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.
I bet that hurt
This past Saturday the American Kennel Club announced its 2009 registration numbers indicating the most popular dog breeds in the United States. For the 19th consecutive year the Labrador Retriever is the most popular purebred dog in the country. But there is a breed making progress towards unseating the Lab. The German Shepherd overtook the Yorkshire Terrier for second, the first time it has been that high in more than 30 years. The Shepherd was America’s most popular dog in the 1920’s but it fell out of favor and has only been making up ground since the end of WWII.
This has irritated the Lab to the point that one actually shot her master last Saturday in California. A hunter was trying to retrieve his duck decoys on a pond near Los Banos which is northwest of Fresno. The dog stayed in the blind until she saw her chance. The Merced County Sheriffs Department figured that the dog stepped on the shotgun knocking off the safety and firing the weapon. Her master, who is 53 and should have known better, was hit in the back with some No.2 shot. No names were given but the hunter was treated and released from a local hospital. Accident?…I’m not so sure.
2009 Most Popular Dogs in the U.S.
1. Labrador Retriever 2. German Shepherd 3. Yorkshire Terrier
4. Golden Retriever 5. Beagle
We're movin on up!
Many of you are familiar with the Flint Hills Wildlife Refuge southeast of Emporia, Kansas. Not far from there is the Wolf Creek Nuclear Generating Plant which has a cooling lake as part of the overall facility. The lake does stay warmer than an average body of water its size because of the plant but it is not a tropical paradise. Even so, over the last few years fishermen have sometimes claimed to have seen an alligator in the small lake.
Just last week the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks were called to the lake one last time to check out a gator rumor. Game Warden Brad Hageman had chased down these sightings before always with great skepticism. This time the rumor measured 5 feet, 3 inches.
A local fisherman had snagged the dead alligator and pulled it to shore. A spokesman for the Kansas DWP told the Emporia Gazette, “It was found yesterday floating in the effluent area. We’re still trying to determine what to do with it.” So far the age of the animal has not been determined and the DWP is not sure what to do with it. It apparently managed to survive for a few years until this unusually cold winter. One possibility is that it was a pet that grew too large and was released into the lake by its owner. No word on whether it had eaten any Jayhawks.