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.

—————

 

I COME BACK TO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN:

“A thing is right when it tends toward the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise”[i]— the ecologist and philosopher Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, set down in the summer of 1947, at the end of a long and illustrious career.

A graduate of Gifford Pinchot’s school of Forestry at Yale University in 1909, Leopold had started out as a disciple of the reigning commandment of the conservation movement of the time: the idea of wise use. The continent’s renewable natural resources existed for the benefit of man, the precept ran, but the sensible man would give those resources a chance to renew themselves. Wise use was sustainable use, the emphasis to fall equally on both words.

Yale’s version of this precept had grown from Pinchot’s experience with timber, and the training was intended to prepare America’s first generation of foresters to carry out the mission of the nascent U.S. Forest Service, the federal agency that was to oversee forest and grazing management on the system of national forests Pinchot and his good friend, Theodore Roosevelt, had established.

Leopold took the Pinchot utilitarian view of resource management to his first assignment with the Forest Service in Arizona where he applied it, as many other conservationists did at the time, to wildlife management as well as forestry. In some of his earliest writings, he was an enthusiastic supporter of predator control as a tool for producing game.

“For some unfathomable reason, there appears to have been a kind of feeling of antagonism between men interested in game protection and between some individuals connected with the stock growing industry,” he wrote in 1915. “. . . It seems never to have occurred to anybody that the very opposite should be the case, and that the stockmen and the game protectionists are mutually and vitally interested in a common problem. This problem is the reduction of predatory animals.”[ii]

It was a point of view that served as common ground in his day-to-day contacts with local ranchers, but even as he wrote it, his professional understanding of wildlife management was already shifting, partly in response to the catastrophic decline of many wildlife species and partly because of his own evolving perceptions. That same year, he wrote a Forest Service plan for wildlife management that began: “The breeding stock must be increased. Rare species must be protected and restored. The value of game lies in its variety as well as its abundance.”[iii]

It was also in 1915 that he was ordered to review a growing problem on the south rim of Grand Canyon, then a national monument managed by the Forest Service. Twelve years before, Teddy Roosevelt had advised Arizonans:

“I hope you will not have a building of any kind . . . to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the Canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. . . . The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”[iv]

In the decade after that speech, the south rim of the Canyon had rapidly become a tourist ghetto with ramshackle hotels, fly-by-night tour companies, electric signs, cesspools, and garbage dumps.[v]  Leopold braved the stiff opposition of the entrepreneurs who were responsible for this mess and filed a sixty-eight-page report that recommended major limits on development. “The public visits the Grand Canyon to enjoy a great spectacle of nature,” he wrote in the 1916 report. “At the same time the public needs and demands certain material services and conveniences. The latter are necessarily out of harmony with the surroundings, and it should be the first object of an efficient administration to reduce this necessary discord to a minimum.”[vi]

As he gained experience over the next twenty-five years, Leopold’s ideas on conservation of wildlife and wild land continued to evolve from the strictly utilitarian approach he’d been taught. He couldn’t ignore the problems he saw in American land management, and he began to give more and more weight to the “wise” in wise use.

In 1922, he championed an entirely new concept— federal wilderness— with the establishment of the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico’s Carson National Forest. With several other wildlife experts of the time, he was forced to confront the problems with too many deer on Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau, the result of a generation of intense predator control. It was an experience he carried with him as he moved to the University of Wisconsin and faced similar problems with the north country’s burgeoning deer herd. He toured the hyper-managed forests of Germany and came to the conclusion that managing timber like a vegetable garden was not good for wildlife or people.

He became a founding member of the Wilderness Society; he served as president of the Ecological Society of America, and as his understanding deepened, he began to regret some of the things he had thought and done when he was young and certain.

He remembered the brooding black presence of Escudilla Mountain in eastern Arizona, the home of the region’s last grizzly.

“No one ever saw the old bear,” he wrote in 1940, “but in the muddy springs about the base of the cliffs you saw his incredible tracks. Seeing them made the most hard-bitten cowboys aware of bear. Wherever they rode they saw the mountain, and when they saw the mountain they thought of bear.”

