The Outlook

Our house is oriented to face due south. The deck is open, but covered, so it’s more like an open porch.  Built into an old sandpit on a hillside the deck is about 3m from the ground, which slopes down to the pond, which the house overlooks. The best view the house offers is from the deck. From the deck, you get to see a lot that goes on in and around the pond.

But if you are inside the house, you still get to see stuff when you are looking out a window.

This year, one thing we have watched happen from the deck and through the windows of the house is game bird production. Mostly high numbers of chicks hatched, but also mostly poor success in keeping a brood together and alive.

There were many different species of waterfowl that hatched out a clutch of chicks that we saw on the pond, from the house, during their first days of life. We’ve seen a brood of grebes, wood ducks, hooded mergansers, mallards and Canada geese. There was a single brood from each of those species; the young mallard ducklings showed up most recently, so maybe the hatching season isn’t over yet, but I think it’s getting late in the breeding season. There was a pair of green-winged teal on the pond for weeks early in the season, but we never saw them with chicks and the adults are now elsewhere. Ring-necks hung around for a while, but although they, like the teal, have nested here in the past, we don’t think they tried nesting here this year.

We’ve also seen a little flock of ruffed grouse scurry by the front of the deck a couple of times.

We have counted close to 40 young, all broods and species (ducks and grouse) combined. Quite a few, I think.

But from there, it seems to have been a downhill slide for chick survival. All the Canada geese goslings are dead. One of the young grebes appears to have disappeared.  Lately, we have seen only two of the hooded merganser ducklings with their mom – the brood started out with 11. We haven’t seen the wood ducks for many days now; there were a couple of orphans on the pond for a couple of days, but those too have now disappeared.  We think the mallards are still more or less intact. The grouse brood was small the both times we saw them.

It made me think about how what happens at the micro level, may or may not reflect what goes on at the macro level. Or vice versa. What we’ve observed is moderate to good hatching success for some, but apparently not too stellar when it comes to survival.

What we saw in and around our pond – the outlook from the house – was a good lesson in how dramatic the result at the macro level could be. If survival on ponds like ours is similar over a wide area, then the fall outlook for game birds might be grim. On the other hand, if hatching success was similar, but survival was better than on our pond, then the game bird outlook for this fall could be quite rosy.  Or, results could be .  . . mixed.

Of note is that during some forest travelling, I have been seeing quite a few ruffed grouse broods. But the number of chicks in all the flocks I’ve seen is on the small side. But a lot of small flocks could still mean a good fall hunt for ruffies. That’s where I’m leaning, as there did seem to be good numbers of adult grouse this spring, and I did hear a lot of drumming.

In the meantime, it’s time to do a bit of fishing and concentrate on berry picking. Around the house, the Saskatoons, blueberries and raspberries are quite good, right now. It is also looking good for choke cherries, which have just started to ripen. It doesn’t look like there’s going to be a bumper crop of pin cherries or Canada plums, which, like the choke cherries, are only beginning to ripen.

Further afield, the wild berry crop looks to be . .  . mixed.

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Summer starts

It’s finally summer and it actually feels like it. I even managed to catch a few rays and start a tan for the first time in a few years.

It was a long, long winter. Snow arrived in late October and didn’t melt until the end of April. But it has finally warmed up nicely and best of all, there’s been just enough rain to keep the veg growing well while not giving the mosquitoes a leg up. Even deer flies are tolerable this year – I suspect the great hatch of dragonflies is helping on that front. Wood ticks were terrible, though. When doing our elk monitoring (critter cams) I had to literally brush of hundreds at times. Sometimes there were also deer ticks in the mix, which potentially carry Lyme disease.  Can’t stand ticks . . .

From a wildlife perspective, it’s been an interesting past several weeks. For the first time, there was a yellow-headed blackbird in the yard. It only stayed for an hour or so; then was gone. There’s a black-billed cuckoo that makes the rounds around the pond almost every morning – we hear it, but haven’t seen it. A pair of pied-bill grebes nested on the pond – also a first – and hatched out young. Yesterday there were five of them, down one, I think. A hooded merganser showed up with nine young followed by a wood duck with ten ducklings. Still waiting to see whether there’s a hatch of mallards and green-winged teal.

