A day in Webster County, a few centuries in America

A shallow stream and deep history

I've been driving in darkness for two hours when the eastern horizon begins to lighten behind me. I'm cruising fast on US-136, Nebraska's Heritage Highway, and in the slowly strengthening dawn it becomes apparent why this has been designated a scenic route. The land consists of dissected plains, the rolling hills cut here and there into small canyons by old waterways. Some of the hills are planted in the region's staple crops of corn and soybeans, but others are still clothed in grass, and in the low spots here and there gleam stock ponds; as colours begin to emerge from the gloom, the autumnal red of little bluestem stands out against the general tan of the grasslands. On my left, to the south, a band of green punctuated with a few bright yellow spots marks the Republican River—it's the first week of October, and the cottonwoods are beginning to turn.

[Republican River valley.]

The river takes its name from a band of Pawnee Indians, the Kitkehahkis. Early French explorers and trappers, sometime around 1785, mistook their form of government for a republic, and named the waterway on which they were living Fourche des Republiques. It would not be the last misunderstanding.

As I cross the Webster County line, a large whitetail buck reminds me to dial back the speed. A few miles later, I turn off the highway and drive through the sleeping town of Guide Rock looking for its namesake: Pahūr, "the rock that points the way", one of five particularly sacred sites for the Pawnee. (These five sites were considered lodges of the nahurac, spirit animals who served as intermediaries between the Pawnee and the supreme being Tirawa.) I think I know where Pahūr is supposed to be, just across the river and slightly downstream, but I don't find it. It's too early to ask for directions, so I resolve to return later in the day.

* * *

Driving westward once again, I cross a couple of creeks as they meander down toward the Republican. One of them, Elm Creek, has occasioned my journey this morning, but I'm not ready for it yet, and I continue on into Red Cloud: approximately one square mile and home to about a thousand people. I arrive in town just as it's beginning to wake. I explore the brick-paved main street, the grocer smiles and wishes me good morning as he unlocks the door to let himself in, and a flock of English sparrows takes refuge under my station wagon as the first grain truck of the day rolls by.

[Downtown Red Cloud.]

Red Cloud is the seat of Webster County, and has been since its founding in 1871. This was the frontier at the time, but it was developed rapidly, with many of its civic landmarks—the State Bank, the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank, the Opera House—built in the early 1880s. One of its founders, 1870 homesteader Silas Garber, later became the fourth governor of Nebraska, but Red Cloud's most famous resident is the novelist Willa Cather.

Cather moved here with her family in 1883, in the middle of that construction boom. She was nine years old at the time, and would have seen the Opera House going up. It is now home to the Willa Cather Foundation, dedicated to preserving her literary legacy and the natural and cultural sites that inspired her work.

[Willa Cather's childhood home: "a low story-and-a-half house, with a wing built on at the right and a kitchen addition on the back, everything a little on the slant—roofs, windows, and doors".]

Having previously lived in Virginia, young Willa found the big skies and open grasslands of the Nebraska frontier invigorating: "a place where there was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the materials out of which countries were made." She wrote for the local newspaper, the Red Cloud Chief (still in publication), and later attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where she continued both her journalistic and creative writing. She graduated from the University in 1894 and moved back East two years later, but the plains influenced her writing for decades to come. The "Prairie Trilogy" novels in particular—O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia—depict the struggles and triumphs of Swedish, French, German, and Czech immigrants on the American frontier. (These were her neighbours. Despite their recent tenure on the land, the Pawnee and other Native peoples did not appear to be within Cather's social circle, and she has far less to say about them.) Cather's contemporary Sinclair Lewis credited her with "making the outside world know Nebraska as no one else has done".

* * *

Back on 136, I stop to take some photos, and a passing vehicle slows, stops, and turns around. The driver hails me and, noticing my camera, looks relieved. "I saw you walking away from your car and I thought you were broke down. Didn't want to just leave you. You're kind of in the middle of nowhere out here." He's a friendly fellow, early to mid-forties, with an easy smile and stubbled chin under his black watch cap. Dark sunglasses, but I imagine eyes of piercing blue. If we hadn't met dead-centre of the continent, I might take him for an aging surfer. We chat for a few minutes before he takes his leave. "Got to get back to harvesting. We just took out 1200 acres of soybeans"—here he pauses to cross himself, a good Catholic boy apparently—"and we've got another 1000 acres of corn to go." A long day of hard work ahead of him, and he takes the time to look out for a stranger.

My actual destination today is the Elm Creek Wildlife Management Area. The "address" for the WMA is not Red Cloud but Cowles, Nebraska, although the post office at Cowles has been closed since 1960. My DeLorme atlas shows the closest community as Amboy, Nebraska, but the Amboy post office shuttered its doors in 1890. I don't even notice a sign for Amboy on 136.

[Somewhere near Amboy, Nebraska.]

[Elm Creek WMA.]

About three miles of Elm Creek is listed as trout water, with two short, non-contiguous segments on the WMA. The upper stretch, the longer of the two, cuts across the northern end of the property, flowing south and then southeast. The lower reach, running back to the southwest, nicks the WMA's southeast corner. This is the extent of the public access; the rest of the creek is on private land.