At the behest of local ranchers, the federal authorities brought in a trapper who, in due time, killed the bear.

“It was only after we pondered on these things,” he continued, “that we began to wonder who wrote the rules for progress. . . . Escudilla still hangs on the horizon, but when you see it you no longer think of bear. It’s only a mountain now.”[vii]

And he remembered helping shoot a wolf and her pup in his early days in Arizona.

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”[viii]

Twenty years after it was published, Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac became the New Testament of environmentalism, more influential in its way than even Silent Spring. A generation of flower children desperately wanted to believe in Leopold, but before he could be canonized, there was a significant problem to be confronted: He was a hunter. An influential segment of the environmental movement found the idea of a person killing an animal for food, let alone pleasure, simply too repugnant to contemplate.

So they tweaked his biography.

A number of years ago, I was invited to speak at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I can’t remember who issued the invitation, but I said I’d be honored to come speak on the philosophical power of the land ethic. It must have been the allure of the subject that caught local attention— I’m not known as an orator— but whatever the reason, there were a lot of people there that night. Sizable room, pretty well stuffed with humanity.

I stole liberally from Leopold’s marvelous writings, and the speech seemed to be well received. After I finished, the moderator asked if there were any questions or comments from the audience. A young woman at the back of the room raised her hand.

“I think Leopold was one of the greatest environmentalists,” she said. “But it’s really, really important to remember that he quit hunting. All you have to do is read that part where he shoots the wolf, and you can see that, when he got older, there was no way he would kill something.”

All the faces in the audience turned back to me.

“We share a love of Leopold’s writing,” I replied. “In fact, it was Leopold’s writing that made me decide to do my graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I studied right next to the glass cabinet where they kept one of the bows Leopold made. It hung over the original manuscripts of Sand County. I’ve read and reread just about everything that ever appeared under Leopold’s byline, along with some stuff that’s never been published. My advisor was Aldo Leopold’s last graduate student. And I have to tell you, my advisor hunted woodcock with Leopold six months before Aldo died. Leopold was a hunter. All his life. Big game, small game, upland birds, waterfowl, snipe. Archery, rifle, shotgun. I know this is hard to absorb, but Leopold the hunter, Leopold the ecologist, Leopold the philosopher— they were all the same man.”

She wouldn’t believe it.

It wasn’t the first time I’d run into the argument. Yes, it goes, Saint Aldo might have been a sinner in his younger, testosterone-soaked days, but anyone who reads his work can tell that he gave up hunting with all those other antiquated nineteenth-century ideas he’d picked up in the Roosevelt era. Only then could he be accepted as a true environmentalist.

There’s a problem in this that clearly reaches far beyond a distortion of history and a great man’s reputation. It touches on the image of hunting itself.

There’s no doubt that the behavior of some hunters, in our time and in Leopold’s, richly deserves censure. Leopold himself had a jaundiced view of many of the things he’d seen hunters do in the field. While much of his writing dealt with the broader issues of human attitudes toward the land, his essays occasionally focused on hunting as he too often saw it practiced. He had a problem with the proliferation of “an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them.” He mourned what he saw as the passing of the “go-light idea, the one-bullet tradition.”[ix]

But there’s also no doubt that hunting was a central part of his life from the time he was old enough to join his dad in the bottomlands of the upper Mississippi to the day the heart attack claimed him as he was fighting a neighbor’s grass fire in 1948. It was much more than recreation for him; it was a way of seeing; it was a way of understanding the natural world.

In one of his later essays, he described a lane he’d cut through the cover behind the little cabin he called “The Shack.” He called it the “deer swath,” and he used it as a way of keeping track of the deer that were trading back and forth between his property and the river. He pointed it out to a number of visitors and watched their subsequent notice of it. Always the scientist, he classified their reactions.

