In praise of cheap, ugly guns

Regular reader(s) might recall a rather dyspeptic blog post written some time ago, in which I said many mean things about golf and a few mean things about flyfishing literature. That particular rant was instigated by my having just read two wildly different (in terms of my enjoyment) books on flyfishing.

One, Howell Raines Flyfishing Through The Mid-Life Crisis, made me retch uncontrollably every third page or so. The other, James Babb's River Music, was an absolutely wondrous read. I included the mean things about golf not because I had (nor will I ever) just read anything on golf, but because I thought (and will continue to think until I'm dead and can no longer do so) golf was an utterly useless activity enjoyed primarily by dickheads and therefore eminently worthy of said criticism.

But I digress. The reason I bring it up now is that in that blog post I recalled my own brief and unwilling adolescent dalliance with the sport and how the experience ultimately left me with a loathing for golf and a Remingtom 870, the very cheap, old and worn-out (not really) Remington 870 Express you see in the picture above.

As a degenerate and unrepentant shotgun slut, I've bought, sold and traded any number of shotguns since trading my hated golf clubs for that 870 way back when, but that cheap, ugly, completely ordinary and utilitarian 870, along with a few others, has managed to stay with me all these years.

That gun and I had many adventures in high school and beyond. During college when I was only slightly poorer than I am now it was my main waterfowl and dog training gun. I had convinced the manager of the local Whataburger in Norman to let me place a pigeon trap on the roof of the restaurant, and after class I would load up the dog, run by the Whataburger, climb up on the roof, retrieve whatever pigeons I had managed to trap, climb back down, explain to the cop who was invariably driving by at the time what I was doing, wait while he ran my driver's license to make sure I wasn't some kind of wanted Whataburger bandit, then drive down the South Canadian river to shoot live fliers for the dog.

It was during one of these sessions that the end of the barrel exploded, peeling back like a banana and scaring the living shit out of me. The pigeon kept flying. Apparently I had unwittingly plugged the barrel with dirt. It was an effective lesson that has never needed repeating.

I replaced the factory barrel with an older full-choke Wingmaster barrel I conned out of my father and kept right on killing things with it: dove, turkeys, many, many ducks, a few geese and even my little brother's first deer, which he shot with a slug.

And while I've gone on to other shotguns for the majority of my shooting, the old 870 is still my primary bad weather, sit-in-the-mud gun, mainly because that old full-choke barrel inexplicably patterns wonderfully with the cheap Winchester Xpress steel loads. But this year I realized it was really looking bad. The plain birch stock was chipped and worn, the finish and pressed checkering pretty much gone. So I decided to rebuild it into something new: It would be my dedicated turkey gun.

So I put it on the bench and took it apart. I made plans to send the barrel off to be cut back to 24 inches, threaded for tubes and have the forcing cone lengthened. I decided on a new synthetic camo stock and forend and I'd primer and rattle-can the receiver. It'd be a lean, mean (and cheap) turkey-killing machine.

But then a funny thing happened: I looked at it sitting there in pieces, and started having doubts, like I was somehow betraying the old beater. I mean, it's essentially worthless. It's not graceful or lively or pretty like some of my other shotguns. It's certainly not pleasing to the eye. I couldn't get a hundred bucks for it in a pawn shop, and it's one of literally ten million 870s out there, but the stories etched into that ugly old birch stock and that scratched up receiver are my stories.

So here I sit, mulling over nostalgia versus practicality...

Cedar Waxwings Redux

Cedar waxwings are a common bird in my area but they are uncommonly beautiful creatures, and one of my favorite birds to both observe and photograph.

Holly over at Norcal Cazadora recently experienced the joys of a flock of cedar waxwings in her back yard, and in honor of that I thought I'd post a little gallery of the cedar waxwing doing what it does best: eating.

And while both the cedar waxwing's eating and the unfortunate yet inevitable aftermath of that ravenous appetite is the topic of Holly's post, I am sad to say that while I have many pictures of the former, I haven't a single frame of the latter. And I don't plan to, either...

The pics are low-res and therefore perhaps a bit fuzzy, and I didn't have time to add copyrights and watermarks for the benefit of image thieves, so if you are an image thief, no, you can't have a hi-res copy and all pictures on the blog (unless otherwise noted) are copyright 2010 by Chad Love, etc. etc. ad nauseum...

Love Is In The Air. Or, Hope Springs Eternal...

I looked out the patio door yesterday to see him strutting his stuff and puffing his junk for the benefit and admiration of a couple extremely disinterested hens who were much more focused on scarfing down sunflower seeds on the back porch than this tom's sartorial splendor.

