Thursday, April 19, 2007
The Last Great Lurcherman
Parody is always a form of compliment, even if a back-handed one, and when it is done well it can rise to an art form as it does here in this piece from Gary Hosker's web site. Wonderful!
This is, of course, a twist on the sometime fawning magazine profiles about the late Brian Plummer (including one that once appeared in The New Yorker), which generally featured his ratting terriers, but sometimes his Hancock-bred lurchers as well.
This is, of course, a twist on the sometime fawning magazine profiles about the late Brian Plummer (including one that once appeared in The New Yorker), which generally featured his ratting terriers, but sometimes his Hancock-bred lurchers as well.
I will see if I can find the old New Yorker piece and post it -- I think I have it somewhere. Note that the jump link at the end of this exerpt takes you to the rest of the story on the original web site.
John Higginbottom, the Last Great Lurcherman.
For this report we are indebted to the Sunday Spineless and its roving correspondent, Miss Wilhelmina Wordspinner.
This article first appeared in the 1991 lurcher yearbook. However, Miss Wordspinner has made ‘several’ trips to the Yorkshire Dales since 1991 and has agreed to publish her articles and extracts from her private diaries here on the Official Lurcher Web Site.
Part 1.
I drove north the three hundred long miles from my comfortable air-conditioned London office to interview a recluse, a self- styled eccentric, a man above men, a lurcherman. Name, John Higginbottom.
My journey started with a long drive north, then north and north again along the MI for what seemed an age. As the flat lands of the south turned first to gently rolling meadows of Northamptonshire and then to the hills of Derbyshire I drove ever onwards, finally arriving in the windswept dales of Yorkshire; a land where, if it's not raining one instinctively knows it must be snowing.
High limestone and millstone grit fells clad in an ever-present mist seemingly sweep up to the very base of the stratosphere. This North of England that lies on the wrong side of a theoretical line known as the north-south divide; a North of dark satanic cotton mills that belch black smoke out of imposing, discoloured and misshapen chimneys, chimneys reaching almost as high as the fells that surround them, blending with the landscape yet at the same time destroying it. A North of coal mines and colliers, of iron foundries and smelters, where work- hardened men lead lives so arduous their circumstances could best be described as an existence.
Yet, leave this industrial landscape that was once the pulsating heart of a proud British Empire and drive only a few short miles through the bitter driving rain and take a side road (track would be a more accurate description for metalled roads have yet to come to this part of Britain) signposted 'to the edge of the world' and one encounters an altogether unique England.
An England so blissfully isolated from the twentieth century that one feels encapsulated in an age long past.
Sheep hardened by many a long winter shelter behind 'dry' stone walls from the ever present torrent of rain, where men still scrape a meagre living for themselves behind horse and plough, cultivating crops on half an acre of boulder-strewn land, subsistence living that is this England. Yes this can truly be called a place on the edge of the world.
I took this path to find lurcherman John Higginbottom, John, a giant of a man with ruddy complexion, short greying hair, a beard of flaming red, and hands like the proverbial size ten shovel. Hands that were cut, bruised and contorted, he told me, through many a long desperate dig, rescuing his battle-hardened terrier 'Tootsie' from life or death conflicts with rabbit and other subterranean creatures, this reclusive, almost shy man refused to talk about.
John, a youthful forty-seven, a taciturn man who still retains most of his own teeth, was brought up in the Midlands and is a spot welder by trade. I asked him why? Why does any man try and live here, all alone pushing himself to the very limits of endurance in order to eke out a shallow existence in this particularly inhospitable place, with only the bark of his seven lurcher dogs and sound of the occasional crow for company. “Have you ever spot welded?” replied John philosophically. He sat quite still reading Kipling to himself.
Breaking the silence I enquired about the breeding of his battle-hardened terrier, Tootsie. “That,” explained John, ”is a Higginbottom terrier, the culmination of a twenty-five year selective breeding programme based on the Yorkshire terrier with just a dash of King Charles spaniel for temperament.”Feeling that I had in some small way penetrated his rock-hard exterior and socialized myself with John, I asked, nay begged, to accompany him on one of his famous hunting expeditions -- expeditions, on which I was informed, he uses his homogeneous pack of Higginbottom lurchers to hunt all legal quarry. For John truly is the last of the self-confessed great hunters.