There are at least a few ruffed grouse hens with broods along the road with young (so far, they have not been run over by vehicles, but I fear it’s only a matter of time) and there was a woodcock that was also acting broody and also on the road. The tree swallows are busy feeding their young in the boxes we put up and an eastern phoebe has young in her nest under the eaves of our old cabin. Lots of other birds around, too.

The painted turtles have been laying eggs in front of the house, but the skunks come at night and have been digging up the nests; we hope some will survive.

The pair of Canada geese that nested on the beaver house hatched out five but tragedy struck – not sure exactly what happened – suffice to say all five goslings perished.  After a couple of days, the adults left. So for the second year in a row, the geese are gone.

I have seen one new-born fawn whitetail. Lots of bears in the neighborhood, including some big ones; and there are still wolves around.  Not sure what happened to the beavers. Three survived the winter, but for the last couple of weeks we have only been seeing one, and only sporadically. Maybe the wolves/bears got the other two.

Saw a porcupine one day while coming home from work (a rarity in these parts). Don’t need or want porcupines nearby. Neva, our dog, has not learned to keep away from them.

When the ice was melting, a very pregnant otter was lolling about for a couple of days. Since then, we’ve only seen her once. Not sure where she is . .  .

The pond is teeming with minnows and hordes of tiny tadpoles are rapidly forming into frogs (most of the ones I’ve seen appear to be wood frogs). The cacophony each evening of singing frogs has been deafening.

Finally, it looks like it might be a good year for at least some of the wild berries. Choke cherries, pin cherries, service (Saskatoon) berries and blueberries are some that are right now looking promising. Yum.

So, I’m ready for the heat to continue and hoping the lazy, hazy days of summer will linger for several weeks. Much, much better than the dreary days of winter where the only life seen is often, at best, a few birds at the feeder.

Yep, time to enjoy country living and not dwell too much on the shenanigans being foisted on us daily by politicians and masses of do-gooders (often the same people).

And do a bit of fishing, which, by the way, has been mostly pretty good.

Elections

Ontario is days away from the date when voters get to mark their ballots and vote for a candidate they hope will become a member of the next parliament.  It’s been an interesting campaign, but I’ve heard next to nothing as to what the parties think about with respect to fishing and hunting or, other than carbon – principally CO₂ – any thoughts they have about the environment.

It seems weird to me that these days caring for the environment, being ‘green’, or simply having an environmental conscience, is striving to reduce emissions from the use of fossil fuels. No talk about wildlife habitat management, fish and game harvest strategies or how wildlife concerns might be accommodated during mega projects like twinning the TransCanada highway. There was a bit of discussion on future development in the ‘Green Belt’, a swath of land with around the major metropolis of Toronto where development is tightly controlled, but other than that, nary a peep.

It’s as if all ecological issues will be magically resolved by focusing all of our attention on the use of fossil fuels. It’s the magic bullet that’s going to solve everything. And if we don’t do it, we’re doomed. All would be lost.

I think that’s a foolish attitude, but in much of Canada, at least, it seems to be a dominant meme. It is for sure here in Ontario.

In Ontario, there are three main political parties vying for power.

The Liberals have ruled for the past 15 years and have already conceded defeat, although the premier is now voicing contrition and tearfully requesting the populace keep her party in power in a minority government by voting in at least a small bunch of Liberals. Fish and wildlife management (except for carbon – we are in a cap-and-trade system with Quebec and California) was, during their time in office, never of much interest to the Liberals.

The Progressive Conservatives (a name that signals a political oxymoron if ever there was one) haven’t said much lately and didn’t say much about F &W during the long period of Liberal reign. However, the last time they were in power, they actually accomplished a lot for anglers and hunters; for one, they vastly increased the number and extent of Parks and Protected Areas, with most of these areas continuing to allow for hunting, fishing and trapping. During this campaign, they have proposed to do away with the ‘carbon tax’.

The New Democrats have been, like the conservatives, rather silent on matters that pertain to fishing and hunting, with the exception of being ardent supporters of the hunting and fishing rights of Aboriginals and Métis; like the Liberals, they are also big on focusing on reducing our use of fossil fuels and thus addressing climate change. They are also anti-nuclear. Last time they were in power was a political fiasco; ineptitude and bungling typified their time in office and extended to the fish & wildlife management file.

There are other parties running as well, including the Greens and the Libertarians, both of whom are fielding dozens of candidates, but according to all the pollsters they have little likelihood of actually electing anybody (apparently the Greens have a realistic chance of having a single member elected).

All I can hope for is that whoever wins, the next few years will be better for us anglers and hunters and the fish and wildlife we care about than the last decade has been.

But, since no one has been talking, who’s to know? Pretty sad, really.

If you’re not from Ontario, I hope that the situation is more upbeat in your jurisdiction. I know some places are worse, but I also know some places are better. Let’s all hope that the future will bring more of ‘better’.

Weather . . . and conservation

Different species avoid bad weather – winter – in different ways.

It’s easy to see why the global warming issue is so big. It’s all about the weather, and every last one of us is affected by the weather.  Despite hopes, beliefs and hard effort to control the weather, the best way to minimize harm that might come to you because of bad weather is to use protection: a rain coat as opposed to a rain dance.

Our obsession with the weather goes back a long way; for example, there is a lot of talk of weather – and controlling it – in the Bible. While I haven’t done an extensive check, I’m sure weather plays a big part in all religions and cultures. Simply put, we are weather dependents and, using again a quote from a country song, “It’s always been that way.”

In Canada, winter weather is usually the worst.  The majority of birds in this country migrate south, en-masse, to avoid winter weather. Some animals also move to areas with better winter conditions, but many others have evolved to find a good spot to lie down and go to sleep for the winter. They only wake up when the weather improves. The rest have to face winter weather head-on and find a way to cope with the cold and snow and the storms.  It’s a tough go to try and survive a winter when, for months on end, the food supply never increases, only dwindles; temperatures are constantly below freezing and everything is covered with snow.

Because of the significant impacts winter weather has on wildlife, wildlifers use a variety of techniques, including indices, to assess the impact of winter on particular types of wildlife. In states and provinces where winters regularly decimate white-tailed deer populations, winter severity indexes were developed that generate numbers that are used to categorize the severity of a winter and provide estimates as to the number of deer that likely perished over-winter. The categories are generally “Mild, Moderate and Severe”; the higher the number, the more severe the winter.

The winter that just passed in the area where I live, was long, windy, cold and snowy.  The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, which has as one of its responsibilities the management of deer, categorized the winter as “Severe” in the district where I live. There’s no doubt it was a hard winter on the local herds of white-tailed deer.

Still, some deer survived. I’ve seen a few around.

A few years ago, deer were common, sometimes abundant, hundreds of kilometers north of where they’re common today. But a series of hard winters, and some other factors, pretty much rubbed them out. I recently authored a paper with a colleague that showed how deer (and moose) populations have fluctuated in this area over the past many decades; we concluded that landscape level perturbations (e.g., fire) are the main reasons these populations fluctuate wildly over time; and of course, much of these perturbations and related events are weather related. You can read the paper here: http://alcesjournal.org/index.php/alces/article/view/227

Animals cope with the elements by living in habitats that provide them with the essentials of life, namely food and cover. If you are in the business of wildlife management in North America, part of the job is likely addressing habitat management issues. There’s still a strong belief by biologists that habitat is often, if not usually, the key factor affecting the survival of a species. If habitat is suitable, and there’s enough of it, most animal populations should do okay. Habitat isn’t easy to describe, and it’s used differently by different animals.

A feature of good habitat is the ability to provide relief from the weather. Deer often congregate in specific areas, usually called a ‘yard’, where both food and cover are available.

Unfortunately, a lot of the time, effort and money that could be spent on trying to do a good job of wildlife habitat management is, I think, being spent on trying to manage the weather. It’s a real flip-flop, and not without consequences. Spending billions on trying to manage the weather (e.g., climate change) is increasingly being viewed with much scepticism. Some say it’s environmentalism. I think it’s mostly virtue signaling – spending lots of money being ‘green’, without much in the way of actual, tangible results.

Personally, I can think better ways to spend money on conservation of wildlife than squandering millions (billions?) on windmills that are notorious bird and bat killers and don’t really make a dent in reducing CO₂ emissions.

However, priorities do differ amongst jurisdictions and on-the-ground habitat management programs do exist in some places. In some – the state of Michigan comes to mind – they can be surprisingly robust. Elsewhere they may be close to non-existent. If sound habitat management programs aren’t in place and funded in the area where you live, there’s a good chance many species of wildlife near you are floundering.

Habitat management is not the be-all and end all when it comes to looking after wildlife, but there’s little doubt good habitat, and habitat management policies, is a whole lot better than poor habitat and a focus on reducing our ‘carbon footprint ’.

I’ll be addressing habitat issues a bit more thoroughly in future postings.

Hiatus Ends

Wolves come in a wide variety of sizes and colours.

I’m back to posting on my blog . . . .I hope to post regularly, but also likely infrequently.

Blogging is, or can be, hard work. Still, I’m doing it because it can provide a forum for ideas that hopefully helps more than just me in understanding events that are of concern to a lot of us. Certainly, I am a follower of several blogs and I get some very interesting and useful information from them.

At any rate, the reason(s) I’m going to try this (blogging) again is that I can’t help but be astounded at some of the going-ons in wildlife world. Wolf management, for example.

Let’s look at that one. It’s appropriate, I think, especially given that I’ve always had a photo of a wolf as the ‘signature’ of my blog.

I have used a wolf photo, in part, because wolves evoke a wide range of thoughts and ideas amongst anyone with an interest in wild things. It’s been that way for a long time – as the song says, “it’s been that way since the get-go.”

Historically, wolves were believed to be ‘bad’ by the majority of people, at least in Europe (those North American ‘colonizers’) and getting rid of wolves was ‘good’. It’s not hard to see how those ideas came to be, considering rural folk in Europe, for hundreds and even thousands of years, were mostly poor, didn’t have guns and were often reliant on a farming existence that was quite fragile. Wolves killed and ate livestock and back in those days, probably killed and ate more than a few people. So it made a lot of sense to try and get rid of wolves; which they did, eventually.

While this was going-on, Europeans began colonizing North America, bringing along with them their ideas about what to do about wolves (get rid of them).

Which, again, they did; much of what became the lower 48 along with large swaths of southern Canada became wolf-free zones.

But there were still a lot of wolves in the world and the wolf did not go extinct.

In Eurasia, large numbers of wolves continued to persist, particularly in Russia; in Canada and Alaska, wolves have always ranged far and wide.

With wolves gone across large landscapes, but still abundant elsewhere, the ‘let’s get rid of all the wolves’ meme lost pre-eminence.

It was replaced by the ‘we like wolves a lot!’ meme.

One outcome was a re-classification of the wolf. In the minds of both the public and government, the wolf changed from being a lowly varmint to the more lofty status of a noble game animal. To provide them with love and protection, wolves, in places, were put on endangered species lists, which brought with it money and the implementation of many a wolf recovery program.

Largely a result of the new meme, wolves today are more widespread and abundant than they have been in over a hundred years.

They’re back with a vengeance in the western mountains of the US, much of the mid-western forests and are occasionally reported in New England.  Of course, there still abundant over much of Canada and Alaska.

And coyotes are almost everywhere outside the tundra. Then there are wolves that people don’t really know how to classify except to say they’re some sort of wolf . . . Newfoundland, once free of all wild canids, now has coyotes and . . .some other canids.

Over in Europe, wolves have also been on the path to recovery. Hiking their way across and out of Poland, wolves have successfully recolonized Germany, to the point where there is now a growing rumbling that wolf numbers are getting out of control. In late 2017, there were estimated to be 60 packs of wolves in Germany, 13 more than the year before. The total number of wolves is officially estimated to be 150-160, although unofficial estimates say there is more than twice that number. Wolves are also showing up in other European countries, including France and Spain.

With many landscapes now occupied (infested?) with wolves, I think it’s time to move away from ‘we like wolves a lot!’

Unfortunately, that meme is not yet dead, although it has been wounded.

For example, the old mantra that wolves only kill the very old, the very young, the sick and the injured has been thoroughly de-bunked.

Wolves will try and catch and kill and eat whatever they can.

In the mountains of northern Idaho and southern British Columbia, the South Selkirk herd of caribou is down to three animals. What’s the main culprit behind their disappearance, despite decades of effort at maintaining and increasing their numbers?  Wolf predation. Even though it is astounding that wolf culls were actually attempted, they weren’t successful in getting rid of the wolves there (maybe it’s a lost art) and so the wolves have been catching, killing and eating all the caribou.

In Canada’s Pukaskwa National Park on the northern shore of Lake Superior, the wolves finally caught and killed and ate every last caribou a few years ago.

This past winter, Ontario did an emergency capture and transfer of caribou off Michipicoten Island. This was done because it was feared wolves there were going to catch and kill and eat all the caribou on the island.

So it’s clear that wolves can drive herds of ungulates, at least locally, to extinction.

It’s also become clear that in addition to killing them all, wolves are capable of killing enough to reduce populations to low levels and then keep them there. It’s called a predator pit – after falling in, there’s no way out. It’s been observed with respect to white-tailed deer in the northern forests of Minnesota and a number of small, scattered herds of woodland caribou wherever they occur.

That’s proof of the pudding that there is no ‘balance’ of nature. Nature is never ‘in balance’. There is a constant struggle for survival that goes on and in the end, most species actually lose out. There are vastly more species that have gone extinct than survive today. And the vast majority of extinctions have had nothing to do with, to use a phrase, humankind.

So knowing what we now know, I think it’s time to get rid of and replace ‘we like wolves a lot!’ with something a bit more reasonable. A lot of people are thinking along those lines.

Something is needed that will result in changes to the present, often absurd, over-protection of wolves way of doing things.

Like here in Ontario, where moose populations have been in decline for years despite severe and increasing restrictions on hunting. The answer seems to be to give wolves even more protection.

Now there’s a proposal in the works to ban wolf harvest completely from a huge swath in the south-central part of the province to protect the ‘eastern’ wolf, something that, with some half-hearted scrutiny, can be shown to be completely bogus, as there is no such animal. The ‘eastern’ wolf, described in part as a rather smallish wolf, occurs sympatrically with gray (timber) wolves. The wolves breed indiscriminately with one another and produce viable offspring of various size and colour. Biology 101 says that makes them the same species. But when you’re hitched to the ‘we like wolves a lot!’ bandwagon, you don’t let sound science get in your way.

It’s worth noting that scientists in the USA, who have analyzed the data, don’t recognize the eastern wolf as a separate species of wolf. They are more along the lines of wolves being Canis soup.

Over in Germany, wolves are still provided with complete protection. With numbers rapidly expanding, there are dire consequences to wild herds of deer and livestock being predicted.

Fighting over how to manage wolves in the US continue to escalate; in some areas,elk herds are taking a pounding from high wolf predation.

With all these conflicts, one would think that reasonable compromises regarding wolf management could be found, but none appear to be anywhere, at least not on the immediate horizon.

So despite all the evidence that shows there is absolutely no doubt that there can be too many wolves and that managing wolves using sound wildlife management  should be a no-brainer, the ‘we like wolves a lot!’ continues to rule the day. It can’t last . . .

Meanwhile, over on Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior, the wolf population – which arrived naturally – is down to a single animal. The Isle, which got rid of all the wolves naturally, pushed the US Parks Service to produce plans to re-introduce 20-30 wolves to the island over the next three years at a cost of about 2 million dollars.