“Most of them forgot it quickly, while others watched it, as I did, whenever chance allowed. The upshot was the realization that . . . the deer hunter habitually watches the next bend; the duck hunter watches the skyline; the bird hunter watches the dog; the nonhunter does not watch.”[x]

In another essay, he wrote: “The true hunter is merely a noncreative artist. Who painted the first picture on a bone in the caves of France? A hunter. Who alone in our modern life so thrills to the sight of living beauty that he will endure hunger and thirst and cold to feed his eyes upon it? The hunter. . . . Critics write and hunters outwit their game primarily for one and the same reason— to reduce that beauty to possession. The differences are largely matters of degree, consciousness, or that sly arbiter of the classification of human activities, language. If, then, we can live without goose music, we may as well do away with stars, or sunsets, or Iliads. But the point is that we would be fools to do away with any of them.”[xi]

And in the actual almanac of A Sand County Almanac, Leopold filled the entire month of October with recollections of hunting. “I sometimes think that the other months were constituted mainly as a fitting interlude between Octobers,” he concludes, “and I suspect that dogs, and perhaps grouse, share the same view.”[xii]

There are many people of good heart and intention in the environmental community who struggle to understand how an intellect as incisive as Leopold’s could possibly reconcile his lifelong commitment to wildlife and wild land with his lifelong passion for the hunt. I don’t find that struggle surprising. My dad once said that trying to explain hunting to a nonhunter was like trying to explain sex to a eunuch— there was simply no common experience, in his view, to serve as a starting point. If any message could bridge that gulf, it was Aldo Leopold’s.

He understood hunting at the emotional level of a participant, at the scientific level of an ecologist, and at the ethical level of a philosopher. It was an almost unique combination, one that contains a critical lesson for anyone who aspires to follow in his footsteps. His admonition to humanity as a whole holds special significance for those of us who hunt: “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”[xiii]

Amen.

 

---

[i] pp.224-225, Leopold, Aldo, 1949. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Oxford University Press, New York, NY.

[ii] p. 47. Flader, Susan and J. Baird Caledcott, 1991. The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI.

[iii] P.146. Meine, Curt, 1988. Aldo Leopold, His Life and Work. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI.

[iv] p.2, Roosevelt, Theodore, 1903. Address of President Roosevelt at Grand Canyon, Arizona, May 6, 1903. Facsimile of manuscript held at the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, Dickinson, ND. https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record/ImageViewer?libID=o289796&imageNo=2. Accessed April 22, 2019.

[v] p.145, Meine.

[vi] p.2. Johnston, Don P. and Aldo Leopold, 1916. Grand Canyon Working Plan. Aldo Peopold archives, Digital Collections, University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, Madison, WI. http://images.library.wisc.edu/awareImageServer/UWDCImageNav.jsp?collection=AldoLeopold&resource=EFacs/ALForest/ALGrandCanyon/reference/0004.jp2&size=M&entity=aldoleopold.algrandcanyon.p0004&title=Grand%20Canyon%20Working%20Plan%2C%20p.%20%5B4%5D. Accessed April 22, 2019.

[vii] p.134-137. Leopold, Aldo, 1949. A Sand County Almanac with Sketches from Here and There. Oxford University Press, New York, NY.

[viii] p.130. Leopold, Aldo, 1949. A Sand County Almanac.

[ix] pp. 180-181. Leopold, Aldo, 1949. A Sand County Almanac.

[x] p.126. Leopold, Aldo, 1953. Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold. Oxford University Press, New York, NY.

[xi] pp.170-171. Leopold, Aldo, 1953. Round River.

[xii] pp.65-66, Leopold, Aldo, 1949. A Sand County Almanac.

[xiii] p. viii, Leopold, Aldo, 1949. A Sand County Almanac.

WE CLOSED THE SEASON YESTERDAY, FREYA THE BRITTANY AND I, PASSING THE LAST HOURS IN A LONG WALK OVER THE HILL TO A PLACE I CALL “THE SECRET SPOT” because the best cover is out of sight from the road. We were both limping a bit, Freya because of the screw in her right elbow that holds the end of her humerus together but still gives her some arthritis, and I because an unexpected encounter with a badger hole a few miles back had given one of my aging knees a wrench.

