Not just for the birds

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  • Hope

    Hope

    My morning ritual every day like clockwork is getting roused out of bed much earlier than I want. Usually the culprit for the rude awaking is Peat because his internal clock tells him it’s time to get fed. Bloom on the other hand is just an innocent bystander to this stupidness. Believe me, we’ve tried to ignore Peat and make him wait to get fed and have even stooped to the level of getting out of bed and putting Peat and his unwilling accomplice Bloom in the car in the garage just to get one or two more hours of shuteye. Bob and I are hoping that moving the clocks ahead one hour this weekend will result in Peat waiting to harass us at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday morning instead of his usual 5:00 a.m. wake up call. I know this whole problem could be easily solved by just stuffing them in crates in another room all night but we like our dogs to sleep with us and don’t plan on depriving ourselves from this pleasure anytime soon.

    After the dogs scarf down their kibble, I let them outside in our fenced backyard. While I’m waiting for them to finish doing their business, I make my coffee and then let them back inside. I grab my laptop and sit down on the couch with Peat curled up next to me on my left and Bloom on my right. I read my email and the news. While all this is happening, Bob is still in bed because he’s an insomniac and is usually up half the night reading and gets his best sleep after I get up.

    This morning, my mother-in-law Barbara who is an avid bird-watcher, had emailed me a link to a bald eagle nest live camera the night before. I clicked on the link and found myself mesmerized and watched an eagle on the nest, feathers blowing in the wind while sitting 145 feet up on a Jeffrey Pine Tree.

    At one point, the eagle named Jackie got up and left the nest for a minute. I could see two small chicks and one unhatched egg. I found myself being very excited and moved by seeing this because apparently, according to Barbara, last year the same pair set up home here had eggs that didn’t hatch.

    The exact location of the eagle nest and camera is not disclosed to protect the eagles, which makes sense; humans should be considerate to the eagles and nature.
    Later this morning while watching, Jackie’s mate Shadow showed up and by now 50,000 people were watching the live stream.

    A couple of days ago, Bob and I took the dogs out for a hike down in Hells Canyon. Bloom and Peat pointed a pair of Gray Partridge. I asked Bob if he knew if the huns or chukar were already pairing up to breed. He thought it might be too early.

    It made me think more about wanting to know more about chukar and Gray Partridge nesting. I remembered years ago finding a study about Hells Canyon chukar and luckily found it again. The 114-page report written in 2001 for Idaho Power is called “Assessment of Chukar and Gray Partridge Populations and Habitat in Hells Canyon.” The link is below:

    https://docs.idahopower.com/pdfs/relicensing/hellscanyon/hellspdfs/techappendices/Wildlife/e32_07.pdf

    If you hunt chukar or Gray Partridge the report is interesting and valuable. Jim Posewitz wrote in his book, Beyond Fair Chase, “Learning about wildlife must begin before your first hunt. The learning process will allow you to become a more understanding and ethical person, and it also will help you become a more successful hunter.”

    Here are some facts about breeding and nesting from the study if you don’t have time to read the whole thing.

    Chukar: Pair formation starts March-April. First eggs hatch March-April. Incubation of eggs 23-30 days. Chicks are capable of flight at <2 weeks of age and appear similar to adults by 18 weeks. Nesting period may extend over 5 months with hatchings from early May-August. During the study 23 nests were found. 87% were on south-facing slopes. The nests were often located within 183-366 meters of water. Rock outcrops were the most prevalent place for nests (56%) followed by grass forbs at 26%.

    Gray Partridge: No information on gray partridge nests in Hells Canyon or other canyon grasslands is available in the report. Based on studies for agricultural landscapes, dates for pair formation vary from region and weather conditions but usually January-February. Female chooses Male. Established pairs may remain together for life. Egg laying begins April-May. Incubation 21-26 days. Chicks are capable of short flights in <2 weeks and longer flights by 6-8 weeks.

