Dove tales

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
photo courtesy of www.pinterest.com

photo courtesy of http://www.pinterest.com

Only doves love summer and perhaps that is why I am not as fond of them as I am of other game birds. I love shooting and eating doves – just not their choice of weather.
– from Upland Bird Hunting by Joel M. Vance (b. 1934)

I didn`t hear any more from Harry until four days after the season opened, and when he called I asked him how the dove hunt had gone. “I got my limit,” Harry said. Then there was a rather long pause and Harry said “I used 108 shells. Bird of peace, hell!”
– from Bird Dogs & Bird Guns by Charley Waterman (1913-2005)

Dove tales

Mourning doves do not fly in heavy fog. Or if they were flying in that thick, gray haze at sunrise on opening morning of this year’s dove season we did not see them.

This was my first real dove hunt in the North Country. When we moved here more than thirty years ago Iowa did not have a dove season. Having spent many an enjoyable – well, frustratingly enjoyable –  September evening shooting doves over stock ponds in over-grazed pastures in our former home states of Nebraska and Texas, I was somewhat disappointed in the Iowa legislature’s adamant refusal to list the mourning dove as a game bird, but since my affair with doves has always been a love-hate relationship I consoled myself with the thought that some disappointments in life are actually blessings in disguise. I would no longer have the pleasure of shooting and eating doves, but neither would I have the exasperation of missing eight or ten consecutive shots at birds zooming past while my dog looked on with bemusement and contempt.

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Me and Rube

Posted on August 26, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
Rube would be proud. A simple mechanical device made ridiculously complicated.

Rube would be proud. A simple mechanical device made ridiculously complicated.

A Rube Goldberg machine is a contraption, invention, device or apparatus that is deliberately over-engineered to perform a simple task in a complicated fashion, usually including a chain reaction. The expression is named after American cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg (1883–1970). Over the years, the expression has expanded to mean any confusing or complicated system.

       – from wikipedia.org

Me and Rube

Before I describe the Rube Goldberg mechanism I built today, let me explain the situation.

My clay target shooting this summer has been terrible. Abysmal. Targets that used to disappear in a cloud of black smoke go sailing on untouched. I fear this is more than a short-term slump. Proficiency in wing shooting is a perishable skill, and it has become evident that mine is perishing.

Sure, it’s only a hobby, like golf or tennis, and as we advance in years we become less adept at our recreational pastimes because our coordination and prowess diminish. I can accept, for example, that I have been soundly thumped 8-0 by my five-year-old grandson in a backyard soccer game. But accept the loss of my skeet shooting skills? No! This is not merely another annoyance of the aging process, this touches a nerve at the core of my being.

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A murder of crows

Posted on August 18, 2015 by Jerry Johnson

When he was a kid, he told me, he killed crows by the hundreds, but as he got older he grew to like them so much he couldn’t bring himself to shoot. “They’re a lot like us,” he would say: “carrion eaters, group thinkers, too damned smart for their own good.”

   – from the novel Blood Sport by Robert F. Jones (1934-2002)

A murder of crows

The wooded draw north of our house is not exactly a crow rookery because they do not nest and rear their young in that grove of trees, but it seems to be a popular meeting place for crows in the early fall, a neighborhood pub where 20 to 50 friends gather to discuss the weather, the prospects for scavenging in the immediate area, the progress of the corn and bean crops, and maybe the horrors of the dreaded West Nile Virus.

I know they talk. Before my hearing went south, I could identify more than a dozen different crow calls, their guttural and croaking language that includes a range of expressive noises from mutters to shrieks, alarms to enticements, scoldings to soothings, boasts to disclaimers, threats to pleadings. To the human ear, few of these sounds are sweet and dulcet. Many are harsh and clamoring, not the sort of voices that would beguile you or win you over to the fraternity of Corvus brachyrhynchos.

The common crow is a rather ugly bird, too, and often bad-mannered. Like humans, when they are alone or in small groups they are usually well-behaved, but in gangs they can be annoying and destructive pests. There is good reason that a flock of crows is called a “murder.”

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North Country math

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Jerry Johnson

IMG_1703The good news is that the tree fell exactly where I wanted. The not-so-good news is that it takes a long, hot, weary day of work to cut up a 16-inch red elm tree even when it falls along the length of the driveway. 