Considering our condition, the prudent thing would have been to call it a day, but this was the last day, and I think it was fair to say that neither of us was willing give up the final hours. I knew it would be almost nine months before we passed this way again. Freya is probably not burdened with such foresight— the chase is simply her reason for being, the white-hot flame that flares in her eyes as she catches the scent and burns there when she points. So we went on to the bitter end.

Which brought us here, to the first day of February, with the northwest wind rattling the windows and threatening snow, bereft. Freya is curled up tightly in her favorite spot, recovering from the last hard week, her eyes following me as I walk in and out of the room, expecting another ride to the country. The vest is hanging in the closet; the boots are in the corner, their seams frayed, their toes polished black by the endless miles of prairie grass, thistle stems, and crop stubble, down at the heel, soles worn smooth. I have chores that have been too long postponed, but for this day at least, I’d rather look back over the last three months and consider what it was I found there.

There were birds, of course: neon rooster pheasants rising with a shower of frost in the first morning sun, coveys of bobwhite quail exploding underfoot, flocks of prairie chickens and sharptails beckoning on the horizon. We hunters speak of such moments in shorthand, stringing them together like jewels on a necklace, even though we all know how rare and fleeting they are.

My overarching memory of the season is far less tangible. It is a feeling of sky and wind on my face; bright sun and snow squalls; cold that penetrated to the skin like an ice pick; sudden, unexpected warmth in the shelter of a cutbank; a short-eared owl floating over the grass; a prairie falcon streaking low over the cover like an arrow from the bow; a guild of tree sparrows and juncos picking seeds in a patch of kochia; crystals of frost clinging to the grass like diamonds in the dawn; a string of mule deer disappearing over the far ridge; the buck standing up, thirty yards away, in a stand of switchgrass; the color of little bluestem in the last five minutes of the day; a skein of snow geese almost invisible against the cirrus, their tenor traveling chorus floating down out of heaven like an anthem. The fuzzy leaves of mullen flat to the ground, green in the depths of winter. The graceful curve of an empty milkweed pod. The drag of the heavy cover on my feet at the end of ten straight hours in the field. Knees that don’t want to lift for the next step.

Such is the content of the hours and hours spent for the second of the shot. When I was young, I wanted one without the other. When the shooting was slow, I was irritated. Little by little, I learned what I was told was patience— distracting myself with thoughts of appointments, commitments, deadlines until the dog caught scent or I heard the slap of a primary on the grass behind me. I’m not sure that approach improved my wing shooting, but I suppose it lowered my blood pressure.

As the miles and the years have passed, I’ve settled into something altogether different. When I’m in the field, a thought will occasionally roll through my head, but mostly, I’m just there, behind the dog, in the moment. If I had to pick one word to describe the mental state, it would be meditation. The occasional points, the shots, the birds in the bag are a critical part of the whole—they supply the motivation for the day and test particular skills in hunter and dog.

But they aren’t the only part.

After sixty years in the field, it seems that what I hunt is not only a bird, not only a day, but a frame of mind. Maybe even a state of grace. I can’t tell where the importance of one stops and another starts. But I think it’s why I keep coming back.

AS THE DISCUSSION OVER CLIMATE CHANGE— OR DEBATE OR DONNYBROOK, HOWEVER YOU PREFER TO THINK OF IT— CONTINUES, I THINK IT’S appropriate to pause at the beginning of the new year and consider the adventures in weather we’ve enjoyed across the United States over the previous twelve months. For those of us who have ducked the nastiest the atmosphere has generated, it’s easy to forget the storms, fires, and droughts that caused significant inconvenience across the country. So, in the interest of recalling some of the nation’s most spectacular events, here’s a quick review of 2019 in weather:

