist the definition of the word “equal” until it fits the system we’ve built, we are not created equal, nor do our innate talents have equal economic or cultural value.  It’s simply not true that we all begin the race at the same starting line or that the rules of the contest apply without exception or modification to all the contestants.

Nor, in spite of all our high-flown rhetoric, does our system offer anything like equality of opportunity for advancement.  The hard numbers show that Americans born into poverty have practically no hope of rising to great wealth, while Americans born with silver spoons in their mouths are likely to enjoy a position in the de facto aristocracy all their lives.  The social and economic hierarchies Americans have roundly condemned in other societies have taken a slightly different form in our culture but are nearly as virulent and entrenched.

The right to liberty guaranteed us in the opening lines of the declaration would seem to be unrelated to the notion of equality, and, in theory, they may be quite separate, but in the real world, the American ideal of liberty isolates the individual, emphasizing competition over cooperation and, by implication, placing the responsibility for any failure, any inequity, directly on the person who suffers it rather than recognizing the stark differences in genetics, innate talents, family backgrounds, income, and education that enforce status and economic position in modern American society.

The men who ratified the declaration can, perhaps, be forgiven for advocating personal freedom with such force— they were, after all, the scions of a long lineage of people who had been oppressed in the name of an unending succession of monarchies and dictatorships.  Still, a few more words on behalf of brotherhood might have been appropriate.  It’s worth noting that, after their presentation of a revolutionary theory of ethical government and the litany of grievances that followed, they waited until the last sentence of the document to mention their commitment to each other— “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

In the years, the decades, the centuries that followed, the mandate implicit in that pledge was often lost, while the pursuit of individual liberty continued with a white heat.  The conflict between the concepts of liberty and equality has been at the root of many of the nightmares that have arisen from the American dream.

For the first century of the republic, there was one safety valve that lowered, ever so slightly, the pressure created by the collision of the two ideas.  That safety valve was the myth of frontier.  I say “myth” because there was no real frontier, if, by the word, we meant land that was unoccupied and available, without moral or physical challenge, to anyone who claimed it.  There were long-term residents in the New World when Columbus first hit the beach, residents who proved to be unwilling to cede their rights to invading hordes of Europeans.  Subsequent waves of immigrants convinced themselves that these original occupants had no right to the land, freeing themselves of legal and ethical constraint and opening the “golden door” of opportunity for millions of people, some of them fresh from the Old World, others simply tired of dealing with the entrenched power brokers of the New.  For generations of Americans, there was always an alternative to the constraints of “civilized” society: the “free” land to the west.

Of course, that land was anything but free.  Claiming it was a dangerous, expensive gamble that failed more often than it succeeded.  Still, the choice was there, and it offered an escape from the economic and social constraints of the eastern establishment.  The myth of frontier bolstered the American ideal of individual liberty.

In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the frontier as a demographic phenomenon no longer existed in America. The frontier, he argued, was “a gate of escape from the bondage of the past. . . . And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

Turner’s analysis has been criticized for its emphasis on English, Germanic, and Scandinavian influences at the expense of other ethnic groups like the French, Spaniards, native Americans, and Chinese; it has been attacked for its failure to appreciate the central role of slavery in American culture; it has been condemned as paternalistic and racist.  There is some ground for all these points of view and possibly even more justification for criticizing Turner’s tacit assumption that the land on the continent was somehow unoccupied and “free.”

As I see it, Turner unintentionally offered an accurate description of frontier, not as objective reality but as a cultural touchstone— a myth.  Does that matter?   Is there anyone who doubts the power of myth?  Frontier was the driving force behind American expansionism, a nation’s “Manifest Destiny,” even more powerful in defining our character than the slave-owning culture we abetted.  The possibilities it seemed to offer captivated hundreds of millions of people around the world and persuaded many of them to emigrate to the New World.  When that myth disappeared, the clash between the guarantees of liberty and equality had no other outlet.

The first sixty years of the twentieth century were full of distractions that deflected American attention from this fundamental conflict.  Generations united to fight wars and economic catastrophe, but, even as they struggled to surmount those challenges, the underlying tension between the guarantees of liberty and equality drove wedges between major segments of American society.

For the last thirty years or more, we’ve been largely spared the kinds of great historical calamities that occupied our fathers and grandfathers.  Freed of mortal enemies, insulated from the most destructive fluctuations of our economy, we find ourselves confronted again with two ideals that were proposed as a foundation of government but probably can’t exist together in anything like pure form.

It seems to me that liberty and equality are inversely related, at least in a nation that has no empty spaces left with which to accommodate its malcontents.  I’m not sure whether the two exist in a zero-sum relationship, but I am pretty certain that, as one increases, the other tends to decline.  To the degree that is true, the exuberant language of the Declaration of Independence created a conflict of expectations that echoes down through history.

Almost a century after Jefferson’s words were ratified, another American leader spoke of “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  He wondered whether “that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure,” implicitly recognizing the clash between the two Jeffersonian ideals, liberty and equality.  The magnitude of that conflict was reflected in the carnage of the Civil War, the violent confrontation between one man’s liberty to hold another human being as property set against the right of every man to be free.  Two radically different conceptions of individual freedom and equality.

In 1865, the nation ratified the thirteenth amendment to the constitution, which guaranteed liberty to a people that had been enslaved.  The question of the equality of those people was not addressed.  It strains America’s social fabric to this day.

The commitment to the ideal of equality constrains liberty.  The commitment to the ideal of individual liberty undermines equality, whether we prefer to focus on some sort of philosophical equilibration of intrinsic human importance or a more pragmatic assessment of the social value of each individual.  There is a balance to be struck, a balance so fragile and ephemeral that it may never be found.  The great declaration aspires to something that may never be achieved, that may not be possible to achieve.

At Gettysburg, Lincoln said our work was unfinished, that there was a “great task remaining before us.”  Had he survived the war, he might well have recognized just how much greater the task was than even he anticipated.  In that moment, at the height of the blood-letting, I don’t think he expected to reach the goals that rang out in the declaration.  His aim was modest in comparison— simply to preserve the union.

Nearly 160 years later, the greater task remains.  I think it’s fair to say that we’re closer to a humane balance between liberty and equality than we were in 1863, but the venom in the debate these days leaves the question Lincoln posed unanswered: Can a nation committed to striking that balance long endure?  I don’t know.  But I join the Great Emancipator in the prayer he offered on that terrible battlefield— “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE.  ONE OF MY DAD’S FAVORITE FILMS, WHICH MEANT IT WAS BOUND TO BECOME ONE OF MINE.  And I guess neither one of us had reason to apologize for that prejudice, since the film won two academy awards in 1948 and has been named one of the fifty best movies of all time.

So many great lines in that film. The one everybody remembers: When Bogart asks the leader of the banditos to show a badge to prove he’s one of the federales he claims to be, the bandito answers, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We ain’t got to show you no stinking badges!” One of my favorites always comes to mind when I’m about to start up a mountain after elk: The old prospector looks at the flecks of gold dust in a handful of dirt he’s found at the base of a rockbound ridge and says, “It’s rich, but it’s not that rich. Up there,” pointing to the spine of the mountain, “up there’s where we’ve got to go!” And another of my favorites in elk camp: “Hey, you fellas, how about some beans?” the old prospector asks his two exhausted companions after they’ve collapsed from a hard day’s travel. “Goin’ through some mighty rough country tomorrow,” he says as he loads up his plate. “Better have some beans.” And, when the greenhorns start pouring water on a rock they think is the motherlode, the old prospector tells them it’s just pyrite. “Say, next time you two fellas strike it rich, holler for me before you start splashing water around. Water’s precious— sometimes, more precious than gold.”

One other line has drifted to mind in the last few weeks. Humphrey Bogart draws a pistol on his partner as they make camp for the night, forces him out into the darkness at gunpoint, and shoots him for the gold the two of them have spent the better part of a year digging out of solid rock. He comes back to the campfire, struggling to come to terms with what he’s done.

“Conscience,” he says to himself, as he stares into the flames. “What a thing. If you believe you’ve got a conscience, it’ll pester you to death. But, if you don’t believe you’ve got one, what can it do to you?”

Here, in the first warm days of spring, that line comes back to me.

I live in Cheyenne, Wyoming. If you draw a circle 200 miles in radius around the town, you’ll find a ready supply of just about everything that feeds my soul:

Some of the most famous trout water in America and a dozen other streams that are almost as good and practically unknown.

The sagebrush grasslands of the big sky country, last refuge of something like three-quarters of all the pronghorn left on planet Earth, home to mule deer and desert elk, sage grouse and golden eagles, bobcats and swift foxes.

The high country— lodgepole and aspen up into the spruce and fir, and, finally, the tundra where the willows cling to lichen-spangled boulders around the high lakes and the brook trout fight each other to take a fly. Elk, moose, bighorn sheep.

The marshes where mallards and geese congregate in the fall and the prairies to the east, where the sharptails and pheasants wait to match wits with my Brittanies.

These are the places and things that have sustained me, lo these fifty years and more.

Draw a twenty-mile circle around Cheyenne and you will find none of them.

For nearly all my adult life, the days I’ve treasured always begin with a drive of forty, eighty, sometimes as much as 250 miles, one way. And they generally end on a sketchy Forest Service road covered with busted rock and blocked by the occasional fallen tree, a dirt track rim-deep in mud, a section road covered by two feet of wind-driven snow, or a tractor trace along the edge of a field of CRP where the badger holes are mostly camouflaged by little bluestem and switchgrass and the snowdrifts are never disturbed by the county plows.

For all those reasons, my main outdoor transport has long been a four-wheel-drive pickup. Real four-wheel, not the all-wheel drive that sells low-slung compact SUVs to the suburban set.  A lot of the time, I need high clearance to get over loose rock or deep ruts, and, now and then, I need serious low-range four-wheel drive. I don’t need it very often, but when I do, I really, really need it. Often with chains on all four wheels. And a shovel. I may be eighty miles from the nearest tow truck; thirty or forty nasty, suspension-pounding miles from the nearest house or pavement; twenty miles (in an unknown direction) from the nearest guy with a pick-up who might consent to help me. Out of cell range. In circumstances like those, grandma gear in all four comes to the rescue.

