Sunday, June 21, 2020

Sandhill crane hunt in WI? Pay attention, & study your Aldo Leopold.

It's been a few years since former WI GOP legislator Joel Kleefisch tried unsuccessfully to create a sandhill crane hunting season so he could cook up some 'rib-eye of the sky.'

And though Kleefisch's plan misfired, and the birds remain protected - 
Grus canadensis.jpg

- the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board (NRB) will review 'crane management' at its meeting on Wednesday, and thanks to the Journal Sentinel's Paul Smith for this guidance:
To view the Wednesday NRB meeting, visit dnr.wi.gov. The meeting will be broadcast live beginning at 8:30 a.m. and a recording will be posted afterward.
Here's another suggestion:

By complete coincidence, I am reading the new edition of the legendary Wisconsin conservationist Aldo Leopold's classic work, A Sand County Almanac

and I'd read this well-known chapter after midnight early today, Sunday morning. Give it a few minutes before the NRB meeting.
A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh. With almost imperceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across bog meadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon.
Out of some far recess of the sky, a tinkling of little bells falls soft upon the listening land. Then again silence. Now comes a baying of some sweet-throated hound, soon the clamor of a responding back. Then a far clear blast of hunting horns, out of the sky into the fog.
High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds.
On the motionless wing, they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh....
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, yet beyond the reach of words.
Two more things:

Hasn't Trump done enough to wildlife, including birds

Didn't Walker do his own share of thoughtless, pandering damage, when even his agency's own bloody rules were ignored by the 'regulators?'

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