Things started off in late February with a strong Arctic cold front that dropped more than a foot of snow on parts of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, driven by winds of nearly sixty miles an hour.[i] As the blizzard moved east, the wind intensified, reaching gust of nearly seventy miles an hour in Massachusetts, New York,[ii] and southern Ontario[iii]. Farther south, the

system brought nearly a foot of rain to the Tennessee valley, causing extensive flooding.[iv] On the night of February 23, the front triggered several tornados, including an EF3 twister that leveled much of the business district in Columbus, Mississippi, and killed one person. Altogether, the storm caused an estimated $1.3 billion in damage and claimed two lives.[v]

On March 14, a strong storm system rolled into the northern plains. With much of the region still in the grip of winter, the heavy rain caused rapid snow melt, all of which ran off still-frozen ground. Nebraska and western Iowa took the brunt of the flooding, but there was significant damage from eastern North Dakota to Missouri as well as Wisconsin and Michigan. The early runoff set the stage for flooding farther down the Mississippi watershed. Estimates of damage ran to $10.8 billion. Three people lost their lives.[vi]

Meanwhile, on the southern plains, severe hail storms from March 22 to March 24 pummeled Oklahoma City, Dallas, and surrounding farmland. People who have not seen a hail storm on the Great Plains would be shocked at the devastation one can inflict. Damage was estimated at $1.6 billion.

A cold front on April 13 and 14 swept through the Southeast, spawning more than fifty tornados across central Mississippi and Alabama and another twenty-five from Georgia to Pennsylvania. High wind and hail also caused damage in several areas.   After the front had passed, damage was estimated at $1.3 billion. Seven lives were lost.[vii]

Again on May 16 through 18, a strong cold front caused severe thunderstorms across Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Texas. Another $1.0 billion in damage.

Yet another storm front swept across the Great Plains and on to Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey from May 26-29. The front spawned 190 tornados, damaging hail, and high winds. Salient among the tornados was an EF3 twister that touched down near Dayton, Ohio, killing one person. Damage estimate: $4.5 billon. Three persons killed.

This succession of storm fronts also led to major flooding in the Arkansas River watershed, from eastern Oklahoma to Little Rock, Arkansas. Officials estimated $3.0 billion dollars in damage and attributed five deaths to the high water.

The flooding that began at the end of winter in the upper Midwest continued through the end of July in many parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana as well as parts of Indiana and Ohio. The cumulative damage done to industry and agriculture by these floods is estimated at $6.2 billion. Four deaths were blamed on the high water.[viii]

On July 4 and 5, storms with hail up to one inch in diameter went through the Denver metro area.   Damage was estimated at $1.0 billion.

Then came the hurricane season. By the standard of 2018, it was relatively mild, but in late August, Dorian came ashore in North Carolina, causing $1.6 billion in damage and killing ten people. On September 17, Tropical Storm Imelda brought almost three feet of rain to the Houston area, causing another $5.0 billion in damage and claiming five more lives.[ix]

On October 20, a nasty low-pressure system rolled over Dallas, then continued to Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Estimate of damage: $1.7 billion. Two people killed.[x]

Out in California, the drought that was largely responsible for the catastrophic fires season of 2018 finally broke. The moisture

during the winter and early spring allowed much of the vegetation in the state to recover, which, in turn, provided exceptional fuel for yet another round of wildfires. State officials estimated that almost 8,000 fires consumed nearly 260,000 acres in 2019, destroying more than 700 buildings and killing three people.[xi] Pacific Gas and Electric, the utility whose power lines were found to be responsible for several of the most damaging fires in 2018, took the precaution of turning off electricity to as many as 2.7 million people[xii] when high wind threatened to bring down more electrical lines in 2019. The resulting losses of power were said to be responsible for more than $2 billion in additional economic loss.[xiii]

While it rained— and rained— in America’s heartland, southeastern Alaska found itself in the grip of a major dry spell, beginning in July 0f 2018 and continuing through much of 2019.[xiv] The city of Juneau set all-time records for high temperatures, and, farther north, the ice pack along the melted early as temperatures in the Arctic Ocean were as much as nine degrees above average.[xv]