The obvious disadvantage of this transportation is the gas it consumes. I wince when I fill the tank on my way out of town . . . and fill it again when I get back. It’s a bite in the billfold, but for many years, I’ve comforted myself with two justifications for the expense: first, that these trips stock the family freezer with our annual supply of red meat and poultry, the domestic versions of which don’t come cheap, and second, that I’d probably spend just as much or more if I took up golf or started spending Saturday nights at the sportsbar. This is probably nothing more than transparent rationalization on my part, but it has helped soothe my misgivings about the cost.

Harder to soothe are my misgivings about what I leave behind as I drive down the road. The carbon dioxide.

I began to pay close attention to the threat of climate change quite a while back, and, as the years have passed, my concern has deepened steadily. In the 1990s, my region of the country went through a drought that lasted, almost without relief, for nearly a decade, and the federal drought monitors in the last few months suggest that we may be on the front end of another one just like it. Hardly a summer goes by when there isn’t a week or two of smoke hanging over town, the sun a pale white orb in a noonday sky whose color has faded from blue to dirty tan as another forest goes up in flames. Researchers are finding that mule deer in my part of the world regularly suffer from poor nutrition on their summer range— it’s hard to grow rich browse when there’s no rain. By the middle of July, some of my favorite trout streams have dwindled to pathetic trickles, too small and too warm to fish. Last October, I loaded my decoys and headed to my favorite duck marsh, only to find an expanse of cracked mud when I arrived. My favorite pheasant and sharptail haunts were strangely short of birds last fall, probably because of a series of severe thunderstorms that swept the area with cold rain and hail just as the nests hatched.

Climate change has touched me where I live, literally and metaphorically. It’s eating away at the wildlife and wild places that keep me sane and grounded in a world that otherwise seems to make little sense. It makes me so angry I can’t breathe, and then the anger turns to sadness, the sadness to regret, the regret to guilt. Because I’ve played a part in what is happening. I still play a part. . . .

We’ve tried to minimize our impact, my wife and I. We live on a postage stamp lot in an aging suburb because we recognize that our impact would be far greater if we had settled on a ten-acre lot at the edge of a national forest in the middle of crucial big game winter range. We let the bluegrass lawn die when we moved in, and we xeriscaped to save a little more water for the trout. We’ve insulated, replaced windows, invested in a high-efficiency furnace and high-efficiency appliances as the old ones have worn out. For much of my office career, I commuted to work on my bike for nine or ten months out of the year. Our over-the-road vehicle is a Prius we couldn’t afford, and when Kathy retired a few years back, she decided to spend her retirement check on eighteen solar panels instead of replacing our dilapidated fifty-year-old kitchen.   I’ve completely surrendered the notion of fishing with friends in Alaska or Baja or the far-flung waters of Argentina, and I haven’t flown anywhere in almost a decade. We even think twice before we plan a road trip to see relatives.

Some of the choices we’ve made have been relatively easy and inexpensive, but the easy ones— like the LED light bulbs and weatherstripping around the doors— have long since been checked off the list of things we could do to help. The ones that remain have become ever more difficult and often more than our income could really support. Our growing sense of emergency has forced us to keep nibbling away at the list because our carbon footprint, while much less than the average American’s, is still huge. As I watch the things I treasure slowly, almost imperceptibly, slipping away, the question arises: What more can I do?

The price tags on those remaining decisions are pretty steep: stand-alone solar panels, battery storage for the electricity so we could maybe go completely off-grid, another round of even more efficient windows, electric furnace, electric on-demand water heater. We’ll chip away at those as we find the cash, neglecting the worn-out carpets and sagging kitchen cabinets.

And I’ll see if I can find a compromise between clearance and all-wheel drive on one hand and gas efficiency on the other. Fully electric transport is still not practical on the wild landscapes I frequent— the range of electric vehicles is too limited; charging stations are far too scarce, and charging times simply too long. If I win the lottery, I may look into a hybrid SUV, but, the price tags are breathtaking, and, in the long term, even that compromise won’t be sufficient. General Motors has committed to producing nothing but electric vehicles by the year 2035. If they reach that goal or come anywhere close, I wonder how many gas stations will be left, especially on the unpopulated landscapes of the High Plains and Intermountain West.

Some sort of carbon tax also looms on the horizon, enthusiastically supported by many climate activists. It seems like a fairly straightforward way of using market forces to wean people off gasoline engines, and people of means in urban areas might find the transition to new transportation relatively easy. For me, out here in the Big Empty, it may well mean the end of a way of life. I fully recognize that the continued deterioration in climate will have the same effect, and so I’m caught between a large rock and a very hard place.

As difficult as this is to admit, the ethical choice may well be for me to abandon that way of life. Sell the pickup truck before it becomes unmarketable, the backpacks and mountain tents, the spinning rods and fly rods, the duck and goose decoys, the canoes, the shotguns and centerfire rifles, the high-energy Brittanies. Settle down to some backyard birdwatching and a seasonal appreciation of the wildflowers that decorate the battered prairie behind the local big box store. Become a “townie” in every sense of the word.

I’m ready to make that sacrifice, even though I bleed at the thought. But here’s the thing: I’m NOT ready to sacrifice so much that I hold dear until America shows its willingness to do something similar.  Something more than turning down the thermostat.   I’ve taken many steps to reduce my carbon footprint. I’ve sacrificed conveniences and luxuries to pay for the things we’ve done to reduce our impact.  As I watch the bustle along the Front Range, I see folks who are trying.  They’re biking instead of driving; they’re investing in hybrids and solar panels.  But for every one of those committed people, there are thousands who just don’t seem to give a damn. Before I give up the things I love most, I have to see some evidence that most other people are willing to do what’s required.

This is all just another round of rationalization, of course. Here I am, across the fire from Bogart, reflecting on conscience, responsibility, and ethical dilemmas. I won’t abandon the dictates of conscience but neither am I inclined to take the clear path to some sort of ethical purity all by myself. We got into this mess together; we’ll have to get out the same way. And that will mean sacrifice. From everyone.

—————

IT’S NOT A BIRD WITH A BIG FAN CLUB.  NOT A POP STAR LIKE THE BALD EAGLE OR WHOOPING CRANE OR EVEN THE EASTERN bluebird.

Not that it lacks charisma. For more than a month every spring, the males of the species gather at traditional sites for a dance competition to decide who will sire the next generation. The strange, other-worldly trilling and cackling can be heard a mile away on a quiet morning, and the flamenco steps and pirouettes are so beguiling that they were imitated by Plains Indians in their ceremonials. The males have feathered tufts they raise like antlers, plumb-colored sacs of bare skin they inflate during their displays, yellow combs over their eyes— altogether a striking combination.

I suspect the problem with their public relations isn’t what they are but where they live. They have adapted to survive— and thrive— on one of the most challenging landscapes in North America, the sun-scalded, wind-whipped expanses of the southern Great Plains. It’s one of the Rodney Dangerfields of American ecosystems, a land that gets no respect, so it comes as no surprise that the specialized animals living there get little more.

The bird is known to science as the “lesser” prairie chicken to separate it from its cousin, the “greater” prairie chicken, which was one of the first game birds settlers from northern Europe encountered when they hit the beach in New England.

One subspecies of the greater prairie chicken lived in the grassy openings on and near the Atlantic coast. The earliest colonists there had many names for it, but students of natural history called it the heath hen. It had the poor luck to stand in the way of some of the earliest and most intense European settlement— by 1830, it had disappeared from the mainland, and by 1932, it was extinct.[i] [ii] A second subspecies, the Attwater’s prairie chicken was once abundant along the Gulf coast of Texas and southwestern Louisiana. It is now one of the most profoundly endangered species in North America with somewhere around 100 birds left in the wild.[iii]

The lesser prairie chicken was probably the last of America’s prairie grouse to be introduced to the scientific community, simply because it lived in a place that did not yield easily to White exploration or settlement. In 1873, it was classified as a subspecies of the greater prairie chicken, but, by 1885, taxonomists had examined the bird and its behavior more carefully and decided it was its own species: Tympanuchus pallidicinctus, Greek for the “pale-belted drummer” in recognition of the air sacs it uses to call during spring courtship and the fact that it is generally lighter in color than greater prairie chickens.

No one will ever know how many lesser prairie chickens there were before the first Europeans arrived. One authority has estimated that there may have been as many as two million in Texas alone before the turn of the last century.[iv] The recollections of men who hunted the High Plains in those days left a more personal impression of the abundance of the species. Walter Colvin, an amateur ornithologist and avid bird hunter, made several trips from his home in northeastern Kansas to the far southwestern corner of the state in pursuit of what was then a little-known species.

“It was a cold October day in 1906,” he remembered, when his party pulled into a farm in southwestern Kansas, having heard that “there were a ‘few’ chickens in a cane and kaffir corn field a quarter of a mile east. . . . Such a sight I have never seen before nor since,” he wrote, years later.  “Chickens were flushing everywhere, and droves of fifty to a hundred would take off down the corn rows, sounding like a moving avalanche as they touched the blades of corn. . . . Mr. Ward and I estimated that there were from three thousand five hundred to four thousand chickens in this one field, a sight never to be forgotten.” A nearby farmer never allowed shooting on his place and planted a field especially for game birds. “In the fall 1904,” Colvin reported, “my brother estimated that he saw in a single day fifteen to twenty thousand chickens around this one grain field.”

Colvin and his friends came back for years to relive that experience, but as he packed to head home after a hunt in 1913, Colvin thought back to his first visits with regret. “I realized with a shudder that we were nearing the sunset life of the king of upland game birds. The decrease in their numbers is not due so much to the gunners, as gunners are few per capita in those parts, but is due largely to the cutting up of this vast wilderness into small farms.”

Colvin mulled that over as he and his hunting partner drove east into the night at the end of their hunt that fall. In an article he wrote the following winter, he remembered the conversation:

“’There will be plenty of chickens here ten years from now,’ Ralph said after awhile.

