The book
Wyoming citizens have always been proud of their cowboy heritage. They have had a cowboy on their license plate for years and now they even have a cowboy “code” on the state books. On Wednesday March 3, Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal signed a bill which officially adopted a state code that people call “Cowboy Ethics.”
These principals were introduced as “Cowboy Ethics” by James Owen in his book What Wall Street Can Learn from the Code of the West. Owen is a retired Wall Street investor who has a great appreciation for the ways of the west and frontier times when a man’s word and the way he handled himself was a matter of honor.
The bill was introduced by state Senator Jim Anderson who admired Owen’s book. Here are the cowboy principals:
1. Live each day with courage
2. Take pride in your work
3. Always finish what you start
4. Do what has to be done
5. Be tough, but fair
6. When you make a promise, keep it
7. Ride for the brand
8. Talk less and say more
9. Remember that some things aren’t for sale
10. Know where to draw the line
Spangled Perch
Just a couple weeks ago it rained fish in Australia. Katharine is a small town in the Northern Territory which is just about in the middle of nowhere. Recently that part of the country has been battered by torrential rains much like our northern states have been buried by snow this winter. On February 25 fish fell from the sky and if that wasn’t enough, it happened again the next day.
The Northern Territory News, which is a paper in Darwin, talked with Christine Balmer who lives in an even smaller community southwest of Katherine. “It rained fish in Lajamanu on Thursday and Friday night,” she said, “They fell from the sky everywhere. Locals were picking them up off the footy oval and on the ground everywhere. These fish were alive when they hit the ground,” she continued.
Mrs. Balmer reassured her family by telephone. “I haven’t lost my marbles,” she said, “Thank god it didn’t rain crocodiles.” According to the paper the small white fish are spangled perch. They are common in lakes quite some distance away and it is believed the fish were carried hundreds of miles by a tornado. The only problem is no tornados have been reported lately. Not only that, but I don’t know what a “footy oval” is either.
Arizona Gambels quail
Sometimes groups advocating gun rights get a little paranoid and overreactive, but then again it seems there are more loony organizations popping up all the time that want to take away somebody’s fun and traditonal pasttimes, mainly hunting.
State lawmakers in Arizona have just taken the first steps towards ammending their constitution in order to protect the right of its citizens to hunt and fish. These lawmakers don’t want future legislators to restrict hunting and fishing by simply passing a law.
Last Wednesday, the House Committee on Military Affairs and Public Safety approved a preliminary ammenment that would prohibit any law or regulation “that unreasonably restricts hunting, fishing and harvesting wildlife or the use of traditional means and methods.” If the ammendment makes it through the legislature it would have to be approved by voters in November.
The Arizona Daily Star quoted Darren LaSorte a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association. “There are powerful anti-hunting groups out there.These anti-hunting groups are certainly becoming more active, more well-funded”, he said. La Sorte added that 10 states already have similar provisions, with votes already planned in three others. Just remember, as much as you might like hunting…there is someone who thinks it would be just peachy if you had to stay home and watch “Dancing With The Stars” reruns.
Look at me!
The annual Pheasants Forever event known as Pheasant Fest was held in Des Moines this past weekend. The event was held in the nearly new Iowa Events Center in the downtown area and kicked off with a parade of bird dogs on Friday. Around 70 dogs joined in the parade representing over 35 different breeds. There were over 1,000 people in the lobby just for the dog parade.
Spokesman for the group, Bob St. Pierre, hoped to hit the 30,000 attendance mark for the first time in the event’s 8 year history. The show is about celebrating the sport of pheasant hunting and protecting and preserving wildlife habitat across the pheasant belt. The show featured about 400 vendors who serve upland hunters, dog owners and wildlife habitat conservationists. There were also seminars on a wide variety of outdoor subjects.
One of the reasons for bringing the event back to Iowa was the state’s scary decline in pheasant numbers and hunters over the last few years. The state has witnessed a return of more than 389,000 acres of grassland to crop production as federal programs lost their appeal to farmers. In addition a series of bad winters and cold, wet springs have hurt bird populations.
Although Iowa hunters and game biologists are committed to help restore Iowa pheasant hunting to its glory years, the attendance at the show was 20,230 or a drop of 17 percent from 2007, the last time the event was held in Des Moines. Next year it will be held in Omaha.
Leave old Buck alone
You wouldn’t think a 13-year-old black lab could get in much trouble but then maybe you’ve never owned a lab. Take old Buck who lives out in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of Los Gatos, California. One day in late December he left Terina Held’s house with her other dog to see what was going on in the yard and didn’t come home.
Ms. Held told the Santa Cruz Sentinel how her other dog came back, “She was all wet, but was by herself. We went looking for him (Buck) in all the nearby creeks and in the woods. There is crazy landscape here with redwoods and cliffs, it’s pretty hairy. We did everything we could for four weeks.”
That’s right four weeks. Old Buck somehow got stuck in a hole in a creekbed about a mile from Held’s house and stayed there for 40 days! Over that time all the neighbors and shopkeepers up and down the valley were looking for the dog. They even found four who had no doubt wandered off from other owners, but none of them was Buck.
A neighbor finally found the dog in the hole with only his head and shoulders above water. He was bug and rat bitten and had lost about 50 pounds. Held said, “Fortunately, he was a little overweight before, so I think he was living off of that.” Buck was treated by a local vet and released. At last report he was curled up in front of the fire.
