Still Shooting After All These Years

The Little Galloo Island illegal massacre of nearly a thousand double-crested cormorants on Lake Ontario in 1998 was quite a focal point in the management of these wild fish-eating birds. The shooters thought of it as a sort of protest – an act of civil disobedience – but with shotguns instead of with words, sit-ins, and placards. As it turned out, they were charter boat skippers and guides who felt the federal government had not paid enough attention to their misguided concerns about thousands of cormorants depleting the sport fish stocks, affecting their industry and incomes. What they failed to recognize and identify was the fact that every day, sometimes twice a day, they were filling hundreds of clients’ coolers with smallmouth bass, lake trout, and other game fish, reducing the available populations. Besides the overfishing, they also ignored the overdevelopment on shore, deforestation and resulting erosion, runoff, pollution, and general degradation of fish spawning sites in the lake’s tributaries.

Over time, fishermen, legislators, fisheries managers, and conservationists in many areas came to spoken, unspoken, and written agreements in the management of cormorants and population limits. There was a sort of a wink-and-a-nod peace.

But it seems that not all stakeholders in the controversy saw it that way, in that the sanctioned shooting of federally and internationally protected wild birds continues today, even though most scientific studies of what cormorants eat show that the birds have less effect on fish stocks than overfishing and the other factors mentioned earlier. The culls continue in states such as Ohio and Michigan where the US Fish and Wildlife Service has eased or nearly eliminated restrictions, evidence standards, and data requirements for proving cormorant damage to fisheries. It is just assumed to have taken place. After all, it is easier, and more politically practical, to shoot a few thousand cormorants to bolster mere perceptions than it is to conduct a study, or to adjust fishing seasons and bag and size limits to improve the fishing.

The real problem occurs when new cormorants move in, re-infiltrate the area, and replace the birds killed the previous season. Birds cannot count and have no recollection of who is absent from the year before. Then someone, a wildlife or fisheries manager or legislator, realizes the culls must continue season after season because there are about two million double-crested cormorants in North America. They are one persistent species and are not going away. Shooting is not the answer, because decision makers asked the wrong questions in the first place.

The Real Art of Being Green

There is more to “being green” than separating our plastics, glass, and paper. Being green is more than using fewer plastic water bottles and buying the correct organic cleaners for our kitchens and toilets. Greening our lives should mean when and how we look at nature. Instead of separating our trash we need to separate ourselves from what separates us from enjoyment of the simple outdoors.

Does anyone remember the childhood fantasy of being alone in the woods or on a quiet beach? Even though we might have been only a short distance from home there was still the sense that we were explorers, pioneers in a new land. With it came the feeling that we were even looking at familiar scenes through different eyes – adventuresome eyes. Walking through natural surroundings without ever-present electronic distractions can open our senses to what an old biology professor of mine once expressed as what we’ve looked at before but haven’t seen yet.

As adults, we’ve probably abandoned the pioneer fantasy, but that doesn’t mean we have to relinquish our sense of curiosity and exploration. To reach that sense means first again enjoying being alone – with our own thoughts and observations. Sometimes then all it takes is looking up into the trees, into the sky, or down at the trail, or into the brush or rocks. Even on a well-travelled trail nature throws things at us that we hadn’t expected or noticed before: a red-tailed hawk soaring overhead, a harmless hog-nosed snake rattling in the fallen leaves at our feet, a crab scuttling into a sandy burrow on the beach, a mushroom popped on the forest up that wasn’t above ground yesterday.

The trick to making our lives green is to bring the idea of the outdoors back into our homes and our everyday lives. Including the observations of our walk in the forest or on the beach in everyday conversation inserts the activity of being green into our lives. We cannot expect our friends and family to appreciate the value of having nature in their lives if we can’t express the simple importance of it in ours. That’s the real meaning of being green.

The Art of Being Alone

Does anyone remember the childhood fantasy of being alone in the woods or on a quiet beach? Even though we were only a short distance from home there was still the sense that we were explorers, pioneers in a new land. With it came the feeling that we were looking at even familiar scenes through different eyes – adventuresome eyes. Walking through natural surroundings without the distractions of friends and phones can open our senses to what an old biology professor expressed as what we’ve looked at before but haven’t seen.

As adults, we’ve probably abandoned the pioneer fantasy, but that doesn’t mean we have to relinquish our sense of curiosity and exploration. To reach that sense means first again enjoying being alone – with our own thoughts – emphasis on alone. Sometimes then all it takes is looking up into the trees, into the sky, or down at the trail, or into the brush or rocks. Even on a well-travelled trail nature throws things at us that we hadn’t expected or noticed before: a red-tailed hawk soaring overhead, a harmless hog-nosed snake rattling in the fallen leaves at our feet, a crab scuttling into a sandy burrow on the beach, a mushroom popped on the forest up that wasn’t above ground yesterday.

If we don’t look we won’t see. If we’re texting, roving the mall instead of the park, and concerned about what our friends are doing every moment, when we look up all we’ll see is the second level of the same shops in the next mall. The real shame is that the peace of the hawks, snakes, crabs, and mushrooms is lost to us in the process.

The Nature We Ignore

Wherever we live there are probably those small streams we pass every day on the way to work, school, or shopping that we take for granted. Some of these are the same types of creeks that intrigued us as kids. Fish, frogs, snakes, raccoons, skunk, deer, muskrats, beaver, arrowroot, skunk cabbage, willows, reeds, and sometimes just a lot of dark mud kept us busy. There is a stream, Black Creek, near my home that in places fits the bill. It eventually flows into the Hudson River where herring hunters net and hook the spawning fish for salting for human consumption or stocked in aerated live wells for use as striped bass bait on the Hudson. In many places it is thin water cutting through brush and meadows.

At the point where Black Creek runs under New Paltz Road, now closed in sections due to flooding over a year ago, the stream is about wide enough for two canoes to pass each other with little room to spare. To the north, the creek winds through an area of brush which overhangs the banks. In the spring it is a haven for large chain pickerel prowling the brush edges for food. I’ve hooked several large pickerel fishing from the narrow road, but never landed one because they skillfully used the brush to quickly foul my line and break off. They seem very adept and practiced in using the brush.

Two years ago I stopped at the road crossing to check out the small pool on the south side of New Paltz Road. A small rocky outcrop juts into the creek just before it flows beneath the road. It was there I spied a large blacksnake – couldn’t decide if it was a racer or ratsnake – about five feet in length that had thrown body coils around and was attempting to swallow a foot-long brown bullhead headfirst. High and dry, the snake and the bullhead struggled on the outcrop as I watched. The fish resisted the swallowing procedure by expanding its thorny fins making it more difficult for the snake to swallow. The snake was equally persistent as it tightened its coiled grip on its prey. The snake, trying not to have wasted its precious energy, worked hard to expand its jaws around the fish’s spiky frame, but it just wasn’t happening. As an outside observer I saw the contest as an inevitable draw. In violation of the “prime directive” of not interfering I grabbed the snake in its midsection – not the best point of attachment -- and caused it to release the fish, which quickly flopped its way back into the creek. In turn, the blacksnake lashed out at me in a series of defensive strikes until I dropped it into the pool to swim upstream out of sight.

This is nature in clear view. The fact that creeks like Black Creek are small and common tends to drive them into the realm of the disregarded with little practical use.

Black Creek is typical of so many small waterways we ignore and take for granted. Many times the result of our apathy is that the stream becomes a dumping ground for our household waste such as old tires, discarded furniture, toilets, shopping carts, and other candidates for landfills. Black Creek hasn’t suffered this fate yet, but once we turn our backs on these small everyday resources it’s easier for people who have little regard for them in the first place to use them as their personal dump sites. Once this attitude strikes a stream or wetland, it is abandoned, marked as wasteland, and forgotten, forever losing its natural appeal. If we don’t appreciate these common, undeveloped natural places we lose them. And it’s our own fault.

(To view previous blogs click on 2010 archived bogs)