“’You’ll be lucky to find a few chickens to shoot five years from now,’ I replied, and that is the truth.”[v]

In the decades that followed Colvin’s last visit, populations of lesser chickens ebbed and flowed with the fickle patterns of rain on southern plains, fading during drought, recovering with moisture, but never achieving the peaks they’d known before the plow. During the Dust Bowl, a manmade ecological catastrophe of Biblical proportions, lessers almost disappeared in Kansas, southeastern Colorado, and eastern New Mexico. They recovered slightly in the wetter years of the 1940s, then collapsed again in the droughts of the 1950s.[vi] Weather was the obvious driving force behind the wild fluctuation in numbers, but the long-term downward trend was driven by that all-too-familiar cause: the steady loss of habitat.

By 1980, some experts in the field estimated that the lesser prairie chicken had disappeared from ninety-two percent of its pristine range.[vii] Estimated population was said to have declined even more— by ninety-seven percent[viii]— an indication that the habitat the chickens still occupied was, for one reason or another, less than ideal.

The collapse was duly noted by wildlife professionals. In 1973, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s “Threatened Wildlife of the United States” had this to say about the lesser prairie chicken: “much reduced or extirpated from large portions of its former range. . . . Decreasing and vulnerable.”[ix] In spite of that gloomy assessment, the lesser chicken was not included in the list of “threatened” or “endangered” species established under provisions of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. State wildlife agencies managed to set aside a few tracts of native grassland on the bird’s behalf, but the general trend of neglect— and loss— continued.

In 1995, the Biodiversity Legal Foundation filed a petition under the authority of the federal Endangered Species Act, demanding that the Fish and Wildlife Service list the lesser prairie chicken as “threatened.” The Service concluded that the listing was ”warranted but precluded by other higher priority listing actions.”[x]

Legal confrontations between various environmental groups and the Fish and Wildlife Service continued until 2014, when the Service announced that the lesser chicken would be given “threatened species status.”   That ruling led to another court battle between the Service and several counties in New Mexico that claimed the listing was “unlawful.” The federal district court in west Texas sided with the counties, and the lesser chicken was summarily “delisted” in 2015.[xi]

Even more legal action ensued— finally, in the fall of 2019, the Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to revisit the listing decision and announce its finding by May 26, 2021.[xii]

While the status of the lesser chicken is endlessly debated in court and federal offices, the bird continues to lose habitat. According to researchers with the Defenders of Wildlife, 800,000 acres of chicken habitat have been plowed under for cropland in the five years since the species was delisted. Another 19,000 acres have been invaded by oil and gas or wind energy development.[xiii]

The lesser chicken isn’t alone alone in feeling the effect of disappearing grasslands on the southern plains. The scaled quail is a bird of the Chihuahuan desert. The northern edge of its habitat overlaps most of the lesser chicken’s range. Scaled quail are known to boom and bust with changes in rainfall, but in the last sixty years, the busts have outstripped the booms— according to the national Breeding Bird Survey, scaled quail numbers in the U.S. have dropped fifty percent since 1966.[xiv]

The Harris’s sparrow winters on the high prairie of the southern plains. I first met representatives of the species in the mid-1970s as I hunted pheasants in the sandhills south of the Arkansas River in southern Kansas. They were the most common songbird in the native plum thickets in those days, a dash of bright call notes and curiosity that relieved the tedium of a gray January afternoon. Now, forty years later, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists the species as a “bird of conservation concern.” Estimates of their population have dropped by more than sixty percent since 1970.[xv]

The grasshopper sparrow is another resident of the southern prairie that has come on hard times in the last fifty years. Like the Harris’s sparrow, it’s considered a “bird of conservation concern” with population declines of nearly seventy percent since 1970.[xvi]

The chestnut-collared longspur winters on the southern plains and has suffered even greater losses. The Canadians have listed it as “threatened;” the International Union for the Conservation of Nature considers it “near threatened” across its range, and, in the U.S., it’s classified as another “bird of conservation concern.” Its numbers have dropped eighty-five percent since 1970.[xvii]

IN THE 1880S, WE CAME IN OUR TENS OF THOUSANDS TO THE GREAT PLAINS, ARMED WITH ALL THE MIRACLES of modern technology— John Deere’s steel plow, Dan Halladay’s self-regulating windmill, Joseph Glidden’s barbed wire— and driven by the boundless hubris of American expansionism. As it happened, we arrived at the beginning of a miraculous series of wet years, a period that allowed the railroad’s real estate boosters to sell the pernicious myth that rain followed the plow on the grasslands. What followed was poignantly described by an observer of farming on the plains in 1902:

“From the 98^th meridian west to the Rocky Mountains there is a stretch of country whose history is filled with more tragedy . . . than perhaps any other equal expanse of territory within the confines of the Western Hemisphere. . . . As the territory bordering upon it became more thickly settled and the pressure for land became ever fiercer, the line of settlements encroached more and more upon this stretch of apparently worthless soil. This line of social advance rose and fell with rain and drouth, like a mighty tide beating against the tremendous wall of the Rockies. And every such wave left behind it a mass of human wreckage in the shape of broken fortunes, deserted farms and ruined homes.”[xviii]

The wave advanced in the 1880s and broke in the drought of the 1890s. It advanced again during the wet years in the early decades of the twentieth century and broke with a crash heard around the world in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. It advanced during the war years and broke in the drought of 1946-1956. It advanced in the 1970s and broke again in the drought of the early 1980s. And again in the great drought of the millennium from 1998-2014. Now, in the spring of 2021, the entire state of New Mexico and parts of west Texas are on the ragged edge of yet another drought disaster.[xix]

The great antidote to drought on the plains was Frank Zybach’s center-pivot irrigation system, a pipe on wheels tethered to a well that pumped groundwater out onto the field. The southern and central plains sat on a natural underground reservoir that held as much water as Lake Erie.  At last, it seemed, farmers could make their own rain.

At least as long as the aquifer lasted. After two generations of intense pumping, shallower areas of the Ogallala Aquifer in the Texas panhandle are on the verge of being depleted; surface flows in major rivers like the Arkansas and Platte have dwindled, and many smaller springs and ephemeral creeks have dried up. Some operators are already planning for a time when there is no more groundwater for irrigation.

The deepening hot, dry conditions on the plains have increased the risk of catastrophic wildfire. Between 2006 and 2018, major fires burned 4.4 million acres on the southern prairie. In March of 2016, a single fire in southwestern Kansas consumed 663,000 acres in just two days.[xx]

And what does the future hold? Average annual temperatures in the southern Great Plains are expected to increase by 3.6 to 5.1 degrees Fahrenheit by the middle of this century and 4.4 to 8.4 degrees by 2200. Researchers expect thirty to sixty more days over 100 degrees each year by that time. They predict drier summers with fewer, heavier storms.[xxi] In short, the weather will be getting worse for agriculture in the region, not better.

The residents of the southern plains seem to face a common fate, whether they’re lesser prairie chickens . . . or farmers. As yet, relatively few outsiders have shown much concern. When the nation considers the effects of climate change, fires in California and hurricanes on the Gulf coast claim the spotlight, and, when the conversation turns to rare wildlife, attention falls on species with more star power like the gray wolf or the California condor. The great American grasslands still get little respect.

Ecologists who pay attention to such things are cautiously optimistic that the Fish and Wildlife Service will relist the lesser prairie chicken. Even if that happens, I doubt that it will result in a sudden outpouring of support for the bird, the prairie, or the people who live there. I hope that a listing will, at the very least, channel some desperately needed funding into the region.

Because it’s abundantly clear that the way we’ve used the southern grasslands over the last 150 years is unsustainable. It’s been bad for prairie chickens and not much better for people. Before another wave of disaster crashes down on the plains, before another Dust Bowl ravages its people and its wildlife, we need to find a way to live with this land, not on it. Helping the lesser chicken would be a good start.

————-

[i] Gross, Alfred O., 1928. The Heath Hen. Boston Society of Natural History, 6(4).

[ii] Johnson, Jeff, et al, 2011. Greater Prairie-Chicken in Birds of the World, Cornell Lab of Ornithology. https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/grpchi/cur/introduction. Accessed April 18, 2021.

[iii] Anon., May 15, 2020. Good News: We Are Saving a Local Bird from Extinction. Houston Zoo Blog. https://www.houstonzoo.org/blog/good-news-we-are-saving-a-local-bird-from-extinction/. Accessed April 18, 2021.

[iv] Crawford, John A., et al,, 1980. Status, problems, and research needs of the lesser prairie chicken. Proceedings of the Prairie Grouse Symposium, September 17-18, 1980. Oklahoma State University, OK. https://shareok.org/handle/11244/299331. Accessed April 19, 2021.

[v] Colvin, Walter S., 1914. The lesser prairie hen. Outing 63: 608-614. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015070321065&view=1up&seq=8. Accessed April 22, 2021.

[vi] Crawford, 1980, op cit.

[vii] Taylor, Maple A. and Fred S. Guthery, 1980. Status, Ecology, and Management of the Lesser Prairie Chicken. USDA Forest Service General Technical Report RM-77.

[viii] Crawford, 1980, op cit. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015070321065&view=1up&seq=632. Accessed April 19, 2021.[ix] Office of Endangered Species and International Activities, 1973. Threatened wildlife of the United States. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. https://ia802708.us.archive.org/22/items/threatenedwildli00unit/threatenedwildli00unit.pdf. Accessed April 20, 2021.

[x] U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2014. Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants: Determination of Threatened Status for the Lesser Prairie-Chicken. Federal Register 79(69): 19974-19975.

[xi] Junell, Robert, 2015. Order granting plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment & order granting in part and denying in part defendants’ motion for summary judgment. United States District Court, Western District of Texas, Midland-Odessa Division, September 1, 2015.   https://www.heartland.org/_template-assets/documents/publications/District%20court%20decision%20delisting%20lpc.pdf. Accessed April 20, 2021.