Ouch! (Byrnes photo)
We have all heard of people being accidentally shot while hunting. Over in Minnesota you can even get shot while fishing. Ryan Byrnes found out the hard way.
Byrnes is a student at Vermilion Community College in Ely way up in the northeastern part of the state. He and his roommate went fishing last Wednesday on nearby Shagawa Lake where they hoped to catch some walleyes. Byrnes did catch one and then he caught a bullet to the head. He told a reporter from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “The next I know, I’m laying in the snow and there is blood on the ground. I felt the back of my head and it was bloody.”
The two buddies set up separate pop-up shanties not far apart and both heard what sounded like shots in the distance. Suddenly Byrnes was screaming about being hit. When the snow dust settled, they took off for the emergency room at the Ely hospital. Byrnes later told the paper, “It was a crazy day of fishing. I caught my first walleye, and I got shot for the first time.”
The St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office said they were unable to determine where the shots came from. Oddly, Byrnes is from Phoenix, Arizona. What was he thinking when he chose a school?
The next thing you knew...
You save up your money and treat yourselves to a wonderful cruise… on board the Queen Mary 2 no less. Barbara and Dennis Gregory a couple from Johannesburg, South Africa, did just that. The photo you see at left shows Barbara on the deck of the QM 2 with another cruise ship in the distance. That you’re seeing it all is the story. Shortly after taking the photo Dennis dropped their Nikon P90 camera overboard and into the deep blue ocean. This happened on a trip from New York to Southampton in 2008.
Some 16 months later a Spanish fisherman named Benito Estevez found the camera in his fishing nets. Amazingly the photos were still recoverable from the memory card. Estevez then posted five of the photos on the internet. Soon the story was covered by the British media. A lady named Laura De Klein, a friend of the Gregorys, recognized the couple and called them up.
Mrs Gregory told the London Telegraph, “To think the Spanish fishermen has gone to such efforts on this – it’s very touching. It’s literally a dream come true. There’s no way we could ever have imagined that this thing would ever turn up again. It sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic.” I guess that’s a pretty good commercial for Nikon!
Just pick 'em up!
I’ve always hoped I would be following an armored car when money poured out on the street. No luck so far but down in Mississippi a bunch of people couldn’t believe their great fortune when catfish seemed to fall from heaven.
Well actually it was a truck. Just outside the little town of Starkville in the north central part of the state local residents were minding their own business when Bill Baker was driving a B&B Fish Farms truck westbound on Highway 82 around 6 a.m. last Tuesday. He somehow lost control and drove into median where he hit a culvert. Thousands of catfish poured out and started flopping all over.
People spotted the opportunity and ran to the scene with coolers. Soon the police arrived and an emergency crew was able to treat Baker for a knot on his head. State Troopers were able to run off the people with the coolers but no attempt was made to recover the catfish. Baker wasn’t sure what caused him to crash and admitted to being a little dazed even several hours after the accident.
Baker told the Columbus, Mississippi Dispatch, “It will make you have a conversation with the good Lord.” Meanwhile an employee of the towing company that showed up told the paper about the local folks and the catfish. “It was unbelievable how much they got,” he said.
The old hunter himself
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack were joined by Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana last Thursday to announce the creation of the Wildlife and Hunting Heritage Conservation Council (WHHCC), an official advisory group under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). Secretary Vilsack, Secretary Salazar, and Governor Schweitzer made the announcement at a ceremony at the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC in tribute to the great president, hunter and conservationist.
The officials said that the new group will enlist the assistance of hunters and anglers to help the nation confront the conservation challenges of our time so that our children and grandchildren can have the same opportunities to experience wildlife and the great outdoors that have been passed along, generation to generation.
The Council will also provide a forum for sports men and women to advise the Federal government on policies related to wildlife and habitat conservation endeavors that (a) benefit recreational hunting; (b) benefit wildlife resources; and (c) encourage partnership among the public, the sporting conservation community, the shooting and hunting sports industry, wildlife conservation organizations, the States, Native American tribes, and the Federal government.
I’m telling you this now because I’ll bet you never hear about this government group again in your life.
Aflatoxin on corn
I was in a farm supply store the other day and ran across something I didn’t quite understand. You could buy bagged “Feed Corn” and another bag of corn called “Deer Corn”. I asked one of the employees to explain the difference and all she could come up with was that “Deer Corn” supposedly fed through a deer feeder better. I dug into it a little further and found out something surprising.
Although people often feed deer from a stocked feeder, it should be noted that in some states it is illegal to bait deer for the purpose of hunting. In addition, some communities are even banning any kind of deer feeding because the animals have become a nuisance. There may be other reasons. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration prohibits grain that tests more than 20 parts per billion of aflatoxin be sold as feed for dairy cattle or to use for human consumption. This stuff often winds up as “Deer Corn”. The aflatoxin is tolerated by the deer but it can kill birds and other small animals that show up at the feeder.
One concern is the effect on pheasants and quail. The aflatoxin may not kill them directly but it can weaken them to the point they might succumb to disease. According to what I’ve been able to find out “Deer Corn” baggers are not using any corn that tests higher than 100 ppb but if you are going to use this stuff be sure to read the label. Even then the aflatoxin levels may increase if the corn sits for a while before being used.