The heat and drought created ideal conditions for wild fires. By late summer, more than 2.5 million acres had burned, less than the 2004 record of 6.5 million acres but still worrisome. According to Scott Rupp, deputy director of the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks, “What has been changing is the frequency and the magnitude of these fires.”[xvi]

The combination of the fires in California and Alaska did an estimated $4.5 billion in damage and claimed the lives of three people.[xvii]

These are 2019’s biggest weather events: $45 billion in damage and forty-four people dead. Compared to 2018, we got off easy. As you may recall, there were three killer hurricanes in 2018, along with drought and fires and hail. Severe weather alone caused $223 billion in 2018 and took something like 282 lives. Still, even a quiet year like 2019 gets my attention. Forty-five billion here, 45 billion there— pretty soon, you’re talking serious money.

No one knows what 2020 will bring, but the people who have studied climate most carefully say the chances are that it will be worse. It’s impossible to say whether any or all of these events were caused by the increasing amount of heat in the atmosphere, impossible to know if they were just made worse. But these events, their severity and impact, are perfectly consistent with the predictions that several independent groups of researchers have made. In fact, there’s growing reason to believe that the predictions made by the International Panel on Climate Change and other reputable research groups have been unduly conservative, which is to say that things in the real world are getting worse faster than many scientists had predicted.

This year, next year, the year after that, we’ll set new records for high temperatures, new records for intense rainfall, for tornados, hurricanes, flooding, wild fires, even for paralyzing blizzards. The cost in damage and lost lives is the price we pay just to “adapt” to a changing climate. That cost will increase at an alarming rate over coming decades because “adapting” to the changing climate does nothing to stop the root cause— more and more energy trapped in the atmosphere, the oceans, and the land mass of the planet Earth by greenhouse gases. It’s like treating a serious infection with a damp washcloth and an aspirin— it may ease the suffering for a while, but it’s no substitute for an antibiotic.

In the year 2020, we’ll have no choice but to cope with the symptoms of climate change. But that won’t cure the disease.

 

————–

 

[i] https://www.weather.gov/arx/feb2419

[ii] https://www.weather.gov/dtx/highwindwarning190224

[iii] https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/high-winds-lash-southern-ontario-maritimes-under-storm-warnings-1.4310412

[iv] https://www.weather.gov/ohx/lateFebruary2019flooding

[v] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/events

[vi] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/events

[vii] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/events

[viii] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/events

[ix] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/events

[x] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/events

[xi] https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2019/

[xii] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/26/us/Kincade-Fire-Sonoma-California.html

[xiii] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/pge-power-outage-could-cost-the-california-economy-more-than-2-billion.html

[xiv] https://weather.com/news/climate/news/2019-05-28-extreme-drought-southeast-alaska

[xv] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/07/01/alaska-heat-wave-record-heat-fuels-wildfires-melting-sea-ice/1616992001/

[xvi] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/07/01/alaska-heat-wave-record-heat-fuels-wildfires-melting-sea-ice/1616992001/

[xvii] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/events

This afternoon, Flick joined his predecessors on the other side.  The spirit was willing, but his hips finally gave out.  As I mourn his passing, I remember the companions who came before him.  They were far better at being dogs than I am at being a person.  I miss them . . .

IT’S MADE OF BRASS, ABOUT THE DIAMETER OF A SILVER DOLLAR WITH A NYLON STRAP LOOPED THROUGH THE TOP SO IT CAN BE STRUNG ON A COLLAR.  It has no markings, but the catalog house that sold it to me, many years ago, said it came from England— certainly, it has that English look and feel, an exquisite bit of craftsmanship from another time that combines simplicity, elegance, and dependability to do a job that is largely irrelevant in the modern age. It has a bright, clear tenor voice, not loud but surprisingly penetrating, even on a day when the first cold front of November is hurrying across the prairie, tousling the bluestem as it passes.