John fell silent, gritted his teeth, pursed his lips, and went into deep thought, almost a trance as if he were going through a metamorphosis or having an out-of-body experience.
Then as suddenly as he had entered the trance he snapped back to reality, kicked his dog and snapped: “Yes, the mad are in God's keeping. Tomorrow morning, crack of ten thirty, not a minute later and I hope for your sake you have a high attention span.”
Glancing in my direction before walking into his meagre shanty home, shared with his pack of Higginbottom hounds, John continued “I insist upon complete and utter obedience from both my dogs and those who chose to follow me.” Fixing me with those steely blue eyes, he gave a penetrating stare, a stare that I would come to know as his force 7 stare. I felt as the Apostles must have felt on the banks of sea of Galilee. I was in awe of this demigod.
Next morning we set off across the fields at a quarter-past- eleven precisely. I asked John why he was late. “Time has no relevance here on the edge of the world,” replied he, wiping the sleep from his eyes.
'Ferrets, ferrets I must have ferrets,' he whispered gently. Suddenly he opened a hutch door, and plunged his gigantic hand into a cage of these ferocious little carnivores. Five ferrets bit deep into the flesh of each of his massive digits -- yet did this man flinch? Not he.
With blood trickling down his forearm he throttled each ferret in turn in order to prise them from his fingers. "Aren't you concerned about infection' I asked “No,” said he “The poker's in the fire. I'll cauterize the wounds when we return.” I glanced ominously at the cumulus clouds gathering overhead, said a silent prayer and thought – ‘If we return.’ >> TO READ MORE
Build It and They Will Come
From an email received today from a friend:
This is the actual turnoff from Banff National Park, Canada to the # 1 highway to Calgary. Great picture isn't it? They had to build the animals (especially the elk) their own crossing because that was where the natural crossing was and after the highway was built there were far too many accidents. I understand it didn't take the animals long to learn that this was their "road." (click on picture to enlarge)
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Elk, Wolves and Grazing
Over at the Black Bear Blog, Tom Remington has a couple of posts on wolves, and also one in which a young man asks a very good question: Why Aren’t Ranchers Upset About Elk Eating Crops?
Reading these posts tonight made me recall an email I got back in January in response to a post I made about Idaho Governor "Butch" Otter's suggestion that 500 wolves be shot in his state.
The not-so-subtle title of my January post was "Why Stupid on Stilts Is Good for the Environment."
A bit harsh, to be sure, and my post generated an email from a reader who is a US Forest Service rangeland management specialist in Montana. He had a couple of objections to my original post. They were:
Points one and two are readily conceded on this end. Sometimes, when I am writing, it's easier to pull up the old stuff in my head than it is to track down the latest quote, picture and data set. Western lands are still over grazed, but it is true that they are not as bad as they were (or as good as they are going to get, I will venture).
As I noted in the last line of the original piece in question, America does wildlife management pretty well, and it's thanks to a lot of Good Government Guy and Gals, hunters, and environmentalists working together that this is so. I am a pretty enthusiastic supporter of the younger, college-educated and science-based public lands managers coming up. I truly believe the best is yet to come.
That said, I disagreed with points three and four, and I detailed why in a missive back to my Forest Service friend. Because my response is "on point" as to why Elk are given a pass for eating alfalfa while wolves are not given a pass for killing an occasional calf, I append it below:
Dear M -
Thanks for the note. I see you are working in the ___ National Forest in Montana. I know nothing about Montana National Forests, but I do know about land management problems in Idaho.
The good news, is that some of the major problems in the Nolo and Clearwater are getting fixed. In fact, the good news across the board is that we have much better science and much better public lands administrators now than we used to have. It used to be that a USFS guy would mark his career by how many big timber sales he could put together. Now, in part due to litigation and in part due to education and attrition in Forest Service and BLM personnel, different values are in competition with each other. That's a good thing for all sides. Who knew truth to suffer in a free and open debate?
There is, of course, a place for sensible private business use of public lands, but I think you would agree that it's an easier mission to achieve in theory than in reality. The Clearwater, for example, needs more prescribed burns, but the timber folks are not all that enthusiastic about that -- they would rather skid out the big trees and leave the trimmings for beetle bore infestation. Burning up their profits? Are you mad?