[xii] Contreras, Rudolph, 2019. Stipulated settlement agreement. United States District Court for the District of Columbia, September 12, 2019. https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/birds/lesser_prairie_chicken/pdfs/Lesser-Prairie-Chicken-Stipulated-Settlement-Agreement.pdf. Accessed April 20, 2021.

[xiii] Evans, Michael, 2021. Lesser prairie-chicken habitat changes since court delisting: Satellite and government data show extensive habitat loss. Defenders of Wildlife, Washington, D.C. https://defenders-cci.org/publication/lpc_habitat_loss/. Accessed April 20, 2021.

[xiv] Anon, nd. North American Breeding Bird Survey. Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Laurel, MD. https://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/. Accessed April 21, 2021.

[xv] Anon, nd. Species conservation profiles: Harris’s Sparrow. North American Bird Conservation Initiative, Washington, D.C. https://partnersinflight.org/species/harriss-sparrow/. Accessed April 21, 2021.

[xvi] Anon, nd. Species conservation profiles: Grasshopper Sparrow. North American Bird Conservation Initiative, Washington, D.C. https://partnersinflight.org/species/grasshopper-sparrow/. Accessed April 21, 2021.[xvii] Anon, nd. Species conservation profiles: Chestnut-collared longspur.. North American Bird Conservation Initiative, Washington, D.C. https://partnersinflight.org/species/chestnut-collared-longspur/. Accessed April 21, 2021.

[xviii] Simons, A.M., 1902. The American Farmer. Charles H. Kerr & Company, Chicago, IL. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735066247606/viewer#page/4/mode/2up. Accessed April 22, 2021.

[xix] Anon, 2021. Drought update for the southern plains. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Washington, D.C.   https://www.drought.gov/drought-status-updates/drought-update-southern-plains-dews-0. Accessed April 22, 2021.

[xx] Lindley, Todd T., et Al., 2019. Megafires on the southern Great Plains. Journal of Operational Meteorology 7(12: 164-179. https://objects-us-east-1.dream.io/nwafiles/jom/articles/2019/2019-JOM12/2019-JOM12.pdf. Accessed April 22, 2021.

[xxi] Bartush, Bill, et al, 2018. Southern Great Plains. In Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washing, D.C. https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/chapter/23/. Accessed April 22, 2021.

I CAN’T REMEMBER EXACTLY WHEN I MADE MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH A GARDEN HOE— IT’S TOO LONG AGO— BUT I  think it was about the time I learned to read. My mother introduced us. I clearly remember the tongue-lashing she gave me when, accidentally on purpose, I chopped down a row of okra in her vegetable garden in my day-to-day combat with the weeds. When she discovered the atrocity and called me to account, I used the classic kid defense: blank-faced ignorance. I didn’t know what it was, I protested. But I really did. I never was a big fan of okra. . . .

We lived on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River just downstream from the mouth of the Illinois, and I got to know the dirt in mom’s garden in the intimate way one learns about soil at the end of a hoe. It was heavy, yellow clay left over from the days, not all that far distant, when the ridge top had been covered in red and white oak, shagbark hickory, and black cherry.

The man who cleared that ground had been none too careful with it, so the layer of thin brown topsoil that had once lain under the trees had washed down the hill, down the creek, and, by the time I started hoeing, had probably made it all the way to the Louisiana delta. What was left was sticky when wet and concrete-hard when dry, even after mom had convinced dad to mix in some old cow manure from the abandoned dairy barn down the road.

It was the contrast that made such a powerful impression on me.

We were visiting my grandmother in Story County, Iowa. She lived in a small frame bungalow with a sagging back porch and a cellar that smelled of potatoes. I was in the front yard, killing time until the adults loaded us into the station wagon for the drive out to Uncle Cliff’s for the annual Fourth of July gathering, hands in my pockets, no time to find any mischief, just standing on the bluegrass lawn, scuffing the ground with the toe of my Chuck Taylor All-Stars.

The dirt made dark gray puffs of dust as I stirred it, which was something unusual in my experience. I knelt down and took a pinch of the soil. It came away in fine crumbles, as black and feathery as the ash of burned paper in the palm of my hand. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I suspect it was the exactly the same moment of discovery that convinced my Norwegian ancestors to end their long trek from the home country only a few miles from where I knelt, hitching up the breaking plow to three yoke of oxen and turning the tallgrass upside down in pursuit of that rich, black earth— the truest, most abiding wealth of the New World.

It’s no accident that central Iowa’s topsoils look like ash. They contain a remarkable amount of carbon. Their appearance and their immense productivity are both due to the accumulation of organic matter over the 12,000 years since the last glacier began its retreat[i] and, especially, over the last 8,000 years,[ii] as the plants of the tallgrass prairie sent their roots and rhizomes as far as sixteen feet below the surface in search of water and nutrients.[iii]

As much as two-thirds of the plant mass in a tallgrass prairie is underground,[iv] largely out of reach of drought, frost, hail, fire, or any of the other stresses the flatlands can inflict on growing things. Much of the organic matter in these roots stays in the ground after the plant dies. It’s carbon, the same black carbon found in ash. It gives the soil its color and, up near the surface, its immense fertility. Farther down, out of reach of the oxygen-rich atmosphere, shallow roots, bacteria, and other decomposers, this carbon is more or less permanently trapped. Which could be a powerful tool in our effort to trap greenhouse gases.

We’ve finally recognized that pumping carbon into the atmosphere, mainly in the form of carbon dioxide, is warming the entire planet and threatens our future. In response to that problem, environmentalists and politicians have been looking for ways to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, while engineers have been working on technological methods for removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Ecologists have pointed out that there is a less mechanical way of doing that. It’s called photosynthesis. It’s part of the process that trapped all that energy in fossil fuels like oil and coal several hundred million years ago. This basic biochemical fact has led some scientists to recommend a straightforward approach to removing carbon from the atmosphere: plant trees. A lot of trees.

Last year, a group of researchers estimated that the earth has 3.5 million square miles that could support forest but currently have none. They figure that planting trees on that area could eventually trap 226 billion tons of carbon.[v] This led to public campaigns to plant a billion trees, 8 billion trees, even a trillion trees to help fight climate change.

Some of the assumptions of the study itself have been called into question, and there are experts who argue that helping indigenous peoples protect the tropical forests that exist is a better idea than planting a bunch of seedlings. No one’s against the idea of using forests to help trap carbon, but there’s an awkward fact the tree-planting campaigns generally ignore: Trees won’t grow everywhere. And, since large parts of the world’s land mass continue to dry out with the warming climate, the area that won’t grow trees is likely to expand, not shrink.

After considering this snag in an otherwise laudable strategy, a different group of scientists, this bunch at U.C. Davis, took a look at the predicted shifts in climate across the state of California and estimated the probable loss in forest acreage that would result. They expected that frequent wildfires and persistent drought would reduce the amount of carbon trapped by the vegetation, but grasslands, whose carbon is stored mainly underground and whose plants are better at handling drought, managed to store much more carbon than forests. In the most extreme climate change scenarios they examined, the difference amounted to more than 400 million tons of carbon. They concluded that “the inherent resilience of grassland vegetation to drought and wildfire translates to a more reliable C sink than forest ecosystems in response to 21^st century climate changes.”[vi] At least, in California.

This research has generated plenty of debate, based, as it is, on modeling and several assumptions that are open to question. What isn’t open to question is the fact that some landscapes grow grass better than they grow trees. And there is no doubt that grasslands remove substantial amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.

How much? Researchers measured the carbon in the soil under a scrap of original tallgrass prairie in southern Wisconsin and found almost 160 tons of carbon to the acre. The soil under a nearby piece of ground that had been planted to tallgrass species sixty-five years before the study held about half as much, but still an impressive amount, all of it out of reach of fire or drought.[vii]

Forests in the same region store about eight-five tons of carbon, and three-fourths of that is locked up in wood and other vegetation above ground, where it can be quickly moved back into the atmosphere by fire, harvest for lumber, and, in the understory, by grazing or browsing.[viii]

Not all grasslands store carbon as efficiently as the Midwest’s tallgrass prairie. As precipitation wanes out on the high plains, productivity in native grasslands drops, along with the amount of carbon trapped in the soil. But it’s clear that, whatever the grasses and broad-leafed plants that make up native prairie, they store massive amounts of carbon in growing conditions no tree could survive.

Plow that prairie, and it loses at least half of the carbon locked in the soil. Restore that prairie on ground that has been converted to cropland, and the amount of carbon in the soil increases steadily but slowly. It may take a century to get back to the amount of carbon that was originally trapped by the native plants, but get there we can.

Any savvy bird hunter will recognize the practical implications in all this soil science. If we care about prairie grouse and the declining hosts of nongame prairie birds, we’re wise to avoid plowing the native grasslands we have left. That doesn’t mean they’re lost to agriculture— they can produce a lot of animal protein when judiciously grazed and still keep the carbon in the ground instead of in the air.

And returning cropland to permanent prairie cover through programs like the Conservation Reserve and CREP is a good idea. These restorations have all the short-term benefits we’ve come to appreciate— better air and water quality, reduced soil erosion, dramatically improved wildlife habitat for a host of birds and mammals, and a guaranteed revenue stream for farmers who face ever-growing uncertainty in weather and international markets.

They also help moderate climate change.

In the modern era of conservation, it’s not often that a “win-win-win” approach to a set of problems turns up. I think this is one.

———–

[i] Prior, Jean C., 2017. Des Moines Lobe. Iowa Geological Survey. https://www.iihr.uiowa.edu/igs/des-moines-lobe/. Accessed August 10, 2020.

[ii] Walker, P.H. and Grace S. Bush, 1963. Observations on bog and pollen stratigraphy of the Des Moines Glacial Lobe, Iowa. Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science, 70 (1): 253-260. https://scholarworks.uni.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2299&context=pias. Accessed August 10, 2020.

[iii] Weaver, J.E., 1954. North American Prairie. Johnsen Publishing Company, Lincoln, NE. p.246.

[iv] Kucharik, C.J., Nathan J. Fayram, and Kimberly Nicholas, 2006. A paired study of prairie carbon stocks, fluxes, and phenology: comparing the world’s oldest prairie restoration with an adjacent remnant. Global Change Biology 12: 122-139. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2005.01053.x.

[v] Basin, Jean-Francois, et al., 2019. The global tree restoration potential. Science 365, Issue 365: 76-79. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76/tab-pdf. Accessed August 10, 2020.

[vi] Dass, Pawolok, Benjamin Z. Houlton, Yingping Wang, and David Warlind, 2018. Environmental Research Latters 13 (2018): 074027.

[vii] Kucharik, C.J., Nathan J. Fayram, and Kimberly Nicholas, 2006. A paired study of prairie carbon stocks, fluxes, and phenology: comparing the world’s oldest prairie restoration with an adjacent remnant. Global Change Biology 12: 122-139. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2005.01053.x.

[viii] Birdsey, Richard A., 1992. Carbon storage and accumulation in United States forest ecosystems. United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service General Technical Report WO-59. P.4. https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/gtr/gtr_wo059.pdf. Accessed August 13, 2020.

 

HE MAY HAVE BEEN ROOSTING IN THE SPARSE COTTONWOODS ALONG THE CREEK AS FREYA THE BRITTANY AND I WALKED BY at the edge of town, an hour after sunrise, but I’d have expected him to fly as we approached, and a great horned owl on the wing is impossible to miss. Chances are he came through on the north breeze during the night, hunting as he went, then moved on.

Judging by the extreme wear on the breast feather, I figured its loss was part of the molt, not the result of an accident, and, considering the timing of the molt and relatively pale color of the feather, I took its previous owner to be a teenager, on his own for the first time. The gravy train of prey from mom and dad was over, I thought. He’s looking for his own groceries now.

That transition is tough on most young raptors. While they’re hard-wired for the business of hunting, there is an awkward time in their youth when instinct has to be translated into the practical, day-to-day— or in this youngster’s case, night-to-night— business of finding prey and reducing it to possession.

Possibly because of their imposing size and nocturnal habit, young great horned owls fare somewhat better than smaller birds of prey. One twenty-year study found that two-thirds of nestlings survived their first year. Having made it through that crucial primary education, three-fourths survived to celebrate their second birthdays. After that, an adult great horned owl may live more than twenty years. One owl banded as an adult lived another twenty-nine years wearing the bracelet.

Great horned owls aren’t picky about their diet. They’ll eat worms, grasshoppers, and other small invertebrates when the opportunity arises, but mostly, they hunt mammals— voles and mice, generally, but cottontails, jackrabbits, ground squirrels, prairie dogs, wood rats, muskrats, opossums, ground hogs, marmots, raccoons, skunks, porcupines, and, in town, the occasional house cat.

On the avian side of the menu, great horned owls commonly take ducks, coots and rails, pigeons, starlings, other species of owls, and, occasionally, much larger prey. One study found the remains of an adult male osprey in an owl nest; another reported a great-horned owl taking an adult great blue heron. Great horned owls steal immature birds out of the nests of crows and ravens, goshawks, and red shouldered and broad-winged hawks. One study found that great horned owls were the leading cause of death among the nestling red-tailed hawks it followed; another found that barn owls comprised more than ten percent of the diet of great horned owls in eastern Washington.

Fearsome predators. But, as ferocious as they may be, they can’t survive without something to hunt, which may explain why the national survey of bird populations shows the number of great horned owls declining slowly but steadily since the mid-1960s.  Great horned owls occupy a niche near the top of a complex food web stretching across the continent and beyond.  Being an apex predator is always precarious, whether the hunter is a wolf, a polar bear, or an owl— a swaying perch at the top of an edifice whose foundation is a constantly shifting interaction of weather, plants, plant eaters, and the thoughtless hammer blows inflicted by 330 million self-absorbed humans.  The trajectory of the hunter’s population says a lot about the condition of the system that supports it.

My best wishes go with this youngster. May he find a steady supply of food, both furred and feathered, enough to keep him in good condition for many years to come, enough to feed a mate and a long line of offspring. The feather he left is some slight reassurance, a sign that, as much damage as we’ve done to the land, it still gives shelter and sustenance to things wild and free.

—————–

FOR MILLENNIA, THE METHYE PORTAGE CROSSED THE HEIGHT OF LAND THAT SEPARATES THE WATERS OF HUDSON’S BAY FROM THE vast, impossibly remote wilderness of the Mackenzie River drainage. The path was a thoroughfare for native travelers and, for a century, the fur trade. Even today, it’s almost 400 miles north of any settlement an outlander would know; in 1859, it was 2,100 miles of jack pine, mosquitoes, and black flies from the jumping-off point on the northwest shore of Lake Superior.

Not the time or place one would expect a bookish Irishman and an American naturalist to strike up an acquaintance.

Robert Kennicott arrived on the north end of the Methye Portage on July 24 that year, after a sixty-seven-day trip from Fort William, the Hudson’s Bay Company post on the site of what is now Thunder Bay, Ontario. Waiting for Kennicott’s party was Bernard Rogan Ross, chief trader at the company’s Fort Simpson Post, a mere 600 miles from Methye.

This was no chance encounter. Kennicott had come from his home in northern Illinois as an official representative of the United States Smithsonian Institution. Two years earlier, the leader of the Smithsonian had contacted Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, to ask for help in obtaining specimens of Arctic mammals and birds.

Simpson had replied most generously: “ The Hudson’s Bay Company are ever ready to render assistance towards the promotion of scientific research in their territory.” He sent copies of the Smithsonian letter to the HBC officers along the Mackenzie River, including Ross, and, in early 1859, sent another letter to company representatives in the northern territories, notifying them that Kennicott would be traveling their direction that summer.

Ross had taken the 1857 call for cooperation with the Smithsonian seriously. As he shook young Kennicott’s hand that day at Methye, he handed the year’s shipment of northern furs over to HBC voyageurs for the return to civilization. Included in those packs were several cases of study skins addressed to the Smithsonian.

Loading Kennicott and the freight for the winter into nine boats, Ross and his men headed back north, down the Clearwater to Lake Athabasca, over a divide to Great Slave Lake, west down the 300 mile-length of the lake to the headwaters of the mighty Mackenzie River, then downstream to the mouth of the Liard River and Fort Simpson. Another fourteen days into the northern wilderness.

This trek was all in a year’s work for the men of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The men who paddled and pulled the freight canoes back and forth across the continent were unimaginably tough, running— running!— over the portages with 180-pound loads, shooting rapids; meeting the wet, the cold, the voracious insects with a song. Most of them were born to the life and knew no other. They had little tolerance for weaklings or shirkers.

The managers were nearly as stout. These were men who would drive a dog sled a hundred miles through temperatures dropping past forty below zero to deliver the mail and chat, men who shrugged off the awful solitude of the Far North, a silence that was known to drive some visitors from civilization to the edge of madness.

When he arrived at Fort Simpson, Kennicott had already spent nearly three months in the rough company of this, one of the world’s most demanding fraternities. The Hudson’s Bay administrators had granted him the nominal position and per diem of a clerk, which gave him a certain official status, but there’s no doubt that he was watched for signs of weakness, for homesickness or impatience with the many discomforts of the trip. It was the hardest kind of initiation, an intense, extended test of strength and will that had broken many men.

By the time winter set in, it was clear that Kennicott had passed the test. In early January of 1860, he drove his own dog team— an arcane skill many white men never mastered— from Fort Simpson to Fort Liard, 260 miles, following the dog team on snowshoes and returning in early March. He learned to shoot a bow and did his best to learn the native languages, a process he found challenging because of the “absence of good interpreters.”

He traveled ceaselessly, by sled and canoe, in search of specimens of mammals and birds, making friends and converts to scientific collecting wherever he went. The winter of 1860-61 found him hunting and trapping at the HBC’s outpost on the upper Yukon River, 200 miles north and west of Fort Simpson. The following May, he joined other members of the post in a spring goose hunt, the meat to be used by the group, the skins to be sent back to the Smithsonian.

“The modus operandi of the hunters is to make a low cabin, or blind of willows, or logs,” he wrote in his journal. “In this the hunter stands, and when he sees a band of geese, imitates their call, when they will, generally, if not too high, and he calls well, turn and come to him. As fast as any geese are killed, they are ‘planted’ near the stand, and when there are a number of these decoys, and a good ‘caller,’ the geese will actually come within twenty feet of the stand.”

During a hunt on Great Slave Lake, someone in Kennicott’s party killed a white goose, barely bigger than a mallard, that lacked the “grinning patch” characteristic of the lesser snow goose. The base of the bill was covered with a rash of bumps not seen in snow geese. Kennicott prepared the skin and shipped it south where it immediately caught the attention of Smithsonian officials and ornithologist John Cassin.

On March 26, 1861, while Kennicott was still in the North, ornithologist John Cassin officially reported the find to science: “the smallest goose known to inhabit North America. Bill strongly warted or carunculated in front and on its sides near and at its base. Entire plumage white.”

Cassin recognized that this study skin was confirmation of a report that had been made nearly a century before by Samuel Hearne, another Hudson’s Bay Company man who had made two extensive expeditions into the Coppermine River region of northcentral Canada in the 1780s. Hearne called it the “horned wavy,” “wavy” being a corruption of the native word for “goose.”

With the physical evidence in hand, the scientific community could finally accept Hearne’s report as well as correspondence from Bernard Rogan Ross, who had insisted that this miniature snow goose was its own species. Ross had very probably adopted this opinion because the Dene tribes around Great Slave Lake considered the bird to be different from other geese.

All that was left was to choose a sanctioned name.

If there were justice in the world of taxonomy, the bird would have been called Hearne’s goose. Hearne had encountered the species as early as 1769 and furnished a detailed description in 1795 in his Journey to the Northern Ocean. However, he hadn’t brought back a specimen, the crucial piece of evidence the taxonomists of the time required.

Sixty years later, Kennicott was the man who prepared the skin so that it would survive the trip back to civilization. He was the Smithsonian’s man in the North, a collector of unparalleled energy and talent. The force of his example inspired several of the Hudson’s Bay Company men to begin collecting for the Smithsonian and other scientific institutions. In 1859, the Smithsonian received 208 scientific specimens from the Mackenzie district, all of them collected by Kennicott himself. In 1860, that number jumped to 1,872, of which 572 were Kennicott’s. In 1862, Kennicott was called back to the United States because of his father’s illness. He sent no specimens that year, but the Mackenzie men sent 2,400.

At least twenty-two employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company began collecting for the Smithsonian during Kennicott’s sojourn in the North. James Lockhart, chief trader at the Yukon post and one of Kennicott’s closest friends, contributed more than 1,000 specimens. Roderick McFarlane, an HBC trader on the Anderson River as well as at Fort Simpson, began an impressive collecting career when he met Kennicott, contributing more than 5,700 specimens over the next decade.

All of which is to say that Kennicott deserves a prominent place in the history of North American scientific exploration, not only for the collections he made but for the collections he encouraged. Perhaps even a species with his name attached: Kennicott’s goose has a certain ring. . . .

Standing in the way of that christening was Bernard Ross, the highest authority the Hudson’s Bay Company had in the Northwest Territories. He was a man of ambition in a place where ambition was particularly hard to fulfill, a voracious reader, member of five scientific and philosophical societies, and an aspiring poet and journalist.

The 1857 letter from the Smithsonian asking for specimens, combined with Kennicott’s arrival, set a fire in Ross’s belly. Beginning with the 1859 shipment of specimens, he took credit for 2,259 specimens sent to the Smithsonian over the next decade. In 1861, he wrote to Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian: “I wish to make myself a name in the scientific world if possible, and I am sure you will do all in your power to gain it for me.”

The lion’s share of the specimens he claimed were actually collected by other men, a fact that rankled some of his subordinates, and it’s unlikely that he actually prepared more than a handful of the skins he sent. Still, he sent more than any of the rest of the company’s men along the Mackenzie, after McFarlane.

He also waived the freight charges for the shipments of specimens and for incoming shipments of collecting materials,, books, and the occasional bottle of whiskey, at least inside the confines of the Mackenzie district. As supportive as the Hudson’s Bay Company had been, this was not something that had been authorized, and it may be that his insistence on shipping under his name may have been an effort to justify the free transport and camouflage it. In 1865, the company discovered the liberties he had taken and fined and reprimanded him for the shipments.

Kennicott realized soon after his arrival at Fort Simpson how important Ross’s support was to the reconnaissance of the Mackenzie region. In 1860, he wrote to Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian: “I found Mr Ross very anxious to send all he could in his own name. . . Postmasters and clerks . . . were to hand over to him all the specimens. . . . As I of course wanted to see all the specimens sent possible— I thought this [a] better policy than to have them given to me.” Baird was quick to understand the situation, and when Cassin examined the Smithsonian’s study skin, Baird suggested that the new species be dubbed “Anser Rossii.” After subsequent decades of wrangling over taxonomic affiliations, the bird has been moved to a different genus and is now known to science as Chen rossii. Ross’s goose.

When Ross heard of the decision in November of 1861, he immediately wrote to Baird: “I am quite flattered at having the snow goose called after me,” he said. “It is about the pleasantest compliment that could be paid me.”

And so Bernard Ross gained the immortality he was so desperate to win. He stayed on with the Hudson’s Bay Company for another ten years, retiring in 1872 and dying quietly two years later in Winnipeg.

Kennicott returned to the north country in 1865 with the Western Union telegraph company’s expedition to run a line through Alaska and across the Bering Strait into Russia. He signed on as “Chief of Explorations,” with the understanding that he could appoint assistants and make extensive collections of the Alaskan flora and fauna.

The expedition was poorly provisioned and badly led by a commander whose only goal was the quickest possible installation of the telegraph line. There was almost no time for collecting; over the winter of 1865-66, the challenge was just trying to stay adequately fed. Kennicott became increasingly discouraged and, on the night of May 13, 1866, suffered an apparent heart attack while walking outside camp. He died alone on the banks of the Yukon River at the age of thirty-one.

It is somewhat ironic that this failed expedition led to the only recognition of Kennicott’s outstanding contributions to the field of ornithology. In March of 1866, one of his subordinates collected a small owl in the rain forest near Sitka. When the specimen was examined back in Chicago, it turned out to be a new species, the western or Kennicott’s screech owl, then classified as Scops Kennicottii. The task of describing the new bird for science fell to Daniel Elliot, curator of zoology at Chicago’s Field Museum. At the end of his technical description, Elliot added this note:

“In bestowing on this owl the name which I trust it is ever destined to bear, I simply express the desire which I am sure is felt by all ornithologists, to render honor to him who, combining the intrepidity of the explorer with the enthusiasm of the naturalist, twice penetrating the forbidding, cheerless districts of the far north, in order to extend the knowledge of his favorite science; and who perished in his early manhood, in the full tide of his usefulness, on the banks of the Yukon. Ornithology has met no greater loss, in these later days, than in the death of Robert Kennicott.”

Kennicott’s colleague William Dall spoke for many of Kennicott’s field companions when he wrote: “He joined to a noble and generous heart an enthusiastic love of nature; defying in the pursuit of knowledge the miasma of the tropics and the rigors of the Arctic winter; manfully enduring isolation, sickness and privation and dying in the field, a martyr to the conscientious discharge of his duty.”

The science of ornithology remembers Kennicott’s dedication and endurance with that single word—kennicottii— in the technical name of a bird that is as little remembered or appreciated as Kennicott himself, but it’s clear from the reaction following his death that his memory was cherished in the hearts of friends from the halls of the Smithsonian to the wilderness of the Yukon. In the end, that may be monument enough for any man.

—————

RAY FISCHER HAS BEEN A HUNTER EDUCATION INSTRUCTOR IN KANSAS SINCE 1994. HE’S ONE OF THE STATE’S most active volunteers and a member of the International Hunter Education Association’s Hall of Fame. Over his twenty-five years in hunter ed, he’s watched the change up close.

“In the ten to twelve classes we do in this area every year, our demographic for the last ten years has been average age of 20.2. We’re getting older students in our class. Eleven and twelve-year-olds— that’s what we would call our traditional student— we’re getting a few of those, but we’re also getting their mothers or their fathers or their grandfathers.”

It’s a trend that’s taken many observers by surprise.

Fifty years ago, several researchers found that between eighty and ninety percent of all hunters started hunting in their teens.[i] This finding led to a couple of conclusions at the time: first, that kids learned to hunt from their parents or other adult relatives and, second, that people who hadn’t started hunting by the time they were twenty probably never would.

Not long after this information was collected, wildlife managers discovered a disturbing trend: the number of Americans who hunted had begun to decline. For thirty years after World War II, the number of hunting licenses sold in the United States rose steadily, reaching a peak of 16.7 million in 1982, but in the decade that followed, it dropped by more than a million,[ii] even as the population of the nation as a whole rose by nine percent.

The reasons for the shift were clear enough. More and more people were moving into urban areas, where wild places were hard to come by and the use of any hunting weapon, frowned upon. Added to that was a change in the structure of the American family; in 1960, one child in ten lived in a one-parent family; by 1990, nearly a quarter of all kids were living with a single parent. Nine out of ten of those single parents were moms faced with the demands of running a household and holding down a job.[iii] They had neither the time, the expertise, nor, in most homes, the inclination to introduce their kids to hunting.

The decline in the number of hunters sent a chill down the spine of anyone who followed wildlife conservation in America. The sale of hunting licenses, along with revenue from excise taxes on hunting arms and ammunition, had been a mainstay of funding for state wildlife agencies over the century, and beyond the financial support, hunters had been key players in the politics of conservation— in Congress, in state capitols across the country, and down at the grassroots, not only for game but for the spectrum of wildlife and wild land across the continent. It was clear to anyone in the field that the loss of the hunting tradition would cripple conservation and just as certain that the way to produce more hunters was to work with kids.

Driven by that sense of urgency, state wildlife departments threw ever more weight behind their hunter education programs, and a host of private-sector conservation groups launched outreach efforts to encourage new hunters. Guided by the information developed in the 1970s, the people who ran these programs targeted kids, assuming that anyone over the age of twenty had already made the choice to hunt . . . or not.

There’s no way of knowing how effective this focus on preteens and teens was in slowing the decline in the number of hunters, but as the years passed, it became clear that programs for kids, by themselves, weren’t turning the tide. There were several obvious reasons for that. In the modern era, kids don’t have the money to buy even the most basic equipment they need to hunt, and without driver’s licenses, they can’t get out of town to places where game can be shot. They are utterly dependent on adults for all that, and the adults in their lives often can’t or won’t provide it. Any number of other activities are easier for a kid to join and easier for an adult to support.

Still, the conservation community concentrated much of its attention on young people, hoping for the best and largely ignoring a crucial shift in attitudes among American adults.

Like most grassroots movements, the modern focus on healthy eating has obscure origins. Upton Sinclair’s1906 novel, The Jungle, may have been the first public expression of American concern over food, but that angst seemed to deepen in succeeding decades. Saccharin, cyclamates, red dye number 2, nitrites, PCBs, mercury, outbreaks of E. coli and Salmonella[iv] became front-page news, leading to the creation of the federal Food Safety and Quality Service (later the Food Safety and Inspection Service) in 1977 to keep watch over meat and poultry production. For a new generation of consumers, the inspection mandate was comforting, but it didn’t allay their deepening concern over nutrition. The “food movement” had been born.

When these activists considered the possible sources of locally grown, organic meat with no hormones or antibiotics, they found themselves drawn to wild game. And so a cohort of hunters was created, not from twelve-year-olds hoping to follow their dads into the field but from twenty- and thirty-somethings who were following an ethical, dietary, and political position to its logical conclusion.

In 2005, a new set of researchers revisited the question that had been asked in the 1970s: At what age do new hunters first take up hunting? And they discovered a seismic shift— a third of new hunters were starting after the age of twenty.[v] Ray Fischer’s observation in central Kansas turned out to be true for the entire nation.