Soon, as the weather and hormones heat up, epic backyard battles will rage when additional toms show up to court the neighborhood's flock of beguiling feathered vixens. Or as I like to call them, the bitches. No, it's not a term of misogyny, but if you've ever watched a flock of hen turkeys for any amount of time, you know what I mean. It's a cutthroat group dynamic to say the least, not unlike what I imagine human teenage girls to be.

Having had two sons, and being a former male myself (I'm married now, hence the former...) I of course identify much more readily with the toms. Especially the one that last spring would show up every day like clockwork and assume his position on the back porch directly in front of the patio door.

After a few seconds of preening, this tom would dramatically fan out his tail, puff out his feathers and then slowly, regally and magnificently strut back and forth in front of the patio door, as if to show the world - or at least his own reflection - that here he was, in all his glory.

And not a hen in sight anywhere.

I have no idea - no idea at all - why that would remind me of my own adolescence...      

Training in the singular form.

The dog box sits in the back of the truck, empty and unused, a two-hole reminder that I now live in a one-hole world. So I unload it and set it out by the formerly plural kennels that are now singular in form.

I drive down to the farm supply store and buy a plastic kennel small enough to fit in the back of the wife's old Subaru. No sense wasting the gas driving the truck when I can fit everything in the Forester. I load up a bucket of bumpers, tell Tess "kennel" and she hops in the front seat. Sorry, Tess. Dog hair and slobber in my truck is part of its character. Dog hair and slobber in a car my wife still sometimes drives is grounds for an argument.

She hops out of the seat and into the plastic crate with a sigh. I close the hatch and we're off on what is ostensibly the first training session of the year but what is, in reality, a trial run for the future. I've put it off long enough. I have no plan, no blueprint for training objectives I want to achieve, no goals other than to throw a few bumpers, watch the dog work and get through it without dwelling, without crying, without feeling lost.

I drive to the local soccer fields. They are, thankfully, empty. Just me, a few overturned soccer goals, the wind and a few early robins probing for worms. I take the bucket of bumpers and slowly set up a double T. It's all stuff Tess knows and what I should be working on are long marks and blinds, steadiness to shot, but I just don't have the energy to do it.

I unload Tess, line her on the T and send her. On the sit whistle she loops around in a slow lazy arc that puts her a good five feet to the right of the line. Should be working on fixing that. When I give her a left "over" to the pile she ignores me and bolts straight to the right pile. Another sit whistle, another slow, looping arc. Another left "over" and this time she goes to the left pile, picks up a bumper and comes to heel.

It's rough. There are a half-dozen things I should be doing, and I'm doing none of them correctly. I take the bumper from her mouth. She looks up at me. She's hardly been out of the yard since Lewey died.

Screw it. That's enough training for today. Let's go for a walk and a swim. We've got all spring and summer to work out training issues. I throw her a happy bumper and she prances around with it as I pick up the others. It's a start.   

First Day of Spring. Maybe I'll go fishing...

URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE


NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NORMAN OK

533 AM CDT SAT MAR 20 2010



...MAJOR WINTER STORM BEGINNING THIS MORNING...



A LATE SEASON ARCTIC AIR MASS WILL CONTINUE TO DROP TEMPERATURES

THIS MORNING... WHILE A POWERFUL LATE-WINTER STORM BEARS DOWN ON

THE SOUTHERN PLAINS. THE STORM WAS STILL CENTERED BACK IN NEW

MEXICO EARLY THIS MORNING... BUT SNOW WAS INCREASING TO ITS EAST

FROM THE HIGH PLAINS OF WEST TEXAS INTO WESTERN AND NORTHERN

OKLAHOMA. SNOW WILL BECOME MORE WIDESPREAD THIS MORNING OVER MUCH

OF THE SOUTHERN PLAINS... AND STRONG NORTH WINDS WILL CREATE

BLOWING AND DRIFTING.



THE MAIN IMPACTS OF THIS STORM WILL BE HEAVY FALLING SNOW AND

BLOWING SNOW THAT WILL REDUCE VISIBILITY. ACCUMULATIONS WILL

AVERAGE 4 TO 8 INCHES OVER A LARGE PART OF NORTHERN... CENTRAL...

AND EASTERN OKLAHOMA... WHILE LOCAL AMOUNTS CLOSE TO 12 INCHES

ARE POSSIBLE IN PARTS OF NORTHERN AND EASTERN OKLAHOMA NORTHEAST

OF OKLAHOMA CITY. NORTH WINDS WILL REMAIN STRONG THROUGHOUT THE

SOUTHERN PLAINS...WITH SPEEDS AVERAGING 25 TO 35 MPH...AND GUSTS

AROUND 45 MPH. THE SNOW WILL BE SOMEWHAT WET INITIALLY... WITH

TEMPERATURES JUST A FEW DEGREES BELOW FREEZING AT THE GROUND...

BUT NEAR BLIZZARD CONDITIONS ARE LIKELY IN THE AREAS THAT RECEIVE

THE MOST SNOW. LIGHT TO MODERATE SNOW WILL CONTINUE INTO SUNDAY...

ESPECIALLY FROM CENTRAL OKLAHOMA EASTWARD. TRAVEL WILL BECOME

VERY DIFFICULT OR IMPOSSIBLE IN MANY AREAS THIS WEEKEND. THIS IS

A POTENTIALLY LIFE THREATENING WINTER STORM.



OKZ004>006-009>011-014>016-021-201845-

/O.CON.KOUN.WS.W.0004.000000T0000Z-100321T1200Z/

HARPER-WOODS-ALFALFA-ELLIS-WOODWARD-MAJOR-ROGER MILLS-DEWEY-

CUSTER-BECKHAM-

INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...BUFFALO...ALVA...CHEROKEE...ARNETT...

WOODWARD...FAIRVIEW...CHEYENNE...TALOGA...WEATHERFORD...CLINTON...

ELK CITY...SAYRE

533 AM CDT SAT MAR 20 2010



...WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 7 AM CDT SUNDAY...



A WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 7 AM CDT SUNDAY FOR

MOST OF WESTERN OKLAHOMA.



* TIMING: THROUGH TONIGHT.



* MAIN IMPACT: SNOWFALL ACCUMULATION OF 4 TO 8 INCHES AND

BLUSTERY WINDS OF NEAR 30 MPH WITH GUSTS AROUND 45 MPH.

BLIZZARD CONDITIONS MAY OCCUR...RESULTING IN A VERY DANGEROUS

SITUATION.



* OTHER IMPACTS: WIND CHILL TEMPERATURES WILL FALL INTO THE

TEENS.



PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...



A WINTER STORM WARNING MEANS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW AND

STRONG WINDS WILL OCCUR. THIS WILL MAKE TRAVEL VERY HAZARDOUS OR

IMPOSSIBLE.

Pointless griping as a coping mechanism for lack of fish

One of the trade-offs to living in cultural purgatory is the lack of a decent local newsstand. When Wal-Mart serves as your community's primary source of the printed word, well, it can't get much worse than that. Which is why I jump at the opportunity to perform menial and boring tasks if said tasks get me out of town and in the vicinity of a decent book store magazine rack.

Yesterday found me performing such an out-of-town task, and as luck would have it I was able to briefly stop and browse at a pretty good regional chain book store. I picked up a copy of The Drake, both the Pointing Dog and Retriever Journal and I scored a cheap used copy of Roy Tanami's Angling the World. No Gray's to be had, but I'll pick up a copy next week when I'm in ye olde home town.

But as I was looking over the hunting, fishing and shooting section of the newsstand I have to admit that, as a reader, I was overcome with a palpable sense of despondency and as a writer I was hit with a feeling of outright impending doom.

You see, when I decided to jump from newspapers to full-time freelancing, Iwanted to focus on hunting, fishing, conservation and environmental issues but I had grand and wildly unrealistic visions of being a hook-and-bullet version of  Bill Bryson, Edward Abbey, Paul Theroux, Ian Frazier, Vonnegut, Thompson, etc., sort of a literary mash-up of some of my favorite authors and long-form magazine journalists.

I know, I know,  it was painfully cliched. What writer doesn't have such dreams, right? But even back then most hook-and-bullet mags weren't interested in anything that strayed from formula, so honestly, I don't know what the hell I was thinking. Sports Afield did have that brief and promising Terry McDonnell-led period back in the 90s when the masthead read like a who's-who of literary figures, but then it went all X-games and Men's Journal on us and eventually died a quiet and temporary death. Besides, I was still in college back then and focused mainly on bass fishing and happy hour two-fers at the local dive.

So when I did start freelancing, all those returned self-addressed stamped envelopes (writing is the only endeavor I know of in which you are required to pay for the bearing of your own bad news...) containing the form letter rejections taught me that when you live hand-to-mouth you better be ambidextrous. So I did. I  became a general, hand-to-mouth freelancer: I wrote for regionals, worked as a stringer for newspapers, even spent a number of years as a reporter for People magazine (that experience deserves a blog post of its own...).

Writing has always been a precarious way to make a living. No surprise there. But it's even more so now, because looking at the newsstand  makes you realize the very best outdoor writing to be had  now is found not (with few exceptions) in magazines (which pay) but online, through e-zines, blogs and forums (which, by and large, don't).

Why? Who knows? There was a very good discussion on the Upland Journal forum a few months ago that explored the question of  is the current state of bird-hunting literature and journalism stuffy, formulaic, boring and (for lack of a better term) old man-centric and perhaps could do with a little more Drake-like writing, maybe a This is Fly treatment.

I would argue that not only could bird hunting do with a little more alternative energy, but that all hunting and fishing print mags need to start taking some cues from the gonzo, freethinking elements of the flyfishing publishing world. I want to see a This Is Fly, Fish and Game. I want to see, as Suburban Bushwacker  recently put it perfectly, a "McSweeney's Afield". I want to see a conventional tackle version of The Flyfish Journal.

As a reader, I want to see that attitude of experimentation and creativity and good writing carried over into the general-interest outdoor mags.

Will I ever see it? Probably not, because for whatever reason, most magazine editors, publishers and owners cannot seem to grasp this simple formula: Give the reader a compelling reason to spend five bucks on a magazine, and he/she/it will. Build a magazine on the radical assumption that your readers have a minimum threshold of intelligence, a minimum length of attention span and aren't frightened by the possibility of having to think about what they're reading.

Set a bar, because if you shoot for the least common denominator moron demographic, that's exactly what you'll end up with. And looking over the newsstand yesterday, I saw a lot of lowest common denominator.

Maybe I'm just being a crabby old bastard. Today I was hoping to regale reader(s) with a tale of my first white bass (sandbass to us Okies and other southern types) on the fly rod. But here I sit griping about magazines and watching the cold rain come down...

Exit Booming...

The performance begins at first light on a windswept expanse of northwest Oklahoma prairie. First one, then two, then a half-dozen birds glide into the small clearing, each staking out its own small piece of territory. Then - as if on cue - they begin a ritual as old as the prairie itself.
Dragging wings on either side of their bodies, male lesser prairie chickens inflate reddish-orange sacs on the sides of their necks, raise a pair of specialized feathers above their heads, stamp their feet and call, all in the hopes of attracting a female. The males maneuver for position, bobbing their heads at one another and fluttering briefly into the air before starting the routine all over again.
It’s called “booming” and on calm days in April and May it can be heard from as far away as a mile. It is this unique behavior that makes the prairie chicken one of the most iconic symbols of plains wildness.
But these are hard times for the lesser prairie chicken, and on this small patch of earth, known as a “lek”, this handful of birds is among the last vestiges of a species which once numbered in the millions. No females appear this day, and one by one the males give up and leave. All that's left in their passing are a few feathers caught in the buffalo grass and the fading echo of memory.

That's the lede to a story (the first of many) I wrote way back in 1998, and things have, if anything, gotten worse in the 12 years since I first had the privilege of watching the sun rise on a prairie chicken booming ground.

Few are familiar with the lesser prairie chicken, but it's probably the most interesting and ultimately tragic upland game conservation story no one has ever heard of. At one time the LPC was the most important and probably most numerous gamebird on the southern and central plains. It numbered in the millions and rivaled the bobwhite quail in both numbers, popularity and cultural tradition. Everyone on the southern plains hunted chickens.

I grew up always wanting to hunt lessers, but by the time I was old enough to actually attempt it, Oklahoma's season had been shut down because this formerly popular and populous prairie gamebird is literally on the way out, thanks to all the usual suspects of habitat loss, changing land-use practices land-use, etc.

The LPC will in all likelihood be listed under the ESA in the next several years and the remaining states that offer a season (Texas, NM and Kansas) will end those seasons, probably forever if the population slide can't be turned around. So a bird that once numbered in the millions and supported a generations-long hunting tradition has essentially disappeared in the span of a few decades.

I was in the process of writing a blog post about the lesser prairie chicken, and I still plan to but Tom Reed over at Mouthful of Feathers has a great piece on the sage grouse issue that I think is worth a read.

The recent decision (and resulting publicity) by USF&W to list the sage grouse as a "warranted but precluded" species is further evidence that our prairie gamebirds, specifically our grouse, are in serious trouble.

Most of the threats to the LPC and the sage grouse are one and the same: unfettered oil and gas development, a combination of the recent boom in wind energy development and the big national push toward more ethanol. Native grass is being turned over to ag production, primarily corn, with ethanol as the end-product. Like the sage grouse, it all goes back to energy production. Combine that with the almost-certain continued loss of enrolled CRP acres (again, due to putting those acres back into production) and it's a double-whammy for prairie gamebirds and even southern-nesting waterfowl.

But it's also an issue of non-awareness among hunters. The prairie chicken, like all prairie gamebirds save perhaps the pheasant, has been on a well-charted long, slow multi-decade decline. You coincide that with the fact there are simply fewer new or younger hunters out there now who hunt upland birds and you start chasing the demographic dragon. I've been to a number of regional stakeholder meetings about the lesser prairie chicken and by and large hunters aren't really represented at these meetings. It's amazing to me that we're on a precipice, the very edge of losing an iconic species and no one really knows about it.

To be perfectly honest (And yes, I admit, this a literary drive-by here...) I blame a lot of that on the rise and utter primacy of deer and turkey hunting as the dominant cultural meme for American hunters over the past 30 years or so. It's been extremely detrimental to other less popular game species in terms of public awareness, research dollars and press.

And while everyone goes batshit crazy over shooting what amounts to photogenic livestock, our prairie grouse, and with it an entire hunting tradition, slowly fades out of frame...

How to Trap a Mountain Lion

I first heard his unearthly screams piercing the night like a wraith, and when I saw his tracks the next morning...right at my back porch... my worst fears were confirmed: a mountain lion had appeared outside my home. Perhaps I'd get lucky and the big cat would simply move on. But that night I again heard a terrible commotion on the back porch. Paralyzed with fear, I drew the covers over my head and waited for the carnage to stop. Eventually, all was quiet, but sleep was a long time coming that night. What terrible scene would the dawn bring?

Morning brought the grisly answer strewn across the porch like some macabre set-piece: my wife's suet feeders murdered, dismembered, their partially eaten remains torn and scattered. They never stood a chance against the beast. Tears welling in my eyes, I cried "this is too much. This will not stand." Suddenly, I knew what I had to do: I would trap the great beast, this supreme predator, this monster of nightmare that even today haunts the darkest recesses of Man's ancestral memory.

On the third night of my ordeal I set out the trap, poured myself a cup of coffee, and waited, waited....and then he came like a wisp of smoke there and yet not there, a spectral vision drawn to the delectable scent of the Fancy Feast Grilled Ocean Whitefish and Tuna Feast in Gravy (which, I'm told, is ambrosia to mountain lions).

My hands trembled, my eyes widened, and when the trap door slammed on his ample arse I knew my nightmare was over, my Grendel had finally been slain (Figuratively speaking of course. The lawyers have forced me to disclose that no actual mountain lion was harmed in the telling of this story...).

As I sat there marveling at the great cat's sheer untamed wildness, I recalled the words of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who once famously opined that "battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes also into you."

At the time I thought he was just a crazy old demented German dude, but when I saw this story, suddenly I knew exactly what he meant. I had joined a select fraternity. I had gazed into the abyss, battled the monster, and lived to tell about.

Now the question is, what do I do with this mountain lion?

How to beat the high cost of bass fishing...

First...

Then...

Then...

Then...

(Baitfishing garbage adds such a nice touch, doesn't it?)

Then...

Then...

Enjoy...

Zugunruhe

As I sit here on my driveway with an angle grinder and a hacksaw slowly turning a rusty, decrepit old boat trailer into a rusty, decrepit new dog trailer (to haul around a newly-lone dog who usually ends up on the front seat anyway...) I hear a faint sound from far above my head, a familiar trilling cry that - coming on the last day of an epically cold, dark and miserable month - is pure auditory sunshine.

A ragged, undulating V of sandhill cranes winging north along an invisible trail seen only by them.  If air currents could show ruts, how deep would they be from the eons of their passing? I hear memory and time and forever itself distilled in that haunting call. And hope.

It is called zugunruhe, and simply put, it is an innate restlessness, an instinctive urge to move with the seasons. We all possess it on some primordial level, but chained by circumstance, most of us long ago turned a deaf ear to its call. But when I hear the sandhills floating overhead it always stirs something inside me, a migration of the state of mind if not the body, a transition from the brooding introspection of late winter to the hope and exuberance of spring.

On this last day of February that's what the cranes are promising. Soon enough the water will warm, the bass will start spawning, the toms will start gobbling and even the cranks among us will smile and feel young again. Even fat, middle-aged cynics still have dandelion wine dreams of renewal, and this year mine can't come soon enough...

Goodbye, February. And don't let the door hit your ass on the way out...