The same is true for mining, drilling and grazing. I think you and I would probably agree that there are a lot of places in the West that could benefit from a little less grazing (especially around riparian areas), but try to get the cattle folks to agree to that, much less the cattle. When we talk about free range in this country, it's not just free of fencing -- it's free of human oversight too, which is why wolves are an issue. Not only could the cattle guys not be bothered with owning land, or building fences, they generally cannot be bothered to put someone out there 24-7 to watch the herd.
The good news, as you note, is that a great deal of National Forest rangeland has improved through the 1980s and 1990s thanks to better management practices. A very big problem remains, however: The Western range is vast, the herds of cattle grazing on them are numerous, and the Forest Service has too few personnel to do very much on-the-ground oversight.
That said, I concede that things are better than they used to be, and I have little doubt they are not as good as they are going to get. I am, basically, a huge fan of our public lands professionals.
OK, that said, let's look at the wolf-cow-rangeland-elk-hunter nexus that Governor Otter speaks of for a second.
The first question is this: Are wolves actually having a serious negative impact on elk populations in Idaho or Wyoming?
The short answer is NO.
In Wyoming, where wolves were first introduced in the West (outside of MN where they have always been extent) the state reports that their elk populations are 91,555 -- more than 9,000 head over capacity.
"We would like to get the elk down to our population objective," Game and Fish spokesman Al Langston said. "But overall in the state, the elk population is doing well."
In Idaho, The Idaho Statesman (hardly a liberal rag) notes that : "In 2005, hunters harvested 21,523 elk - the largest number in a decade and the seventh-largest harvest since 1935."
In Montana, nearly 60 percent of Montana's original elk management units exceed their elk-population objective and the folks that write the outdoor columns in your neck of the woods openly laugh at the fear mongers who say wolves are a problem, noting that Montana's elk-harvests are very fine, thank you.
Where elk populations have gone down, it turns out wolves have been less of a factor than the drought -- the same drought that drives beetle bore infestations, and which has always resulted in swings in elk and deer populations in the west.
The bottom line is that, so far, the presence of wolves does not appear to have had a noticeable, significant or unwanted decline in the average Elk population of Idaho, Wyoming or Montana -- despite the rise in wolf populations in all three states.
If there had been a noticeable, significant or unwanted decline in Elk populations, would the proper response be to shoot large numbers of wolves, or would it be to cut back on private ranching on public lands?
My answer: Cut back on cattle and sheep grazing on public lands. Here's why:
As a general rule, wild land can support more wild animals than domestic animals for the simple reason that wild animals (like elk and deer) are native to the land and pretty efficient at converting forbs and grass into flesh.
As you can see from the data (gleaned from GAO), land that can support one cow can support more than 7 mule deer, more than 2 elk, and more than 10 pronghorn.
The Governor of Idaho wants to shoot 500 wolves, each of which can be expected to consume about 20 elk a year (according to Yellowstone biologists who track this kind of thing).
To put it another way, 500 wolves can be expected to eat about 10,000 elk a year across Idaho.
If we want to replace those 10,000 elk in Idaho, we do not need to shoot wolves. All we need to do is dial back on the Animal Unit Months (AUMS) of grazing we are now allowing on public land in Idaho. The AUM data for state land (and federal lands by agency) is available here, but from what I can see, if we want to see an increase of 10,000 elk in Idaho, all we have to do is dial back on public lands grazing in Idaho by 5,000 head.
Now, of course, the subsidized grazers will object to this, but remember they also object to Elk being in our National Forests. As far as some ranchers are concerned, the National Forest system is something they own, and it's there for their use -- not for elk, wolves, back country packers, fly fishermen or even hunters.
The "beef cow vs. bull elk" debate is not a new one, of course, but it is important to note that it predates the rise of wolf in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.
On the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation's web site, for example, there's a pretty good article detailing how livestock grazing in the Elkhorns negatively impacted the elk herds up there until they began putting together an integrated land management plan. Fish, Wildlife and Parks area coordinator Mike Korn is quoted as saying:
"The combination of elk and cattle on public land allotments has always been the point of contention in the Elkhorns. The general feeling from livestock permittees is that there are too many elk using the forage, and their cattle are suffering because of it."
"Too many elk"?
Well sure, you can have too many elk if you put a lot of beef cattle on the land and also have no wolves to keep things in balance.
But let's remember who the foreigner is here. The elk and the wolf are native to the landscape, but the cattle showed up yesterday and are now claiming all the rights. If something has to give, it has to be the last arrival.
Especially since the last arrival is costing America's taxpayers quite a bit of money -- $500 million a year in direct costs according to one study.
Before the wolves showed up, the cattle guys were being painted as the bad guys. Now the cattle guys are only too happy to change the story and point to the wolf as the bad guy, just as the timber guys are only too happy to change the story and point to forest fire as the bad guy.
There's just one problem with that equation, and that problem is what's left unsaid: that what made Montana, Idaho and Wyoming the great states they are today was not subsidized free-range cattle, strip mining, and clear cutting of timber, but God-driven natural forces.
And three of those natural forces are elk, wolves and fire.
For the cattle guys, the wolf is a convenient distraction from what I think is the real story, which is that elk and cattle are in direct competition with each other. The cattlemen want us to forget that every cow stands where two bull elk should be bugling.
The good news in the American West is that we can still field-test our theories against reality. Most of the west is under "new management" of one form or another -- Wall Street Executives, PhD scientists, rangeland experts, farmers, ranchers, Forest Service and BLM officials, etc. Some of these folks are managing their lands better than others, but what's truly interesting is that very few of them seem to be managing their land better than God did.
Former Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation president Bob Munson helped start the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, which gives us some very interesting numbers about roadless forest land in Idaho -- land where there is no timber cutting, no fire suppression, no mining, and (as the name suggests) no roads. There is also not too much grazing of cattle. This is land still under the "old management plan," i.e. God's Original Design (or GOD for short).
As the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership notes:88% of the land in hunt units that yielded more than 90% branched-antler bull elk is roadless; 94% of the land in hunt units yielding both 70% bucks and 40% 4+ point bucks in the mule deer harvest is roadless; 58% of westslope cutthroat trout habitat is found in roadless areas. And, 83% of the of the westslope cutthroat populations rated as "strong" are found in roadless areas; 74% of chinook salmon habitat is found in roadless areas; and 94% of sediment-impaired (degraded) streams are located outside of roadless areas.
Now, to be clear, I am not against all grazing on public lands any more than I am against all timber harvest on public lands. You are correct that, in theory, we should be able to cut timber and graze cattle on public lands under science-based supervision and with carefully crafted integrated management plans.
That said, I am against allowing folks to exploit public lands for private financial gain while the American people lose money on the deal.
And the American people DO lose money on the deal -- lots of money.
Timber sales alone on public land results in a net LOSS to U.S. taxpayers of over a billion dollars a year. The unreimbursed costs of grazing on public lands appears to generate major losses as well.
You suggest that everything in the National Forest system is subsidized, and ranchers, miners, drillers, and timber companies are no different in this regard than hunters, anglers or back country tourists.
I disagree.
The timber and cattle companies working public lands employ few people, put disproportionately high resource pressures on the land, and require far more management oversight, construction, and reclamation money than do hunters, anglers, bird watchers, or car campers. Extractor industries pocket the cash (hence the name "cash cow") and leave us with the bills.
Hunters, anglers, bird watchers and campers are not a complete free ride, of course, but the cost-per-person-served is very low compared to the cattle and logging companies, and a tremendous number of jobs are generated by recreation -- far more than are generated by cattle and logging.
Lumping these two groups together, I think, is to lump two very different things. One group is a largely benign presence on the land and a huge economic engine, while the other leaves a massive environmental footprint, but creates relatively few jobs.
Ultimately, of course, all public land debates devolve into politics. Sadly, however, the elk, wolves, trees and bears do not vote -- people do.
The good news is that Governor Otter's inane comments about killing off all the wolves are exactly the kind of thing that mobilizes people to take action, donate to groups, join political campaigns, and vote. In the year ahead, I suspect no one will have harmed the cause of public lands grazing -- or done more to help wolves and elk in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana -- than Governor "Butch" Otter.
And for that, we give thanks -- not because we are against ranchers, but because we are for elk and wolves.
Unlike Governor Otter, I think all sides can find room for each other out there in vast stretches of the American west. If push comes to shove, however, Governor Otter has just helped make sure that the wolf (and the elk) will not lose.