North Country math

Remember those “word problems” we all had to solve in elementary school? They were really math problems, but a student had to read the paragraph that presented some strange predicament –

Tommy has enough money to buy three candy bars but he has five friends…

– and then compose a mathematical formula that would solve it:

Tommy + 5 friends = 6 kids; 3 candy bars ÷ 6 kids = 1/2 candy bar each; ergo  X = 3÷ (5+1)

Heady stuff these first lessons that revealed to us, the blindly optimistic baby boom generation, the promise of our potential to solve all the great problems facing mankind with a bit of logic and clever application of algebra. Although we knew even then, from harsh first-hand experience, that the odds of Tommy sharing his three candy bars with five friends in the real world would be about the same as the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series.

As a flashback to that more innocent and hopeful time, here is a North Country “word problem” for you to solve.

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Posted in Firewood, North Country Math. Wood Cutting | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

The cost of $7 corn

Posted on August 5, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
Once completely encased in its embankment, this 30-inch diameter culvert hangs suspended after rainwater flood runoff plugged it, flowed over the driveway above it, and washed away more than two feet of the bank.

Once completely encased in its embankment, this 30-inch diameter culvert hangs suspended after rainwater flood runoff plugged it, flowed over the driveway above it, and washed away more than two feet of the bank.

The ag industrialists of the North Country have been high on ethanol fuel for more than a decade, staggeringly intoxicated with the stuff that has brought them much profit from higher grain prices, primarily the corn from which most ethanol is distilled. It’s been quite a party, and like most inebriated carousing it has left behind a mess, a mess that we private property owners and county tax payers have to clean up at our own cost and with our own labor.

 The cost of $7 corn

Ethanol fuel production, arguably the biggest boondoggle in the history of federal farm programs and economic policies, has been a total bust for advocates of renewable energy resources but a gold boom for industrial agriculture corporations. At the local level, for those of us who share the land with this monster, it has been hideously costly and environmentally devastating.

Ethanol fuel is nothing more than ethyl alcohol, the same intoxicant that gives Russian vodka and Tennessee moonshine their kick, blended with gasoline refined from crude petroleum, usually about 10 percent ethanol to 90 percent gasoline. The ag industrialists of the North Country have been high on ethanol fuel for more than a decade, staggeringly intoxicated with the stuff that has brought them much profit from higher grain prices, primarily the corn from which most ethanol is distilled. It’s been quite a party, and like most inebriated carousing it has left behind a mess, a mess that we private property owners and county tax payers have to clean up at our own cost and with our own labor.

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Stopping the clock

Posted on July 29, 2015 by Jerry Johnson

IMG_1696Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment.
              – from Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)

Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
              – from The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Stopping the clock

If only we could stop the clock. If only we could make life’s most beautiful and amazing moments last longer than their brief firefly flicker in time.

Late afternoon on a cloudy October day, climbing into your tree stand and watching, hearing smelling, sensing the woodland come to the end of its busy day.

Christmas Eve, reading aloud to your granddaughter until utter exhaustion finally overcomes her excitement and she falls asleep in your arms.

That snowy day in November when your springer spaniel swims the creek, races a quarter mile through a picked cornfield, catches the rooster pheasant you knocked down with a less-than-perfect shot, and retrieves it to your hand, head held high and tail madly wagging.

First light of morning reveals the sweep and grandeur of the prairie as you sit shivering beneath a red cedar tree with rifle propped between your knees, not really wanting a deer to appear from the coulees, savoring this first day of the hunt as it rolls along in a measured and leisurely pace.

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Pepper in your underwear

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
Grandpa! Pepper in your underwear will NOT make you run faster!

Grandpa! Pepper in your underwear will NOT make you run faster!

“You know,” Grandma told Odin, “you shouldn’t believe everything Grandpa tells you.”

“I know, Grandma,” Odin assured her. “But I’m going to try that pepper-in-my-underwear thing.”

Pepper in your underwear

“Fact or Fib” is one of the most fascinating and instructional games I play with our grandchildren when they come to visit us on the farm. They have a natural tendency to accept anything that Grandpa tells them as the truth, but by the time they are nine or ten years old they have learned to take my advice, platitudes, and truisms with a grain of salt.