    Sometimes it’s unavoidable but we try to not hike with the dogs off-trail in the spring in areas where we’ve seen chukar or huns during hunting season. Just like with that pair of eagles, we should try as much as possible not to disturb nesting areas. I suppose if you find yourself in the chukar hills with your pointing or flushing dogs this spring, avoid south-facing slopes with rock outcrops near water.

    Emily Dickinson wrote “Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul.” I find this to be very true.


  • What Did We Expect?

    What Did We Expect?

    More news this morning from Hercules, about a new lease they signed with the State of Idaho, encompassing for the first time the area on the other side of Highway 71.

    Most of this land is on the Andrus WMA, and offered hunters and other recreationalists nearly countless opportunities to use the public land. Ranchers also have run cattle extensively in this area for generations; it’s unclear how their leases will be affected by Hercules’ expansion. Expect to see the same degree of closure to access there as on the other side of Highway 71 between Camp Creek and Grade Creek. Now the entire area from Middle Fork of Brownlee Creek Road all the way down to below West Fork Road will be open to mineral exploration by Hercules.

    To anyone who’s read this blog, it’s no secret that this was our main hunting area. Now, with the charred remains of last season’s fires on the other areas we hunted nearby there’s nothing left within a day’s drive. What did we expect?

    Hercules’ news release on the new leases highlights the benefits to Idaho:

    “Under the terms of the lease, the Lessee will pay an annual rental fee of US$24,927, which will increase by 3% each year over the 20-year lease term. The Lessee will remit a 5% Net Smelter Return (NSR) royalty on any minerals produced from the leased area. To incentivize production, minimum annual royalty amounts are due each year, regardless of if the lease has reached production, starting at US$20,000 per year for the first five years of the agreement…”

    I guess Idaho should feel lucky that Hercules will be contributing almost the equivalent of one full-time beginning teacher’s salary.

  • What Is Life?

    What Is Life?

    Over the years, I or Leslie would joke, one of us, usually me, “What is life?” The question, for me, which I shared at the time, years ago, with my wife, came from a recalcitrant student of mine. “Recalcitrant student” is basically the same, in my short career as a teacher, as saying that black was dark.

    Anyway, Tony would sigh that while everyone was working on something, and I was “monitoring.” It took everything I had to ignore his question.

    But it’s a good question. Even though it would recur as a joke, it quickly, to both Leslie and me (we’d admit later), would evolve into a sort of private needs analysis. What about ______? Did he really mean _________? They couldn’t have thought that ________? And, we all know, there’s no answer.

    For game birds, the question is more basic, if asked at all, which most would say doesn’t happen. Ever. For those creatures.

    Today was Christmas. There was the usual several-day lead up. Now I’m walking the dogs on the golf course, snow here and there, crispy, then some quiet wet grass, what will spring be like? Will the greens show snow mold? Probably. They didn’t spray them this fall, the morons. Blah blah blah. What a waste some thoughts are.

    I used to love Christmas. Like most kids (I don’t actually know if this is true; it could just as easily not be), I’d get up earlier than my parents, sometimes conspiring with my sibling, and plot and hedge and wonder. I’d listen, too. That was private. Something never to be checked with the other. Shameful to admit that, maybe. Or maybe just claiming something like a moment for myself. Something before the deluge of waking up parents, of tinsel getting caught in bows and ribbons. Of scoldings, forgivenesses (because of Christ’s birthday) calculated agonizingly by the scolder, pecking orders chipped away at, families going at it.

    Lucky to have had that, to have had all that. All that it was. Lucky not to have known it wouldn’t last. Unlucky to have realized, probably simultaneously, that it was over. When you don’t have your own children, there’s no surrogacy period, and we’re in about the 5th decade of disillusionment. Of course, if you do have children, there’s always the chance they’ll hate you; that’s the consolation prize we give each other when we’re scared shitless we’ll be too daft to know what to do when it’s too late. Or even that it’s too late.

