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We’ve been inundated with images of Katrina’s wrath. Flooded streets with floating bodies drifting through poor New Orleans neighborhoods, burning buildings and the bald spot on the Superdome’s roof. Yet, the wetlands that buffer New Orleans from the Gulf have been missing from photo spreads. But the damage is immense. That one storm is estimated to have caused 50 years worth of erosion, according to a new report. And the waterways have been widened by a third...And the Gulf coast has moved inland up to a quarter mile in places...Surprisingly, though, the fishing has been great. Many locals that still have a house and a boat are reporting some of the best runs of red drum in years. This could be because the new underwater topography is better suited for holding bait and thus game fish. Large sloughs and deep channels were cut by Katrina's storm surge.
Continue reading "Unstoppable Erosion in Lousiana" »
Similar to the bull in the china shop, a young buck in Indiana dropped into a local video store by crashing through a window. After taking a moment to check out the drama section (Deer Hunter, anyone?) the animal turned and high-tailed it through another window.
While in the store, the deer attempted to charge another shopper who was trying to corral the it out the back door. A policeman reported seeing the deer running down a city street.
And now for the biggest "duh" statement of the article, uttered by a local cop:
"It doesn't happen here every day." Really? That ranks up there with, "No one saw this coming," and, "I didn't know it was loaded."
So, you wanna go back to the homepage?
It just happened to be a long time ago, when there were some especially large winged creatures flying around. Anthropologists are speculating that 2 million-year-old monkey skulls and ape-man skulls showed similar injuries, thought to be originally caused by land-based predators. After watching eagles attack modern monkeys, the scientists came up with the theory that birds could've pursued early man. Here's the jist of it: "...eagles would swoop down, pierce monkey skulls with their thumb-like back talons, then hover while their prey died before returning to tear at the skull."
This explains why I like duck hunting so much: revenge.
 Like a good keg party, leave it to the authorities to end a fun time. Pennsylvania hunters had proposed allowing the atlatl to be used during big game hunts. According to a recommendation from the state’s Game Commission, the atlatl isn’t lethal enough to drop a deer in the hands of an “average hunter.”
Are the staffers crazy? Not lethal enough? Last time I checked my caveman history, our hairy, loincloth-laden cousins were taking down mastodons with darts. But maybe the 6-ton wooly mammoth had a soft hide, compared to the thick skin of a whitetail? Hey, I’m trying here. If every state in the union is complaining about an outrageous deer surplus and you’ve got a few guys that want to don bear skins and take to the woods equipped with a spear, at least give them a chance. A deer that falls in the woods, is one less that’s going to play Frogger with cars on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
A little background: The atlatl is considered the oldest modern weapon. It consists of a wooden handle and a dart. The handle helps increase velocity when propelling the dart, which can travel as fast as 80 mph. Historians suspect usage in Pennsylvania goes back at least 8,000 years.
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And feline owners wonder why the stereotype of a “cat lady” is negative. Well, a woman from a DC suburb found her pet cat, Cody, dead under a tree in her yard, the carcass covered in another animal’s saliva. Tragic, I know. In my family we would get a shoebox, find a decent spot on the property, dig the hole and then head inside for dinner.
Not this woman. Oh no, she’s using the best ‘Law and Order’ crime-fighting tools available to determine what killed her beloved Cody. When animal control refused to aid her quest by declaring a local German Shepherd dangerous on lack of evidence, she called up a California DNA lab.
For a fee of $500, DNA experts compared samples of the dog’s saliva and fur with those found on Cody. The odds that it wasn’t this particular dog were 1 in 67 million. Still, without an eyewitness, local officials couldn’t list the dog as a menace. The cat lady is considering a private lawsuit as a last resort.
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Apparently, pollutants called polybrominated diphenyls, or PBDEs, are wreaking havoc on the nervous systems of polar bears. The compound is a flame retardant found in carpets, clothes and furniture coverings. It has also been discovered in the bears' fat. Researchers assume the pollutants were carried by ocean currents to the Arctic. The worst part? Uh, the bears with high exposure levels can become hermaphrodites. In fact, 1 in 50 females in Svalbard, Norway also happens to be a dude.
Buried away in our office is an archive with every issue of Outdoor Life ever published, all the way back to 1898. (You ought to see the covers from the 80s. What a shame most hunters don't sport the plastic mesh trucker hat anymore.) Us overworked staffers get the occasional chance to flip through an old copy and marvel at some of the great adventures penned by equally great authors. Roosevelt, Leopold, Hemingway and O'Connor. And don't forget Charles Elliott. One of his last stories is on the real site right now.
Wolves are running free and wild in the west, and the grizzly has been a recovery success along the Rocky Mountains. And yet, fewer than 1 percent of animals on the Endangered Species list have made it off. Devout environmentalists are telling D.C. politicians to keep their editing pencils away from the ESA, arguing that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And to their credit, the current incarnation of the act has preserved many critters that would have otherwise gone the way of the dodo.
My rebuttal to the enviros, though, is would you buy a car that ain't broke yet struggles to get 8 miles to the gallon, or a new hybrid that pushes 50 mpg? Both work, right, but one works better and more efficiently. Clearly the ESA needs revamping so the success rate isn't comparable to the graduation rate of a college football team. First step, ignore the politics and let the biologists make decisions. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the direction Congress is going. Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton has implied that changes could include giving political appointees more control over future decisions. Read some of her opinions and tell me what you think.
Executive Editor Colin Moore wrote this little ditty about the price of meat.
You hear it all the time: it’s less expensive to buy meat at the grocery than to go hunting for it. Well, that depends. Although it’s been reckoned that a pound of dove breasts costs about $20 in terms of ammunition expended to get it, that’s dirt cheap compared with some meat prices.
For example, orders are being taken now for Jamon Iberico, a Spanish ham processed from the meat of black-foot hogs indigenous to Spain and that feed only on acorns from cork oak trees in the western part of that country. Apparently, it’s the acorns that give the hams their special flavor. How special? Try at least $800 per ham, at a price of about $60 per pound. If you’re interested in buying one of the Spanish hams, go online to tienda.com, which is the Web site of the U.S. retailer importing them. Be prepared to pay a deposit of $199, and be patient; the hams won’t arrive here until the fall of 2007. In the meantime, you might have to settle for domestic wild hog, which, even if it costs $25 a pound to get, is still a bargain.
 Turkey has put the lockdown on hunting wild birds in the eastern reaches of the country after two deaths from the dreaded avian flu. The ban on hunting will be lifted when the disease is thought to be under control.
Anybody know what kind of birds are hunted in eastern Turkey? My guess would be chukar and prairie chickens. And as much as it pains me, I won't make any Turkey jokes.
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