It is probably devilish of me to undermine their faith in people’s basic honesty by spinning tales that stretch their credibility and make them question the veracity of every statement they hear, but I want to prepare them to deal, as adults, with politicians’ proclamations and television and web news reports that can range from half truths to outright lies. As my own grandfather once told me, “Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see until you check the facts yourself.”

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NRA is the hunter’s greatest enemy

Posted on July 15, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
The image and reputation of responsible gun owners has been tarnished by the NRA's ludicrous positions and statements. We need to speak out and regain our communities' respect or the shooting sports will continue to diminish.

The image and reputation of responsible gun owners has been tarnished by the NRA’s ludicrous positions and statements. We need to speak out and regain our communities’ respect or the shooting sports will continue to diminish.

If you support the NRA because you think it is promoting the future of hunting you are sadly mistaken. The NRA is not a conservation organization; it is not a wildlife organization; it is not a hunters’ organization. It is strictly a firearms ownership organization. What that means in the grand scheme of social and political trends is that the NRA has become a powerful driver to end traditional sport hunting and recreational shooting.

NRA is the hunter’s greatest enemy

Hunters, recreational shooters, firearms collectors, historic reenactment hobbyists – if you support the National Rifle Association you are shooting yourself in the foot. Opposition to the shooting sports, and anything connected to the shooting sports, has increased dramatically over my lifetime, and the NRA is the main cause of that opposition.

Appalled by the thousands of firearm homicides every year, and saddened that all political and social discourse on the issue is becoming ever more confrontational and polarized, I do not expect that any rational solution to firearm violence will be achieved anytime soon. But incrementally, opportunities for traditional sporting and recreational use of firearms will decrease precipitously over the next several years, and the decline of these avocations I have pursued all my life is being hastened by the madness of the NRA.

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Posted in NRA. Black Guns. | 4 Comments

Tinkerballs

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
Photo from: wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Feral_cat_Virginia_crop.jpg

Photo credit: wikimedia.org/
wikipedia/commons/9/97/
Feral_cat_Virginia_crop.jpg

Tinker’s fighting style was to hold back and lay low while the other tomcat would spit and spar and jab and get overconfident and take one swipe too many. Then Tinker would come out smokin’ and get hold of him and the fight was all over in about 30 seconds. The lucky ones got loose and got away. The unlucky ones were never seen again.

Tinkerballs

Tinkerballs has been dead for several years, but the legend of that old tomcat will last forever because of his epic battle with Stubby Osterdovsky and Hooter Hutan the night those two model citizens of Minnesota got roaring drunk and decided to save themselves an $80 veterinary fee by doing their own feline surgery: namely castrating Tinkerballs.

There are several versions of this story, so the one I am about to relate is a compilation and distillation of everything I heard first-hand from Stubby and Hooter, with some additional information provided by the nurse and intern on duty at the emergency room that memorable night. Having heard the story six or seven times from these principle parties, I am satisfied that they were telling the truth. For the most part.

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Posted in Tomcat. Humor. | Tagged | 6 Comments

Hunting velociraptors

Posted on July 1, 2015 by Jerry Johnson
A hunter must keep and a cool head and steady hand to stop the charge of a pack of vicious velociraptors.

A hunter must keep a cool head and steady hand to stop the charge of a pack of vicious velociraptors.

Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
            – Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Stunt, dwarf or destroy the imagination of a child and you have taken away its chances of success in life. Imagination transforms the commonplace into the great and creates the new out of the old.
            – L. Frank Baum  (1856-1919)

Hunting velociraptors

There were eight of them.

Late Tuesday morning, after rain had trapped us two days in the house and made us restless and eager to do something outside in the wild, we spotted the pack of velociraptors* lurking in the wet grass to the south of the old granary foundation. Six females and two males.

I had naively assumed that raptors had been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous Period, about 70 million years ago, but my 12-year-old grandson Ander informed me that the vicious little dinosaurs had been re-created by rogue scientists who had somehow gotten hold of a few viable strands of raptor DNA.

It was all explained in a movie titled Jurassic Park, he told me. But we did not have time to go into the details. We had to deal with this threat now, mercilessly, or else we would be raptor chow ourselves within the hour.

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Posted in Grandchildren, Grandfathers, plinking, Rifle Hunting, Velociraptor | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments