I came across a Sierra Club page that notes: "The biggest single step that automakers could take to reduce the cost of driving is to use existing technology to make our cars, SUVs, and light trucks go farther on a gallon of gas."
Digging on the dogs today, I came across this dead tree that had been worked over pretty well by a local pileated woodpecker.
"There’s only one way to protect yourself, your family, and native ecosystems from the most dangerous and destructive wild animal in North America, an animal responsible for maiming and killing hundreds of humans each year, an animal that wipes out whole forests along with most of their fauna. You have to kill it with guns.
I’m talking about the white-tailed deer. In what Gary Alt, one of the nation’s most respected wildlife biologists, calls “the greatest mistake ever made in wildlife management,” deer are being allowed to overpopulate to the point of destroying the ecosystems they’re part of and depend on. The annual mortality of roughly 1.5 million deer via collisions on the nation’s highways doesn’t make a dent, save in motor vehicles and their operators-damage that costs the insurance industry about $1.1 billion a year.
There are major or minor deer problems in all 50 states-if not with whitetails then with blacktails, mule deer, elk, and such aliens as axis deer. In virtually every case the reason is that natural predators have been eliminated or reduced to the point where they can’t effect control.The situation is especially grim in the East. No state is worse than Pennsylvania, but vast tracts in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia have been stripped of low vegetation. There are so many deer in South Carolina that bag limits are set by the day rather than by the season. On most of the coastal plain you can kill as many bucks as you want-every day for 140 days, using dogs, if you so choose. (The joke is that the deer are so stunted that the dogs retrieve.) Despite this superabundance, hunters burn and plant private land to encourage even more deer. Georgia, which also allows hunting with dogs in some areas, is so overrun with deer that it has set a seasonal bag limit of 12 (only two of which may have antlers) during two and a half months of rifle hunting. And yet, in order to manipulate national forestland to make room for even more deer, the state’s Department of Natural Resources opposes federal wilderness designation
>> To read more
On Sunday Chris and I met up at the Buckeystown General Store, before heading off to some nearby farm land.
It was just two weeks ago that Sailor was bitten by a black widow spider bite. Other than two shaved spots on her front legs, where blood had been drawn and fluids administered, she seemed fit as a fiddle.
The neurotoxins that had left her paralyzed for over six hours, seem to have left no lasting damage.
Mountain, of course, is always "ready for Freddy".
As for Chris' new pup -- eight-month-old Moxie -- this was her second time in the field. As we headed out of the woods and over a freshly cut barley field, she seemed to relax around the two older dogs and began running around, clearly enamored with Mountain who she decided was the leader of the pack.
It was 9 am, but it was already hot. Lucky for us Sailor and Mountain found pretty quickly in a nice shady hedge. The hole was very tight, however -- so tight Sailor could not even get in. We opened up the hole a little, but it still took 20 minutes of digging before Sailor managed to turn the corner and disappear. Once inside, however, she seemed to find quickly and began a furious baying. She was clearly hard against it.
The ground here was rooty, but the soil was OK for the first two feet. After that it was a mass of cobble stone.
These large stones had been gleaned from the fields and pushed to the edge more than 200 years ago when this land was first cleared for agriculture. Since that time, the hedge had grown up among the stones, and leaf litter and tree roots had drifted in over the top.
Digging was hard, but the pipe was not deep. About three and a half feet down we broke into the tunnel. I started a second hole a few feet over, but had not gotten very far before the groundhog managed to bolt out of a small den hole we had left unblocked.
The groundhog ran about 40 feet across the forest with Chris in hot pursuit, shovel in hand. That groundhog flew up the trunk of a tree and was 40-feet up in a matter of seconds.
Chris was pissed, but I was amused. Good for the groundhog. If we won every game, it would not be sport. We could hunt this one another day. He was a smart one.
While we were variously frustrated and amused, Sailor was still underground -- she was having a difficult time squeezing through the impossibly tight pipe that the groundhog had bolted out from. With a little assistance from Chris, however, she managed to pop out. First thing out of the pipe, she followed the groundhog's scent trail over to the tree and looked up. There it was. If only she could fly!
Moxie, Chris' little black dog, followed Sailor and was clearly cranked up from the scent she was now smelling . I think Moxie missed the bolt itself, but now that she could smell the groundhog and watch Sailor, she knew the game was afoot. Moxie paced back and forth from bolt hole to tree, and made an odd high-pitched whining sound as she looked up the trunk in the general direction Mountain was looking. Moxie was learning.