Adults are taking up the hunt for a variety of reasons, recreational as well as practical and political, but one statistic suggests that getting organic red meat is a primary motive. In 2016, federal estimates of the numbers of hunters dropped across the board, but some kinds of hunting suffered more than others. Compared to the long-term average from 1991 through 2011, the number of big game hunters in 2016 dropped sixteen percent while the number of small game hunters dropped thirty-nine percent, and the number in pursuit of migratory birds declined by fifty-one percent.[vi] My guess is that the influx of adult locavores helped support the statistics for big game.

Some of these adult hunters have been self-starters. One of my oldest friends, wildlife biologist Neil Johnson, now retired from the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, is one of those.

“I grew up just outside New York City, on the Jersey side,” he says. “Dad never fished; he never hunted. Mom— she liked cats. I used to read Robert Ruark in Field & Stream and The Old Man and the Boy and that was probably the closest I got to doing anything outside.

“It was my second year in grad school when I decided biophysics wasn’t where I wanted to be, and I transferred up to UMass for wildlife.”

That was where he decided to take up hunting.

“I killed a couple of deer out of Vermont— archery. I got into shorthairs in Massachusetts, and my neighbor gave me a big black Lab. I ended up buying a little side-by-side twenty-gauge Ithaca.”

With the ink still drying on his Ph.D., he took a teaching position at Dakota College in Bottineau, North Dakota, then moved to Kansas and later to Idaho as a state wildlife biologist.

“I couldn’t say that anyone was a mentor,” he says, as he looks back over his decades as a hunter. “I had people I hunted with that were fairly knowledgeable and knew how to do it correctly.”

Heidi Hillhouse is a grassland ecologist with the University of Nebraska whose introduction to hunting was almost as independent.

“My parents divorced,” she remembers, “so I didn’t spend a lot of time around my dad after I was in high school. My mom had done a little bit of hunting with him— at one point, she wounded a rabbit and was totally traumatized by the incident and never hunted again.”

Heidi went off to the university for undergraduate and graduate degrees, but after she launched her professional career, she revisited the idea of hunting.

“I’d wanted to get involved in hunting for quite a while but just never really wanted to jump in and go solo. By coincidence, my sister started dating a guy who did some hunting and offered to help me get started. Now it turns out, he was one of the worst teachers I have ever encountered. It was not a smooth start.”

After three muzzle-loader deer seasons that were long on frigid waiting and short on venison, her volunteer instructor was laid up with hip surgery. She jumped on the opportunity to get out on her own.

“I promptly got a modern rifle with a scope, got another friend to set me up with a place, and got two deer that year. The first time I shot a deer, I was solo.”

With the help of a couple of illustrated books, she taught herself to field-dress deer and decided to handle a lot of the butchering on her own as well.

“The first one I butchered, I didn’t have any help. I really like it because it gives you so much flexibility with what you can do with what you’ve harvested.”

These brave souls are probably the exception among hunters who start as adults. Matt Dunfee is the director of special programs with the Wildlife Management Institute. One of his main interests has been finding ways to shore up the declining population of hunters, and he’s enthusiastic about helping adults take up the discipline. In his experience, “self-starters are rare, and I don’t think there are enough self-starters out there to bolster hunting. There’s an old Japanese proverb— paraphrasing it, it says, ‘If you’re passionate about what you want to do, you’ll teach yourself; if you’re just interested in doing something, you’ll have somebody else teach you.’”

He’s convinced that helping adults who want to start hunting is a smart move.

“They’re a better investment than a kid,” he argues. “They’re motivated by authentic experience and local sustainable living— you tie into their motivations and they’ll find the time and money to do it.”

The organized effort to teach adults how to hunt may well have started in Wisconsin. In 1991, Christine Thomas, a professor at Wisconsin-Stevens Point, launched a program she called Becoming an Outdoors Woman, designed to teach women a variety of outdoor skills, including hunting. It proved immensely popular— today, thirty-eight states and six Canadian provinces offer B.O.W. workshops.[vii]

Jamie Fischer, Ray Fischer’s wife, was less than interested in taking hunting lessons from her husband, but, eight or ten years ago, her daughter-in-law decided to attend a B.O.W. workshop, and Jamie went along.

“I was hooked after that,” she says.

“I love going deer hunting or turkey— to watch nature wake up. Just to go and have that quiet time. To watch who’s out and around and who isn’t around. I love the meat we get that way and the time spent together.”

Another early effort to tailor hunter education to an adult audience was launched at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1993. Two professors in the Department of Wildlife Ecology, Scott Craven and Don Rusch, recognized that many of the department’s undergraduate and graduate students had never had an opportunity to hunt. Since hunting remains one of the most important— and controversial— parts of American wildlife management, the profs thought it was vital for these developing wildlife managers to understand something about it. They saw it as an important part of the curriculum for future professionals, but it also turned out to be one of the earliest efforts to teach hunting to adults.

Their program included a hunter education class and certification, training in the use and safe handling of firearms, roundtable discussions on the relationship between hunting and wildlife conservation, and a day of actual hunting in the field. The Wisconsin Student Hunter Program, as it was called, was adopted by several other university wildlife departments, and in 2005, it was expanded to an even more extensive course of training, Conservation Leaders for Tomorrow.[viii]

These programs at the two state universities stimulated a broader approach to hunter recruitment in Wisconsin. Keith Warnke, a biologist with the Department of Natural Resources, began working on hunter recruitment in the 1990s and took over the position of hunting and shooting sports coordinator in 2011. In 2018, the DNR promoted him to lead its R3 [Recruitment, Retention, Reactivation] Team.[ix]

Warnke emphasizes the connection between the locavore movement and adults taking up hunting for the first time:

“Hunting provides us with that deep connection to our food— local, sustainable, self-gathered, and delicious.” And he’s seen the same shift Ray Fischer has experienced: “These are adults, many of whom have not had any experience with guns or hunting, or shooting. It’s really exciting because you have an invested, motivated learner, somebody who’s just really eager to learn how to hunt.”[x]

About six years ago, Scott Harmon and Mark Gochnour, members of the Izaak Walton League’s Bethesda-Chevy Chase chapter, came to the same conclusion. The chapter had been running a traditional hunter education program designed to meet the state’s requirements, but Scott and Mark recognized the need for a “post-graduate” course.

“We were wanting to pass the knowledge on that we have,” Scott says. “We’ve hunted for years. I’ve bow-hunted since 1982. There’s a lot of knowledge you’d like to pass on and help folks out as they’re first starting out.”

Safety is a key part of the curriculum, but they also delve into the practical knowledge a hunter has to have to be successful.

“We go into the basics of scouting in the woods,” Scott explains. “Tracks, preferred food. Figuring out the ‘why?’ If you can figure out the ‘why,’ you can figure out the ‘when’ and ‘where’ easily. We talk about scent control, wind direction, being proficient, practicing with your firearm, your crossbow, your bow.”

It’s proven to be a popular seminar. Scott says, “We have some younger children who come through, but it’s mostly adults, eighty-twenty, ninety-ten, depending on the class.”

Bit by bit, state wildlife agencies have begun efforts to expand their hunter education to meet the needs of adults. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has developed an extensive outreach effort aimed at adult hunters, online and in the field. Much more recently, the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish recognized that their hunter numbers were dropping and decided to take a new approach to recruitment.

Lance Cherry, chief of Information and Education for the New Mexico Department, remembers that time.

“In 2011, we dropped eleven percent” in license sales, he says. “That was absolute rock bottom. The bulk of our buyers were still baby boomers— our primary customer was aging out of the sport.”

Cherry says that they completely revamped the department’s hunter education program. “We started requiring some responsible adult to come with those kids to those programs.” Cherry and his staff could see that “the parents didn’t have the skill sets we were trying to give the kids. We started sneaking that in.”

As the parents built their own skills, the demand for more sophisticated classes grew. The department launched a cooperative program with the Mule Deer Foundation to reach out to adults, especially parents.

“There are a lot of single moms out there,” Cherry says. “We built a program that encourages them to go to the extremes. We’re going to teach you how to hunt and how to field dress. To be successful in these things.”

After that, the department expanded its outreach even further.

“We’ll do those specific kinds of hunter ed classes where it’s just adults that come in,” Cherry adds. “They’re not required, but you’d be amazed how many adults want to go do that so they know enough to be those role models for their own kids.”

The result? Sales of hunting licenses in New Mexico rose from 66,000 in 2011 to 115,000 in 2017. Cherry sees most of the growth in two age groups: “youth, eight to eighteen, and adults, around twenty-eight to forty.”

There is, in this resurgence of interest among adults, great reason for hope. It shows us that hunting is more than a child’s pursuit. It’s a way of understanding the world that gains meaning rather than losing it, as we spend more and more of our lives in cages of our own making. There is really only one reality, and it’s not virtual. The new generations of hunters have recognized that fact. They’re reaching out, reaching back, to connect with the earth in the most intimate, most serious way.

All they need is a guide.

——————-

[i] pp.105-106, Applegate, J.E., 1977. Dynamics of the New Jersey hunter population. In: Transactions of the Forty-second North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference. Wildlife Management Institute, Washington, D.C.

[ii] Data extracted from: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Hunting License Report, 2004-2015, accessed May 21, 2019: https://wsfrprograms.fws.gov/Subpages/LicenseInfo/HuntingLicCertHistory20042015.pdf. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Hunting License Report, 1958-2003: https://wsfrprograms.fws.gov/Subpages/LicenseInfo/HuntingLicCertHistory.pdf. And the 2016 and 2017 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Hunting License reports.

[iii] Living arrangements of Children Under 18 years old: 1960 to Present. U.S. Bureau of the Census. https://wsfrprograms.fws.gov/Subpages/LicenseInfo/HuntingLicCertHistory20042015.pdf. Accessed May 21, 2019.

[iv] Pollan, Mchael, 2010. The Food Movement, Rising. The New York Review of Books. https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/the-food-movement-rising/. Accessed May 21, 2019.

[v] p.5. Leonard, Jerry, 2007. Fishing and hunting recruitment and retention in the U.S. from 1990 to 2005. Report 2001-11, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Arlington, VA.

[vi] Data from these reports: p. 32, 1996 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife Associated Recreation. p.33, 2006 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildife-Associated Recreation. p. 35, 2016 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, all from U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.

[vii] Becoming an Outdoors-Woman. https://www.uwsp.edu/cnr-ap/bow/Pages/States-and-Provinces-offering-BOW.aspx. Accessed May 23, 2019.

[viii] Barrow, Lori, 2017. A different kind of education. https://forestandwildlifeecology.wisc.edu/2017/06/05/a-different-kind-of-education/. Accessed May 23, 2019.

[ix] Anon., 2018. Keith Warnke hired as Wisconsin DNR R3Team supervisor. https://dnr.wi.gov/news/Weekly/article/?id=4176. Accessed May 23, 2019.

[x] Milewski, Todd, 2014. Q&A: Keith Warnke says local food movement and hunting are a natural fit. The Capital Times, Nov. 16, 2014. https://madison.com/ct/news/local/writers/todd-milewski/q-a-keith-warnke-says-local-food-movement-and-hunting/article_d8087439-3bd2-519f-8a9d-7c9eadfe8ce2.html. Accessed May 23, 2019.

THERE’S A POEM THAT’S HAUNTED ME MUCH OF MY ADULT LIFE.

Many years ago, my mother sent me a fragment of it— just five or six lines— that she’d found in a magazine somewhere. I kept the clipping on a bulletin board above my desk, but it tore loose from its moorings during an office move and disappeared along with the attribution, the author, and any hint of a connection to the broader context.  In the years that followed, the verse kept coming back to me, a jumbled version of the words emerging in moments when the walls seemed to be closing in.

At one point, I called the chair of the state university’s English Department, hoping for guidance.  That patient, sympathetic soul heard me out and, unable to identify the garbled passage I quoted, sent me on to a colleague at the University of Indiana. It was heartening to talk with people whose love affair with words is as passionate as my own, people who understood how frustrating it can be to find a passage that speaks so eloquently and then lose it. They dug through quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore; they made inquiries of their own and suggested other avenues for the search, but, in the end, they couldn’t help.

At long last, it was the rise of the internet that unearthed the source. I entered the verse as I remembered it— no hits. I cut out a phrase or two I wasn’t sure of— still no hits. Finally, I used just two words, “men” and “freedom,” and there it was.

The work was “The Land of the Free” by Archibald MacLeish. MacLeish, a poet with a law degree from Harvard, ambulance driver and artillery officer in the First World War, one of America’s Lost Generation in Paris during the 1920s, and witness to the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. In the late 1930s as the smothering gray clouds of the Dust Bowl were beginning to settle, he sat down to draft an accompaniment to a collection of eighty-eight photographs of the era made by Dorothea Lange and other visual geniuses who worked with the Farm Security Administration to document the common man’s view of the decade. The words he set down as companions to their

images were an anthem to the suffering of a generation of common people and an expression of their new-found doubt:

“We wonder whether the great American dream

Was the singing of locusts out of the grass to the west and the

West is behind us now;

The west wind’s away from us

We wonder if the liberty is done:

The dreaming is finished

We can’t say

We aren’t sure

Or if there’s something different men can dream

Or if there’s something different men can mean by Liberty. . . .

Or if there’s liberty a man can mean that’s

Men: not land

We wonder

We don’t know

We’re asking”.

Doubt, born of hard times. And, braided through the verse, a query that has defined generations of the American experience: “We wonder . . . if there’s liberty a man can mean that’s Men: not land.”

We’re a long, long way from any time as hard as the Dirty Thirties. Hardly anyone among us lived through those trials or the cataclysm of the second Great War that followed. In nearly every way imaginable, the vast majority of us are pampered beyond the wildest imaginings our grandparents might have cherished for us.

And yet there is this vague feeling of being restrained. Confined. Obstructed. Powerless.  I suspect there’s nothing new in the sensation; in fact, I think it’s been a major force in the flow of our history, possibly even the prime mover— a sensation so powerful that it led generations to pack their meager belongs and take the great gamble, heading west, always west, through the merciless storms of the North Atlantic, across the Alleghenies, across the Mississippi and Missouri, across the great grasslands and deserts, the ice-bound ramparts of the Rockies, the Sierras, the Coast Range, and on into the trackless wastes of the Pacific. Generation after generation, looking for that ineffable commodity Daniel Boone called “elbow room.”

This was not, at its heart, an antisocial impulse; in fact, community was a common theme in the great emigration. Hospitality was one of its most cherished traditions. More often than not, contact with other people was a spice that flavored the quiet of day-to-day routine. But it was the quiet itself, born of space, of “elbow room,” that nourished our sense of freedom.

There are revolutionaries who argue that overweaning government is the thief that has deprived us of our freedom. While there may be a grain of truth in that observation, I see the growth of rules and regulations as a symptom, not a cause. A wise friend of mine once observed that “freedom is a finite commodity; how much you have depends on how many people you have to split it with.” My freedom to swing my fist stops at the end of my neighbor’s nose, so my fist-swinging is bound to be limited by the number of neighbors I have and how close we are together. It seems my friend was right— at a practical level, freedom often becomes a simple question of real estate— and I find I barely have room to raise my voice, let alone my fist.  I have nowhere left to go.

Thomas Jefferson assured us that we were all endowed “with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Tom also harangued an infant nation into putting up the money for the Louisiana Purchase. I suspect he’d smile in agreement at MacLeish’s words: “We looked west from a rise and we saw forever.”

That was the view from Jefferson’s time. He is to be forgiven for failing to imagine the view from the other side of forever. Elsewhere in “The Land of the Free,” MacLeish captured it:

“Now that the land’s behind us we get wondering

We wonder if the liberty was land and the

Land’s gone: the liberty’s back of us. . . .

We can’t say

We aren’t certain

We’re asking . . .”

There are times when faith gives way and doubt rises.  Times like these.  Is the liberty done, the dreaming finished? I’m not sure. I don’t know. I’m asking.

THE WIND PAUSED FOR TEN MINUTES OR SO— AN UNUSUAL PHENOMENON ON THE HIGH PLAINS— WAVERED, THEN swung into the north. We’d enjoyed three days of spring, but at the foot of the Rockies in the first week of May, spring is an ephemeral condition. As the sun set, a spattering of rain and those little ice balls the weathermen call graupel rattled at the windows as the temperature dropped. The sound alone was enough to send a shiver down the spine. The Lady of the House and I scuttled gratefully under the down comforter, thankful for shelter on such a night.

Sometime before dawn, the big blue spruce outside the window sighed one last time and grew still. As the light came up, I could tell there was a heavy overcast, but, overcast and chill notwithstanding, Freya the Brittany insisted on her morning run. After I’d put on my tall boots against the wet grass in the field and added a wind shell to my fleece, we stepped out into the gray morning, Freya shouldering her way into the weeds as a cloud of small birds rose in front of her, hundreds of them rolling out of her way to disappear in the vegetation ahead, their call notes like electric sparks.

The light was flat, and I hadn’t brought a binocular. I strained to pick out some signs of color and field marks. They were mostly sparrows: lark, chipping, white-crowned, clay-colored, vesper with a few horned larks, a goldfinch or two, and a scattering of what may have been siskins. One larger specimen perched on a fencepost to get a better look at me— a Say’s phoebe. As the dog and I continued across several hundred acres of open ground, the cover swarmed with this sudden invasion. “How many?” I wondered. No way of telling. An immense, unfathomable number.

As we turned for home, a larger shape streaked through a shelterbelt and swept close overhead— a sharp-shinned hawk with something small and feathered in one talon, the cheetah following the herd of wildebeest, feeding at will on the assembled throng.

It was a wave of the spring migration, broken for a day or two against the arctic front to settle in these empty fields. Ordinarily, these small migrants travel at night, navigating by the stars and the tiny electrical flux they generate as they cleave the magnetic field of the earth, landing at dawn and using the daylight to feed and rest for the next big push. When they found themselves bucking a fierce headwind, they dropped out of the sky into these neglected open places at the edge of town, guided by an instinctive aversion to burning energy needlessly. Freya and I were the only earthbound residents to mark their arrival.

As I watched the loose flocks rolling through the cover ahead of us, I wondered how many other waves had passed me by— unseen, unfelt. Insulated by cocoons of our own making, we miss all but the most overwhelming changes of the seasons. We’re moderately aware of the shift in weather; we may stop and listen to a chevron of geese on its way to nurseries beyond the reach of our imagination, but, mostly we’re simply unaware of the ebb and flow of living things that sweep over us. The tides of life.

It is this estrangement, I think, as much as our insatiable appetite for everything the planet offers, that has caused such harm. The populations of nearly every species I saw that morning have been declining for at least as long as counts have been made. Entire landscapes have been transformed, degraded, stripped of their native vegetation, restocked with alien pests of all sizes, descriptions, and capacity for mischief. If it’s true that we cannot love what we do not know, then it may be that we have set the stage for a massive pogrom. There may be no more evil act than to kill with indifference.

These are the thoughts the hard numbers inevitably bring. But, setting the data aside, there is a certain hope that comes with the wave. For all the difficulties they face, the birds still return, often in flocks so overwhelming they appear on radar and fill the fields we have left with bustle and cheer, vast waves sweeping up and down the continent, following traditions as old as life itself. As delicate as they seem, they are survivors, far travelers— tough, resilient, but ultimately dependent on the health of the land that supports them. Their future is ours.

I wonder when we’ll summon the wisdom to recognize that.

The wind stayed in the north all that day and most of the night. Sometime in the wee hours, it swung into the southwest and then the south. The next morning, Freya and I watched the sun rise in a flawless sky as we headed for the fields once again. The meadowlarks were in fine form, embroidering the morning with song.  But the wave of migrants had gone, headed north again in the night.

Bringing another spring.

—————