I must have bought it around 1987. I was starting Britt at the time. He was the most talented bird dog I’ve ever owned, and he was just starting to show his worth when we encountered the Conservation Reserve Program. We were used to working fencelines and shelterbelts, long strips of cover Britt could hunt from the outside. When he went on point, he was nearly always out in the stubble where I could see him. The bird might not hold, but there was at least no problem finding the dog.

The first CRP field we hunted was a full section of switchgrass just reaching maturity. Some of the seed heads were eight feet off the ground; the vegetation below was almost impenetrable. We both saw the potential and dived into the jungle with high expectations. I saw Britt’s wake for the first fifty yards, then the grass was still. I stopped to listen for him. Not a whisper. I figured he was within sixty yards of me, almost certainly pointing a pheasant, and there was no way I was going to call him off that point.

I started a spiral search pattern, and in about five minutes, I found him, still holding, but with the relaxed tail that told me the scent had gone cold. The rooster had quietly departed for other hiding places.

By the time that field had finished with us, I could see that Britt and I needed some way of keeping track of each other if we intended to hunt any more CRP. The first generation of beeper collars had just been invented, but fresh out of college, I didn’t have the money to buy one, and I didn’t really want one anyway— that infernal beeping felt a little like spray-painting graffiti on the Mona Lisa. So I bought the bell.

We went back to that section of CRP on a clear, quiet morning with the temperature hovering around five. The frost lay like snow on the grass— I figured Britt would be able to smell a rooster from a quarter-mile away. He skirted the edge of the heavy grass for a hundred yards before a plume of scent lured him into the cover, and listened as the bell traced his progress, out and across the lee of a low rise. Then, suddenly, nothing, a hole in the air where the clear tink-tink had been. I headed toward the last place I had heard the sound, holding the shotgun high enough to keep the grass stems out of my eyes.

I almost stumbled over him, head high, stub tail at full attention, taut as a violin string. One more step and the rooster came straight up, clawing into the blue sky with a clatter and a squawk, his flanks like molten copper in the first light.

Taken by surprise, as I nearly always am when a rooster flushes, I missed with the first barrel but managed to catch him with the second. Britt disappeared into the switch, the bell marking his progress, farther away, farther, then a pause, closer, closer still, and suddenly, two amber eyes out of the wall of grass— Britt with the bird.

 

OVER THE NEXT TEN YEARS, the two of us spent a lot of time in this strange, one-way telecommunication, Britt transmitting out of sight while I tried to interpret the message.   I could tell a lot by the sound of the bell. There was a steady cadence with a syncopated flourish when he was quartering, looking for scent. When something caught his attention, the cadence broke, and the irregular notes of the bell signaled every move of his head. There was a Doppler change in the tone as he worked— higher as he came back toward me, lower as he went away. Early in his career, he was fond of pointing meadow voles, and I could often tell by the bell that his tail was wagging as he pointed, a sign that he was mousing. And now and then, that hole in the air, the sudden silence— a rooster, a covey, a band of chukars, a ruffed grouse, a blue, a bomber. We hunted them all, Britt following his unerring nose while I followed the bell.

One evening, the friend who had told me about Britt’s litter called me about another litter in the same line, so on the way to a quail hunt in the Flint Hills, I stopped to look the pups over. That was how little Meg came to our house.

Britt tolerated her, and she paid him the respect due to his age and experience. They hunted together for two seasons before she inherited the bell. She might not have had the talent of her great uncle, but she was still a better bird dog than I deserve. I remember her pointing a pheasant on the slope of one of those huge prairie swales that break up the high plains, staunch in the wine-colored little bluestem as my partner walked in. The rooster flushed wild, and the shot rocked him but didn’t break a wing. We watched and Meg watched as the bird flapped and glided, flapped and glided down the long slope, across the creek bed, and up the other side, almost to the horizon before he sat down.