"That little one is putting it all together Chris," I said. "The penny has not quite dropped, but it's hanging there in the slot. She's right on the edge." Chris mentioned he had been doing a little tunnel work with Moxie, and she was already going down the wooden den liner and taking the corner to retrieve her squeeker toy.
Excellent. That's the idea!
We repaired the sette and moved up the field to the forest edge. The forest here sloped down to a creek bed, and on the other side of the creek was a high bank. I said I thought we would find up on that bank, and sure enough, we did.
No sooner had we crossed over than Mountain was doing his "Come here, Timmy" routine.
"Come here Timmy" is a reference to the old Lassie movies, when Lassie would run over to Timmy and bark. It always meant something complicated like, "Come here Timmy, Mr. McPherson has fallen down the well and has a fractured leg."
And Timmy always seemed to understand the whole story.
Now I have Mountain, and she does a "Come here, Timmy," especially if she finds something in a very tight hole she cannot quite enter herself. Now she stood at the edge of a rock-rimmed hole, looked over at me as I came down the creek bank, wagged her tail, and then looked back at the hole grinning.
"Come here, Timmy! Mr. Groundhog is down the hole, and I want to break its leg." Easy dog, I'm coming.
As is always the case if Mountain cannot enter on her own, this sette was very tight. It was located in the middle of four or five trees that seemed to spring from a jumble of boulders. I paused a bit, but decided it was probably doable as it was likely to be a shallow sette. Thankfully, it was.
After a bit of a struggle to get in, Sailor, the smaller dog, opened up to a nice solid bay. She was hard up against it, and the critter was not deep.
The bad news was that there was rock everywhere.
We located Sailor and began to pry up the large stones as we came to them. A little dirt was moved with a shovel, but this dig was mostly about cutting through roots, moving a few handfuls of soil, and then prying up more rock.
I shattered a few stones with the bar -- one of them pefectly round and bigger than my head. It was cleaved into two perfect half-spheres. Amazing.
When we got down to the pipe, we found Sailor hard on the groundhog's front end, and trying to pull it out of the hole face-first.
Sailor is a little thing -- just 10 pounds -- and not very hard, but she was going at this one hammer and tongs.
Enough of that -- time to get the right tool for the right job.
With a bit of a struggle we got Sailor off the groundhog, and swapped her out for Mountain. Mountain is a bit bigger and quite a bit stronger and younger. She gripped on and quickly pulled out a small groundhog of about 8 or 9 pounds.
I dispatched this one pretty quickly, and then we tied up Sailor and Mountain in order to let Moxie rag the carcas a bit. A little work with dead quarry can teach a young dog about scent, and is a small reward for paying attention while the older dogs work
Moxie chased the dead groundhog a bit as we pulled it around on the ground, and then we let her chew on it while we repaired the sette. When we finally placed the groundhog high up in the fork of a tree, Moxie was tongue-out and happy.
For her end of the bargain, Sailor was too tuckered to pucker, and we decided to stake her out under some heavy shade so she could rest. She had worked two good holes solo and in some pretty fierce heat. Mountain would have to find and work the next one.
We headed out of the forest and into an area of tall grassand small trees, with Moxie hard on our heels.
We had not gone more than 50 feet before we hit a big sette. Mountain was off looking for just such a hole. We paused, waiting for Mountain to circle back.
Moxie, however, seemed a little interested in the hole. I slid of my pack and put down the tools. This might be interesting.
Moxie stuck her head into the hole and slunk dowm low to the dirt like she was stalking.
"Look at that Chris, the penny is beginning to drop."
And drop it did. Moxie stuck her head in to the hole, pulled it out, put her head back in a little deeper, and then went in all the way up to the tip of her tail.
She came out again, looked at us, and then slid back down the pipe. Chris and I silently high-fived each other. Excellent! She was out of sight!
If that was all there was, this would have been a great day. But now, rather miraculously, Moxie began a deep rhythmic baying. Hot damn -- she had found!
This sette was big soft-earth pipe,and Moxie had a lot of room to move around down there. The pipe itself seemed to go straight back -- a nice simple sette. This was excellent.
We let Moxie bay it up for a while ("Let's not move too quick here, give her some time to learn a little something. She's in a nice safe sette"). Chris was ecstatic, and so was I. Waiting for the penny to drop? Hell, this dog had just hit the trifecta on the nickel slots.
We barred for the hole and found it two feet down. This dirt was easy digging -- no root and no rock. As luck would have it, we came into the side of the hole. There we found Moxie baying up the groundhog, and the groundhog -- aggressive as hell -- charging her from the stop end of the pipe.
Perfect!
In her excitement, Moxie had bitten her own tongue, but her tail was going like a metronome. She was clearly having a ball, and her deep baying was as solid as a dance hall beat.
This was about as good a first experience as a young dog could ever have.
After a few more minutes of letting Moxie work her stuff, we slipped in the shovel and I snared out the groundhog and dispatched it. This was a small Spring groundhog, but it was just what the doctor had ordered for a young dog like Moxie.
As I said to Chris as we filled in this third hole of the day, "We started off with two working dogs, but we're leaving with three." Yahoo!
Moxie is going to be terrific. The task ahead is to simply go slow. There is no rush now -- we know this little dog has the right stuff in her. She is not even 9 months old yet -- the best game plan now is to reign in the horses a bit and let her grow a little judgement and discretion.
A young dog with a little success is like a young motorcycle rider with his first 60 miles of road under his belt -- an accident waiting to happen due to over confidence.
Moxie rags her first one -- worked solo, front door to back
There will be a lot more digs between now and the first of October. The goal for the next two or three months should be to make sure Moxie only has positive experiences. That means reserving her for larger simple holes without too many complicatations for her to negotiate.
If a young dog is over-matched and jibes, it's hard to get her back in the groove again.
With a young dog so quick to start, the faster way to success is going to be found in the slow lane. Avoiding mistakes now needs to be Job One.
Chris and I were both hot and tired, and we decided to call it a day. We headed back to the vehicles, losing Mountain along the way. After a bit of looking we found her about 75 feet from where we had last seen her. She was in the middle of a thicket of weeds and broken timber doing her very best "Come here, Timmy" routine. She had found again, but in the 92 degree heat, we were too pooped to party.
Give it up dog, there's always next weekend!
An escapee from J-Unit with his fine young dog and its very first 'hog. There will be many more.
"The Red Sox have had such bad luck in the 20th century, I have to believe that in the new millennium it can only get better. Besides, statistically, scoring goals is harder than hitting a home run, and in the World Cup, you have the whole WORLD against you, but in baseball, the Red Sox only really have to beat the Yankees."
The human ability to wreck things has expanded exponentially faster than our ability to consider the future.
Clovis points have been replaced by "Daisy Cutter" bombs, dams large enough to flood entire civilizations, and mountaintop removal.
And yet most people still have not planned for their own retirement, much less considered the ramifications of genetic engineering, or the building of entire cities on rapidly dwindling reservoirs of fossil water.
And so, in order to try to shift the time paradigm, Steward Brand, Danny Hillis and Brian Eno decided to build a clock -- a physical, visible thing that would run for 10,000 years. The clock would chime once every 1,000 years, and its very presence would require a different kind of thinking about the future.
What would power the clock? Solar power needs too much maintenance and so too does nuclear power. Could geothermal energy do the job? What power source would never run down and would never submit a bill? And thus was born the beginning of the struggle to answer the first great design question: what would power the clock?
Who would maintain the clock? Clearly not one person, so there would have to be an organizational structure -- and thus was born the Long Now Foundation.
Where would the clock be located? It had to be some spot free from destruction for 10,000 years. And so the Long Now Foundation purchased part of a mountain in Nevada where the clock will be situated deep inside a limetone cliff.
Who would explain the clock? Ten thousand years from now people will not be using any language we know today. And so was born the Rosetta Disk to serve as a translation tool for the future.
The 10,000 year clock being built by the Long Now Foundation.
Changing a paradigm is not easy. In fact, it is so hard, and so rarely done, that the very idea of it seems more than a little Quixotic.
And yet all important change comes from paradigm shifts, and a paradigm shift about time is, I think, exactly what humans need. Or, as Stewart Brand has put it, "we need to think slower and deeper, not faster."
But to tell the truth, a 10,000 year clock is a little abstract for most people. Never mind that it is physical and visible and magically corrects itself for the long-term global wobble that will result in a deviation in solar time.
People are simply unable to grasp 10,000 years. They have more immediate concerns. Like lunch.
In any case, the future is not built in a 10,000 year lump any more than a cathedral is forged from a single block of stone.
The future will be built like a cathedral, made up of thousands of blocks of action and consequence, each carefully cut and interlocked into place.
And so was born "Long Bets," to promote more robust short-term thinking. Better building blocks to make a better cathedral.
The Long Bets idea was forged when Paul Ehrlich said he would give even odds as to whether Great Britain existed in 2000. Ehrlich was prone to making such provocative apocalyptic statements. His most famous book, "The Population Bomb," predicted massive die-offs in the developing world due to a shortage of food and a "longage" of people.
In fact, such predictions started with Malthus who postulated that population grew exponentially and food arithmatically, and for that reason doom was inevitable and that aiding the poor was foolish and would only abet more misery.
Malthus's tract on population was written to justify land clearances for the Enclosure Movement. Without writing a long essay on Malthus, it is enough to say that he was quite wrong. Since Malthus' time, global food production has outpaced human population growth, life expectancy at birth has increased, and literacy has spread.
Those facts, of course, have not stopped a small parade of apocalyptic predictors from following Malthus, from William Vogt to Paul Ehrlich, Garrett Hardin and William Paddock.
On the other side of the coin have been a few people like Julian Simon -- a University of Maryland economics professor who claimed human ingenuity could solve ALL problems. I will not delve into Simon's intellectual mistakes, but they are as legion as any of those on the opposite side of the coin. My aim here is not to get trapped in the quagmore of Ehrlich and Simon. What we are talking about here is Long Bets -- let's get back to the Long Bet that was made.
Simon challenged Ehrlich to bet on the future price of any 10 commodities. The bet would last 10 years, and the winner would pocket the price differential in the commodities.
Ehrlich quickly accepted the challenge, picked a portfolio of 10 metals, and crowed that he would make out like a bandit.
Ten years later, however, when the value of the portfolio was added up, it turned out that every single metal had declined in value.
Simon pocketed Ehrlich's check with a wink and a nod.
Much has been written about this bet in the past, (google Simon Ehrlich bet). I will not delve into it too deeply other than to say that both men were overly simplistic in their analysis of both resource use, pricing and population.
That said, the idea of a financial bet between two parties intrigued Stewart Brand and his small band of talented brethren.
In their quest to promote "slower and better" thinking, a "Long Bet" seemed like an excellent mechanism to encourage both increased participation and better prognostication.
Money has a way of focusing the mind.
And so was born LongBets.org.
I came across this web site five years ago when I was looking into what Stewart Brand was now up to. Brand had been the creater of The Whole Earth Catalogue -- a series of simple catalogue-like publications, assembled by a merry band of hippies, that were so sweeping in their interests that Steve Jobs (of Apple Computer fame) has credited Brand with creating the paper-and-print conceptual forerunner of the World Wide Web.
All I know is that The Last Whole Earth Catalogue is still worth reading -- again and again -- even today.
When I checked out the Long Bets web site I found some real brainiacs making serious bets -- people like physicist Freeman Dyson, voice-synthesizer guru Ray Kurzweil, Vint Cerf (father of the internet) and Mitchell Kapor (inventor of Lotus software), to say nothing of Stewart Brand, Brian Eno and Danny Hillis themselves.
Very cool, but the bets were too steep for a nonprofit wage-slave like me. Two thousand dollars was the minimum bet, and all "winnings" were to go to charity. That was more than I could give away in a single stroke.
A while later, however, I was on a list-serv in which people were talking rather broadly about the energy crisis. I tried to explain the limits of M. King Hubbert's oil data, a well as the fungibility of energy types and other such thoughts.
As usual no one was convinced of the other person's point of view, and after a point the list drifted off to other topics.
A few months later, on the same list, I mentioned that Stewart Brand had sharply reduced the money limit on a "Long Bet," and that now it was just $200 on each side. Almost immediately, Steven B. Kurtz -- one of the previous energy debaters -- asked me if I wanted to make a "Long Bet" on future energy costs.
Sure, I said. Let's make it the price of a kilowatt hour of electrical power, and let's park the bet two years into the future.
In truth, I had in mind winning the first Long Bet. I bet Steve did too.
Steve took the bet. Now, three year later, it appears he has won it, though not before a serious bit of confusion occured over at the U.S. Department of Energy which initially published data suggesting the price of electrical energy had declined.
Apparently DOE had at least two or three years worth of data wrong (including the initial price of energy at the start of our bet) due to lies, deception and data confusion that grew out of the Enron energy fiasco. In the end, looking at the re-published data, it appears the price of electrial power has gone up very slightly due to the disastrous Middle East policy of George Bush which has (among other things) resulted in a very significant decline in Iraqi oil production. Score one for Steve!
Steve and I actually have a longer, more serious bet on the human condition, in which I argue that "Over the next ten years, we will make measurable global progress in all five areas of the human condition: food, access to clean water, health, education, and the price of energy."
I let Steve pick five data sets from a closed list of about 20 options, all of which are kept by the United Nations, and which therefore have (hopefully) some continuity of collection methodology. If Steve wins on any single point, he wins the entire bet. So far, I think he is losing on all points, but the wager is still young, and we shall see.
That said, I think both Steve and I thought we really would beat Ted Danson. What was the chance that the Boston Red Sox would win the World Series in the next three years?
And yet Danson won. Though the Danson-Elliot bet seems a trifle lightweight on the surface, it's actually a wager about probability and risk, and not mere sports.
With the World Cup played only once every four years, and with far fewer Major League Baseball teams than World Cup soccer teams, Ted Danson had about a 20:1 chance of winning over Mike Elliot.
But I figured I had at least 8:1 odds of beating Ted Danson to win the first Long Bet. After all, the Sox had been losers a long time, and the window for my success was a mere two and a half years.
Of course, luck does play a hand in all things, and on this roll of the dice I lost -- twice.
Such is life.
What does all this have to do with hunting and dogs? Well, not a lot, to tell the truth. But maybe a little. I did manage to work hunting and dogs into the beginning of this piece. Now let's see if I can work it in at the end as well.
There is the small point that Thomas Malthus had quite a lot to do with the Enclosure Movement, which in turn laid the foundation for the fox and terrier work that followed, as well as the speciation of terriers following Robert Bakewell's use of enclosures to improve livestock. To read more about that see this >> illustrated history of working terriers.
Finally, for those who dig in the Eastern and Midwestern United States, the legacy of the mammoth can be found in our hedges and forests. If you are in the right thicket you may find Osage Orange, Honey Locust or Kentucky Coffeetrees.
All three of these trees have large fruits and seed pods with thick protective coatings or thorns -- natural defenses designed to help protect them from over-grazing by mammoths that roamed through this area just 10,000 years ago. The mammoths are gone, but their ghosts remain in the form of these tough and defiant trees.
Hopefully, all this will make you think, just a little, about how fragile this earth is ... about how much damage humans can do if they do not plan ... about the mammoth responsibility that comes with the powers we now have to shape the natural world.
Let's not screw it up this time .... We cannot afford to bet the farm again.
____________________________
The last mammoth, a dwarf species, was killed on Wrangle Island about 3,800 years ago -- about the time the pyramids were being made.
American Kennel Club Promotes Coonhound Initiative
By COKE ELLINGTON, Associated Press Writer, July 08,2006
The American Kennel Club is trying to make coonhounds couth.The nation's largest and most recognized dog registry is in the early stages of a major push to add coonhounds to its prestigious rolls, hoping both to increase its membership and to assure these sad-eyed symbols of country life stick around a while longer.
"We're interested in the registration of these dogs and their litters, but we're most interested in preserving these dogs for the future," said Steve Fielder, who moved to Raleigh in late 2004 to launch the club's coonhound initiative.
To meet its targets, the AKC has found itself negotiating with governments to assure there's ample hunting land for the dogs, setting up competitive hunts and working to enlist more of the estimated 1.2 million coonhounds in the nation.
It may seem like unlikely work for a club headquartered on swanky Madison Avenue in New York City and more closely tied to images of pouffy poodles than howling hounds, but Fielder insists it's right in line with the club's mission.
"The AKC wants to be all things canine," said Fielder, one of about 300 people at the AKC's operations center in Raleigh.
To help with its initiative, the AKC began offering free registration last year to coonhounds already enlisted with two other national clubs. The move resulted in about 10,000 registrations, up from about 500 the previous year. The club expects to have another 10,000 registered by the end of this year, pushing the total number of AKC registered coonhounds to 22,000.
Still, coonhounds make up a tiny part of the club's registry. Labrador retrievers were the most popular breed in 2005 with nearly 138,000 registered by the AKC. Almost 921,000 dogs were registered in all.
Registration costs just $15, but acceptance by the AKC is invaluable to breeders and others who need or want to prove their dogs have pure bloodlines.
For coonhounds, registering alsoopens the way for the dogs to compete in AKC-sanctioned hunts and competitions that offer titles, trophies and cash prizes of as much as $25,000. Just in July, the AKC is sponsoring about 70 coonhound competitions across the nation, including contests for youth, field trials, water races and night hunts.
Night hunts tie most closely to the tradition of the coonhound owners across the South who once led packs of dogs on late-night winter hunts, forcing the raccoons up trees where the hunters could get a clear shot at them. The raccoon hides fetched $20 to $30 each in the late 1970s, according to Perry Sumner, a biologist with the state Wildlife Resources Commission. With demand dwindling, a raccoon hide today is worth about $5, he said.
"Now the money is more in the hounds than in the coons," Sumner said.
A good coonhound can sell for $4,000 to $5,000, with some bringing up to $100,000, said David Gardin, the president of the North Carolina Coonhunters Association. Running the dogs has become more of an expensive hobby than a vocation, he said. Outfitting a hunter can cost up to $5,000, excluding the cost of the dogs, and the AKC doesn't allow guns or the taking of game during any of its events.
"It's more politically involved and it's more expensive," Gardin said.
The AKC first registered black and tan coonhounds - one of six coonhound breeds - in 1945, but during the past 60 years there had been little mingling between hound owners and the AKC. Coonhound owners were more likely to register with the Professional Kennel Club or the United Kennel Club and the AKC didn't seem to mind.
Coonhound handlers cared mostly how well a dog could tree a raccoon, while the AKC largely focused on the appearance of dogs.
Now, their interests seem to have merged.The AKC is expected to fully recognize Plott hounds sometime next year, while the treeing Walker, the American English, the bluetick are in the early stages of being fully recognized, perhaps by 2008.
"The coonhound has been kind of like a subculture in the world of dogs," Fielder said, "but with the AKC involved the spotlight is shining on the breeds."
All proceeds from the sale of this stuff will go to terrier rescue. 100 percent! But for the money to go to rescue, people have to buy a few things. Now you could just buy stuff somewhere else AND give to canine rescue on top, but for some reason the second half of this equation is too rarely done. So we've made it easier for you to do well (this is great stuff) and do good (this is a great cause) in one simple transaction.
Please help keep this little chain of miracles going! Think about it ... a small idea begats really great art .... and through the miracle of the internet we are able to put that art on a whole bunch of cool stuff and offer it for sale, with 100 percent of the money going to support terrier rescue.
All we need is YOU to complete the chain of love. You have friends in the terrier communtiy -- strengthen those friendships by giving an "American Working Terriers"-branded gift today.
And don't you think you deserve a little something too? Of course!
This little idea might get you a few farm permissions.
I got one of Steve Bordio's books in the mail yesterday (On the Edge of the Wilds) and I am just 9 pages into it and am knocked out. It's depressing to find smart sons of bitches who can really right and actually have something to say, 'cause basically you know you will never be able to say it half as well. On the other hand, it's exhilirating too -- new ideas and turns of the phrase that just pop in your brain. I feel like an apartment dog taking his first long walk though a zoo. Pretty grand this place!
In the pages I've covered so far, Steve's talking about the smug disdain that the well-bred, over-fed, I-got-me-a-medical-plan and a college education crowd feel towards people that work with their hands and, conversely, the folks that actually own large ranches and farms.
It's more than the fact that Steve says it all very well (smooth, smooth); it's that he has something to say that really needs to be said and (as far as I know) has not been said before. I think it must help to be from the East and have gone West and stayed and really paid attention -- it is an expatriot journey every bit as clarifying as what deToqueville did (and certainly just as far geographically). It is an old observation that to write best about Somewhere it helps to be from Elsewhere -- Hemingway in Idaho and Florida writing about Paris, etc. Anyway, it is at some level depressing and inspiring to read something this well put together. Writing this good reminds me that done properly writing is more than typing -- it is craft.
"For the longest time I have felt a little like a polar bear at a road-side zoo -- pretty sure there must be others like me, but without much evidence of that reality. Now I see there are others out there with a similar bend in the brain -- not a lot of us, but more than one, and that's a pretty thrilling thing on this end. I know some professional environmental types, but I have to say most seem to know almost nothing about critters -- it's either an academic excercise or a romantic thing, or a legal construct (lots of lawyers!) or else it's just the fear-mongering tribe they chose out of college. For whatever reason, there is often not much real connection to things that snap or go squish under foot, or that fly up or bite back in the hedge. A dissapointment."