    So what is life? For me, for the past long while, it’s been two-thirds waiting and one-third chukar hunting and trying to make sure nothing falls through the cracks during that one-third. I think I’ve done a decent job at scribbling all that down. At managing it. At monitoring it. Maybe I leveraged that in my classroom when Tony was just, maybe, breathing an expression of boredom out loud. Or maybe he wanted someone to answer. Or maybe he was just playing the fool. As a brown-skinned kid, one of exactly two at our school, who suffered through (or at least sailed through) years of ignorance and bullying (“The Wall”), Tony became a flag-flying MAGA-phile. I see his truck and his flag sometimes there in town. And I’d bet he hasn’t a clue he impacted me in any way.

    One of my proudest achievements as a teacher, mainly because of what the students taught me from the experience, was having Tony’s class read Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno. I expected them to hate it or at least be bored by it. The opposite. That’s for keeps. Which makes me wish I’d had Tony and his class, all pretty recalcitrant boys who I’d genuinely come to love, read Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man.” I know Tony would have taught me a lot about the last few lines:

    “…the listener, who listens in the snow,
    And, nothing himself, beholds
    Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.”

  • Hercules-Barrick

    Hercules-Barrick

    Ventured over for a hunt on what used to be one of my favorite spots in Hells Canyon.

    We waited until the Hercules-Barrick “exploration” mining operation shut down for “winter weather.” The last two years, the one time each season we’d hunted over there was interrupted by run-ins with mining operations. All this on public land, land we pay taxes every year to maintain. Land that was given to Idaho specifically for wintering ground for deer and elk. Land that many people I know feed their families from the big and small game harvested from that public land. Land that ranchers I know used to run their cattle on in the summer. Land that is now torn up by new roads and heavy equipment.

    Up high, where no motorized vehicles can go (or haven’t gone yet), we saw lots of birds and big game prints. Down low, where it’s pretty easy to get to, not so much.

    Down lower, the signs. Of things to come, no doubt.

    The gate at the junction of Camp Creek and Grade Creek roads, all on public land funded by taxpayers who are being told they can’t access their land.

    It’s worse than sad to see something you love destroyed, and then to be charged for it, and then to be told to stay off of it. Idaho needs to re-work its ancient mining laws: if mining operations close or inhibit access to public lands, taxes should be reduced accordingly, even if it’s only a few cents. Remember the Boston Tea Party? Judy Boyle is not my representative. And Chris Paul, CEO of Hercules, is a Canadian whose business Canada has banned from doing things in his own country for numerous environmental and human rights violations. If they get their way, Barrick, an even more vile non-U.S. offender, will buy the operation and staff it with Peruvians. The local community won’t see a penny. And all this waiting for the deportation shoe to drop with the incoming “administration.”

    We hiked out on Camp Creek, a road that used to be an old two-track terminating at a locked gate on Highway 71, one of the few non-motorized access points to the north end of the Andrus WMA. Now it’s a freeway for heavy equipment, with numerous drill pads excavated along the road. I used to finish great hunts reflecting on life and hunting and connections while walking down this road, and occasionally get interrupted by pointing dogs or busting coveys, bonuses reserved for epic days in the field. Now, it’s just anger, sadness, and maybe a few less savory thoughts.

    This is a bad sign. Mining operations are required to have a “Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plan,” and Hercules-Barrick put this box and a contact phone number (with a Saskatchewan area code) at a place that nobody is supposed to go. The box was empty. I called the number, and got a “Call cannot be completed” message.

  • The Fire

    The Fire

    “God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
    No more water, but the fire next time.”

    –A.P. Carter, “God Gave Noah The Rainbow Sign“

    This summer, chukar country was on fire. All of the places, and more, that we hunt have been burned. North, south, east, and west of us. Like most chukar hunters, I wondered about the birds, how they were faring, if this year’s chicks were old enough to run or fly to pockets of safety. Bird numbers have been mostly good this season, but a huge chunk of our favorite spots are now toast.

    Most of the fires started from lightning. Much of the fuel that allowed them to spread, and to continue growing, is invasive annual grasses: cheatgrass, medusahead rye, and ventenata. The “range,” composed largely of extensive tracts of public land (mainly BLM), is now “currently defined by ecosystem dysfunction, social upheaval, and a warming climate.”