I really think it’s time to change that meme.

Well, that’s my back to blogging post. Hope you enjoyed it.

Over And Out

I’m done with this blog. I hope some of you have either enjoyed some posts or got some information that you found useful. Maybe in the future, I might try blogging again. Regardless,  there are the posts I’ve published and maybe there is something there you might like. All the best to everyone who visited my blog. I wish you all well.

*note* Feb 21, 2018. I see there is traffic on the blog almost every day. So  as I said above, I think I will be blogging again in the not too distant future. I’m contemplating using the same site (this one!) and the same name, but instead of being only about wildlife, it will be expanded to ‘wild life’. In other words, fish, insects, vegetation, etc. And I’ll be changing the format, meaning sometimes there will be a photo (or several), maybe video, or simply text, with no standard length (originally, I tried to keep posts very similar in appearance and length). I won’t get into all the details as to why I took a long hiatus from blogging: let’s just say I needed to recharge. So expect something to start happening over the next month or so…..

The Tiny Ten

Damara dik-dik

Years ago, I cut myself badly skinning a whitetail on a hunt near Moosomin, Saskatchewan and had to have stitches done after I severed an artery near my thumb (another skinning lesson learned . . . ). The doctor who did the surgery happened to be from South Africa (it turned out all the doctors in the hospital at that time were from South Africa!); he told me that as I was a hunter, I should plan on an African safari to go after ‘The Big Five’.

He didn’t say anything about ‘The Tiny Ten’.

The Big Five, as many hunters know, are the elephant, lion, leopard, cape buffalo and rhino. For big game hunters, taking all of the Big Five is considered to be one of highest achievements a hunter can accomplish. The reason for this is the inherent danger in trying to hunt any of these animals; the term ‘The Big Five’ was coined years ago to say here are the five most dangerous game species a hunter can pursue. There were bragging rights to any hunter who could say he (or she) had taken The Big Five. Even today, cape buffalo are believed to gore and kill about 200 people a year (mostly hunters).

While there’s still a mystique in today’s hunting world around The Big Five, it isn’t what it used to be.

There are a number of reasons for this attitudinal change. First, whether this assemblage of African big game animals is indeed a list of the 5 most dangerous animals a hunter can pursue has always been debatable, but never more than today. In addition, hunting ‘dangerous animals’ isn’t a top of the list want for many of the hunters of today.  Finally, there are a lot fewer opportunities to hunt these animals than there used to be.

At any rate, hunting The Big Five has never been something I aspired to do, although it was certainly of interest to me, even those many years ago in Moosomin.

Back to ‘The Tiny Ten’. . .

Around the campfire in Namibia on our first night, talk of The Big Five naturally came up.

And that’s when I first heard about The Tiny Ten.

The Tiny Ten is a list of the following species of small antelope found in southern Africa:

• Damara Dik-Dik
• Blue Duiker
• Common Duiker (also called Gray Duiker or Bush Duiker)
• Red Forest Duiker (also called Red Duiker, Natal Duiker or Natal Red Duiker)
• Cape Grysbok (also called Southern Grysbok)
• Sharp’s Grysbok (also called Northern Grysbok)
• Klipspringer
• Oribi
• Steenbok (also known as Steinbuck or Steinbok)
• Suni

These antelope are really small; often they are referred to as pygmy antelope. For example, a mature Damara dik-dik is only about 30–40 centimetres at the shoulder and weighs only 3–6 kilograms. Tiny.

Yet all these pygmy antelope have horns.

They are also said to be a challenge to hunt.

During my hunt in Namibia, I saw Damara dik-diks, steenboks and duiker (I don’t know which species I saw). A couple of my hunting partners saw a klipspringer one day. One dik-dik – the one in the photo – was supposedly a real trophy, as was one of the steenboks I saw and photographed.

They are certainly interesting and it was great to see them.

But like The Big Five, hunting The Tiny Ten isn’t a goal for me.

I am glad I saw a number of them, and would certainly like to see all of them. Maybe that’s my quest.