My eyes dropped back to another movement, Meg crossing the creek bed on line. She trotted up the long slope on the far side, a tiny white speck by this time, paused on the hilltop, then turned back toward us. As she crossed the creek bed, I could see she was carrying something. She disappeared in the grass on our side, and a long minute passed before I heard the bell approaching. She walked up to me with the bird in her mouth. I took it and scratched her ear. Good dog; good dog.

The two of us chased many birds across many states to places I don’t think I would ever have seen on my own: the pocket just under the rim of Tatman Mountain in northern Wyoming where a tiny spring waters a lush stand of wild rye and a perennial covey of Huns and you can see for fifty miles. The terrace in Iowa where there is always a rooster and Meg once pointed the biggest whitetail buck I’ve ever seen, caught napping in the switchgrass. The prairie slope out over the Missouri River in North Dakota with its sharptails, the buffaloberries scarlet on the hillside and the hawthorn fruit fuschia against the gray branches in the draw.

The moments fade in the telling, like picked wildflowers, but in my head they are forever bright against the background of the autumns we shared, the collection of days stitched together by the play of light and shadow on the grass, the sigh of the wind, and the tinkling of a small bell.

 

NOT LONG AFTER MEG PASSED HER FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY, a friend invited us to hunt his farm in western Iowa. The farm reflects Tom’s commitment to conservation— terraces, grassy waterways, and buffer strips to keep the topsoil in place; blocks of conservation reserve to rebuild topsoil where it’s been lost; and wetland reserve to purify the runoff. That kind of management produces pheasants even when the surrounding farms have been scalped for profit.

Meg was still good for two hours in the morning, and while her pace had slowed, her enthusiasm for the game was as bright as ever. On the morning of the fifth day, I was packing to leave, one bird short of Iowa’s possession limit. Always the gracious host, Tom told me to stop and check one last hillside on my way to the interstate, so I headed south, Meg riding shotgun in the pickup, marking every meadowlark as it flushed off the side of the road.

The CRP Tom has recommended was a perfect corner for pheasants— bluestem and switchgrass with a mix of broad-leafed plants just below a harvested cornfield. I Unbuckled Meg’s collar and slipped on the bell before I lifted her out of the truck, then grabbed the Model 12 and followed her down the fencerow. She disappeared into the grass, and I waited, listening to the bell as it made its invisible way down the slope. A hundred yards from the truck, it stopped.

I walked that way and found her just a couple of yards into the heavy cover, rock solid. As I passed her ear, two roosters exploded out of the grass. I picked the left bird and crumpled it. Meg Disappeared. Then, I saw her coming back through the short brome of the field edge, tail and head up, with the rooster in her mouth, the light of the December morning warm on them both. A fine way to end a hunt, I thought, and a season.

At the time, I couldn’t know that it was also the end of a career. That Iowa rooster was Meg’s last bird.

 

AND SO THE BELL PASSED TO FLICK.  He’s eighteen months old now, with two seasons under his belt, a passion for rabbits, and a talent for birds. He’s presided over the demise of about fifty pheasants already, and just last week, I had a chance to introduce him to some Kansas bobwhite. He didn’t know what to make of the first covey, but he quickly filed the scent under the general heading of “game,” trotted down the edge of the milo field to a thicket of sand plum and pointed a single. Which I promptly missed.

As I strolled along behind my new companion toward the next covert, it occurred to me that a bird hunter measures his life in dogs. With luck, I may have one more after Flick. Or he may be the last. Such thoughts can lead out into areas of metaphysics and theology I’m not qualified to navigate. Is there another world beyond the pale? I’m sure I don’t know. But I find it hard to imagine a place much better than the one we were all born to, this small blue planet where life has gathered against all the odds.

I’m not anxious to leave. If I were given a choice between crossing over into an unknown paradise or melting back into the ground of this one, I think I’d just as soon stay. Still, there is the possibility that, when the time comes, the fields on the other side will be drenched in the morning sun of November with the scent of fall on the breeze . . . and the sound of a small brass bell, fading toward the horizon.

And, if that’s the call, I just might have to follow.

 

—————-