    We want to point fingers, but that does little good. In many of these places, it’s too late to stop the takeover of these destructive annual grasses, brought here from far-away places by feed for cattle. The pre-livestock perennials that kept the range “healthy” (a relative term) can’t compete and — in many places we hunt — are already gone forever. Bitterbrush and sagebrush, two of the most important perennials for a host of creatures endemic to the range, can’t survive the increased heat, frequency, and duration of today’s range fires. Same with the native bunchgrasses. In some of my favorite former chukar haunts what once plumed vibrant seas of multi-shaded green and gold now is a monochromatic moonscape of charred earth. Yesterday we happened to find ourselves descending into a bowl that once was filled with sagebrush and numerous partridges but now, four years after a big fire there, was choked solely with 4-foot-tall dried grass that completely hid our dogs. Sage and bitterbrush rarely come back once they burn hot. The invasive grasses all but guarantee more frequent fires on the range.

    The obvious irony is that chukar love the fresh, abundant shoots of these invasive grasses. The fall rains that bring “greenup” signal good bird numbers in lots of places. Doubling this irony, of course, is that this beloved bird is itself invasive. So why do we care?

    The answer is obvious and needn’t be stated. Less obvious, maybe, is that an even bigger threat to these public lands is the continuous attempt by robber barons to transfer them to the western states. We’ve been able to continue indulging our chukar hunting passion, despite the fires, because of the abundant choices of BLM and NFS land in Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Washington, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah. Closest to our home, thanks to Idaho’s repugnant trespass law of 2018, hundreds of thousands of acres adjacent to NFS and BLM land have been purchased and closed off, including (illegally) some public roads, by the notorious Wilks Brothers from Texas, a state with almost no public land. (Look on onX, for example, up the Middle Fork of the Weiser for “DF Development LLC” land, which is one of the Wilks Brothers’ land businesses.) The Wilks Brothers acquired much of their holdings by purchasing Idaho State lands, which the state is required to sell, which is what everybody knows they’ll do with any federal land that gets transferred to the state. Do you want to be like Texas, where you have to be rich in order to hunt?

    The latest legislative assault on public land is happening in Utah, in which a small faction of sycophants to the American Lands Council (funded largely by the Koch Brothers) is using unconstitutional boilerplate arguments paid for by taxpayers to argue that all federal land in Utah should be transferred to state control. The only way they’ll succeed is if the state’s constitution is amended, which is their aim. Most western states have an almost identical constitution which stipulates that citizens of those states “forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands” in the state. Courts have, until now, rejected these lawsuits as unconstitutional, but with the shift in the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court, along with numerous federal courts throughout the U.S., it’s possible that one successful challenge — maybe it’ll happen in Utah soon — will lead to a domino effect vaporising federally held (i.e., truly “public”) land in the west. For anyone who uses these public lands, that would be worse than any fire. If you believe in contacting your state representatives to express your opinion, Idaho Wildlife Federation has made a snazzy form for sending an editable comment to Crapo, Little, Risch, and Fulcher that encourages them to disavow Utah’s current effort to transfer its public land to the state. I did it, and am sure I’ll get the typically condescending response from Risch’s office. Can’t say I didn’t try…

    For an excellent, recent overview of where we are and how we got here, see the video below, in which Walt Dabney, former National Park Service Superintendent and Texas State Park Director, discusses the history and future of America’s public lands.

    Finally, with regard to the Hercules project near Cambridge, which is now being called, by Hercules, the Barrick Project, foreshadowing a transition from exploration to actual mining, there’s more information. I personally haven’t been able to stomach going back to the area after my visit last year, but Leslie and I hunted across the canyon from it and were stunned by how many new roads they’ve carved into the publicly owned land there, mostly on the Andrus WMA but extending now into USFS land higher up. Perhaps even more dire than increased fire vulnerability or transfer of public lands to state ownership, mining rights threaten the actual earth itself. The Idaho Conservation League just released a comprehensive report on mining in Idaho, which details current projects and past environmental impacts of mining in the Gem State (click the image below to load the report). Like fire itself, which is both real and metaphoric, verb and noun, mining is something everyone who values public land should know something about and not take for granted.