My friend working for the U.S. Forest Service objected to a few bits in my missive. As I recall (I am afraid I do not have his original email), he argued that there was a lot more grazing in roadless areas than I thought and that the $500 million grazing figure was too high.
He may be right. Without a doubt there is no ending the debate and discussion on these issues.
The good news is that in the discussion is the solution. At the end of the day, though we may not end up with a perfect policy that makes all sides happy all the time, we get a pretty good policy in which we end up being neck-deep in elk, deer, wolves, alfalfa, and all the rest.
Whatever it is we get wrong, we are (more often than not) getting conservation issues rights. And for that, I remain a proud American.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Cacophonous Coyotes of Washington, D.C.
Within two miles of National Geographic's main headquarters in Washington, D.C. there are coyotes, and The Washington Post reports that they howl. A lot.Quick, run and get a British camera crew. I will grow a beard and play Grizzly Adams of Rock Creek Park.
The sound did not belong. It was high-pitched and keening, something from a prairie night or a Hollywood sound-effects reel.
Something one should not hear while sleeping in a bed, in a house, in Chevy Chase, in the District.
"AOOOOOOO!" said Lee Bernstein, mimicking the noise that woke her up at 4 a.m. March 31. "Like a cartoon or something."
Other people have heard yipping in the woods near Cleveland Park, barking off Oregon Avenue NW and wailing that answers police sirens near Military Road NW. These are the sounds of coyotes, the Western predators that first colonized the city's suburbs and now have established themselves in Rock Creek Park.
As the animals have moved in, neighbors have started hearing things that leave them startled, curious and suddenly worried about where the dog is. In the middle of the District: actual calls of the wild.
"It's an eerie howl. It's a little -- what am I thinking of -- like a monster-movie howl," said John Northcutt, who lives across the street from the park. "It was just very strange to be in the city and hear that."
Coyotes have recolonized most of the urban East in the past few decades -- or perhaps colonized, since scientists aren't sure whether they were here before European settlement.
Their proliferation is partly about the reforestation of the East Coast as farming has faded and woods have returned. But it's also partly about the animals themselves. They have adapted well to the suburban environment, eating everything from garbage to fawns to small mammals. Coyotes are the most general kind of omnivore -- like raccoons, if raccoons also ate rats and house pets.
In fact, scientists say East Coast coyotes often grow bigger than those in the West. The life, and the hunting, might actually suit them better here.
"Easy pickings," said Paul Peditto, an official with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. "They're highly adaptive, and they're efficient, and what they learn is that it's much easier to take a suburban small pet . . . as opposed to having to run down a wild cottontail rabbit."
The first coyotes arrived in the Washington suburbs years ago. Biologists now estimate there are at least 1,250 in Northern Virginia alone.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Dog Food Blues: A Waive of Pancreatitis Is Next
Writing in today's Washington Post, reporter William Booth gets it just right when he notes that,
There is no accident in a can of dog food. Just the opposite. The contents have been supplemented and fortified for nutritional, mineral and vitamin balance, the foods precisely engineered for smell, texture and palatability. (The makers want dogs to desire it, but not crave it, and they want its smell not to repulse owners.) And then they market it with all the cunning they can muster."
Booth goes on to observe that pet owners that were ignorant about where their old pet food came from, are now about to go down a new road with eyes closed:
[T]rust me, consumers were very surprised when they learned that Menu Foods makes din-din sold under dozens of pet food names, from the cheap generic store labels to the fancy "premium" offerings. A lot of familiar brands are on the recall lists, such as Alpo, Mighty Dog, Iams, Science Diet, Eukanuba, Gravy Train, Paws, Special Kitty and Ol' Roy.
The recalls are unprecedented. There never has been anything as extensive before for animal or human foods. While the volume -- 60 million cans and counting -- is sizable, what is remarkable is the number of pet food makers involved. It's almost all of them. (For a complete list, see http://www.fda.gov/.)
"Some people are absolutely panicked," said Bonnie Beaver, a professor of veterinary medicine at Texas A&M University. "Some owners are going to home-cooking. But too much fat, and you've got a case of raging pancreatitis."
Of course, there is nothing to be done. You can tell people to relax and just feed their dogs bagged Purina kibble (a good product made in a dedicated factory by people who know what they are doing), but the folks that used to buy expensive dog food based on their unified field theories of pet food (and who were shocked to discover they were buying Old Roy at three times the price), are now positive (once again) that they know more about dog food than anyone else on the planet, including anyone from Purina. And so we have all kinds of list-serv kooks out there touting even more untested brands and home-grown diets.
Knock yourself out people -- there is not stopping you.
Meanwhile, reporter Barr reports the chief financial officer of Menu Foods sold nearly half his shares in the company less than three weeks before the widespread recall was announced -- a recall that was delayed at least three weeks by executives in the company.
Menu's CFO describes it all as "a horrible coincidence." Right. Of course it was. He will, of course, be donating 100 percent of his ill-gotten booty to charity? I thought not.
The only good news here is Congress is ramping up to investigate, and almost every member of Congress owns a dog or a cat, and that is true also for the folks over at the U.S. Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the various U.S. Attorney's offices around the country.
Snap a jelly pack: the CFO of Menu Foods is toast.
.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Coffee and Provocation
Wolf-Man, Dog-Man or Idiot?:
A Bucket of T-Rex Please:
The New York Times and other sources report that chickens are descended from T-Rex. Well actually, the truer story is that all birds are descended from dinosaurs. Hmmmm. So they didn't all die out with the meteor crash?
Are Breed Restrictions Code Talk?:
The Bluedogstate blog asks whether breed-specific bans, and pit bull bans in particular, are the new "code talk" for keeping blacks and poor folks down and out? In the era of Imus, that's not crazy talk, and there are some good points scored here. That said, I am not always thrilled by some of the numbskulls who own pit bulls. One can admit there is a problem without necessarily embracing the solutions offered by know-nothing politicians.
Manatees are Doing Well:
More evidence that the Endangered Species Act works: US Fish and Wildlife Service officials are considering reclassifying the manatee as threatened instead of endangered, a sign that the numbers are up a bit thanks to motorboat and development restrictions. And, yes, manatees will still be under Federal protection.
Bite Sized Snacks Released to Wild:
Twenty endangered Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits, Brachylagus idahoensis, were reintroduced to the wilds of Washington state just three weeks ago, but 14 of them have already been eaten by coyotes, hawks and owls. These little rabbits are the only burrowing rabbits in this hemisphere, weigh just 1 pound, and their wild population got so depleted a decade or so ago that they were all rounded up and put into a captive breeding program to ensure their survival. One has to wonder how retarded the scientists were to not do basic predator abatement at the reintroduction site.
Wired Monks Gone to the Dogs:
The Monks at the New Skete monastery are the stars of the new Animal Planet series "Divine Canine: With the Monks of New Skete" which premiers on Monday. I hope the brothers will explain why they stay away from AKC dogs and always import breeding stock. See Inbred Thinking on how the AKC's closed registry system wrecks dogs.
Wild and Working Dogs on PBS:
PBS channels will be showing "Dogs That Changed the World" on April 22 and 29. The series promises to offer a broad look at dogs and the human-dog relationship and features a round-robin of clips "from the jungle to the arctic" of dogs hunting, herding, guarding, pulling, and guiding. Again, we can only hope the series explores a little bit of the Inbred Thinking that undermines dogs today.
Animal Planet Plays Catch Up to Cesar Milan:
Animal Planet is trying to play catch up with Cesar Milan with their new series "It's Me or the Dog" where Briton Victoria Stillwell tries to sort out dysfunctional pets and people. The series starts Monday. Once again, it seems only people with accents can train American dogs and owners. Walkies anyone?
Once again we have a Briton, but this time it's Shaun Ellis who took in three abandoned wolf pups (from where?) and decided he was just the guy to raise them up in a big zoo-cage enclosure in order to teach them how to be a wolf. Apparently long hair and a disdain for a bath is all you need to do the job. It was all filmed for the National Geographic Channel series "A Man Among Wolves," and shot "on location" at the 25-acre (is that all?) Combe-Martin Wildlife and Dinosaur Park in Devon. Call of the wild indeed!
Spring Thanksgiving:
Spring turkey season starts this week in most places -- be careful out there. Meanwhile, let's give thanks for what the National Wild Turkey Federation has helped give us.
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