Elm Creek is strictly a seasonal fishery. The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission stocks it with five hundred rainbow trout in the autumn and another one thousand in the spring, but it's very skinny water and I suspect that very few if any of those thousand spring rainbows survive the hot Nebraska summer. (Later I check my theory with self-described "pointy-headed fish biologist" Daryl Bauer from the Commission, and he sets me straight: "The limitation at Elm Creek is the stream has a huge watershed and when there is a significant runoff event there is A LOT of water that flushes through there. When that happens, most of the trout tend to head to Kansas. So, fishing is usually best after it is stocked, and after a period of no runoff events.")

This is my first visit here, and I know going in that it's unlikely to be a spectacular day. The stocking truck delivered exactly 502 trout here two weeks ago, so they've had plenty of time to spread out: 167 trout per mile if they all survive, which is unlikely. I don't know if catch-and-release fishing is prevalent here, but I know the otters and herons aren't giving up their share.

Arriving at the WMA, I decide to fish the longer, upper segment of the creek first and park along the dirt road. I rig up a 7-foot 5-weight fiberglass rod and tie on a muddler minnow, unweighted as befits what is likely to be a slow-moving stream. I can either fish it as a streamer or, if the opportunity presents, dry it off and fish it as a hopper—'tis the season for terrestrials, after all.

I'm already wearing board shorts under my jeans, which get stashed in the back seat of the wagon. My street shoes go on the back floorboard, changed out for wading shoes. My Nikon—my wife's Nikon, in point of fact—also stays in the car; if I need to take pictures, I have the camera on my flip-phone, which makes up for in durability what it may lack in resolution. My wallet goes in a waterproof (I hope) case in the pocket of my shorts, and my car keys get stashed at the base of a fencepost. I grab my sling pack and I'm off.

I walk from the car across a grassy field to the brow of a hill, from which I can look down on the creek. It's broad here, so much so that I almost mistake it for a pond. I see a great blue heron standing in the "pond" and hear the rattle of a belted kingfisher, which is encouraging. I also hear the lowing of nearby cattle, but the sound is superfluous, as the air is redolent with the aroma of the beasts. I make a mental note not to drink the water, and descend the hillside to wade in.

The decisions about my personal effects and health are good ones. When I get back to the dirt road after fishing, I find the car and the keys exactly where I left them. I've taken a fall in the water, so I'm glad the Nikon was in the car and my wallet in the case, which is in fact waterproof. And, of course, I stand by my resolution not to drink downstream from the cattle herd.

But all subsequent decisions related to fishing—choice of rod, choice of fly—are rendered irrelevant by my choice to fish the upper stretch of the creek. It is very slow, languid even, and silt-bottomed. Plenty of minnows, lots of invertebrates, but I don't catch any trout. I don't have any follows or refusals. I don't startle any trout. I don't see or in any way interact with any trout in an hour or more of slow, patient stalking—sometimes from within the creek, sometimes from the bank. And eventually I discover why.

Near the end of the WMA's upper stretch, the water disappears below a mat of duckweed, milfoil, and other vegetation: the boundary fence separating public from private land has formed a dam, below which the water runs quicker and clearer and out of reach. In that pellucid water, I believe, there must surely be trout. But I decide to stay on the right side of the fence, geographically and ethically, and follow the fenceline hoping that I will be able to reach the lower stretch, where the creek re-enters the public land of the WMA. But eventually I find the going too hard, the way blocked by a vast cattail marsh, and make an ignominious retreat through cattails and nettles and beggars' lice back to the dirt road. (Needless to say, my legs are not happy with me.)

I drive to the southern edge of the WMA, where I can access the lower segment of stream from the road. I'm short on time—it's a weekday, and I am postponing responsibilities back home in Lincoln—but happy to be back in productive-looking water, flowing shallow but clear over a bed of sand and fine gravel. However, I only see one trout on the lower creek, and that one darts away from under the bank as I first enter the creek.

Feck me.

[Lower section of Elm Creek, looking toward private land; the lighting was better.]

The weather has been dry, and there has been no flooding event. It would appear that I'm simply too late, or maybe just unlucky. I briefly wonder if the trip has been only so much wasted time and mileage, but then dismiss the question. Even when confronted with difficult conditions, it's almost always better to fish.

* * *

On my way back to Lincoln, I stop at Guide Rock once again. I'm hoping to get directions at the post office, but while the lobby is open, the office has closed for the afternoon.

On my way out, though, I happen to meet a Guide Rock resident, there to check his mailbox. He looks faintly disreputable somehow, in the manner of someone who's been down on his luck for far too long, but his troubled eyes take in my fish-print shorts, my wet wading shoes, and possibly some streaks of mud still on my legs, and he asks if I'm fishing in the area. I say yes, and he offers unsolicited directions to the local reservoir. "Big catfish down there. Really big. But you got to go at night. Bring heavy monofilament, maybe some wire." Since he seems inclined to be helpful, I ask him if he knows how to find Guide Rock. "They tore it down! Long time ago. When they built the canal, I think." (This is the general "they", the people in charge; in this case, manifestly not the Pawnee.) He gives me clear directions to precisely where I had been that morning, and subsequent research confirms that Pahūr, like several other of the Pawnee's sacred places, no longer exists as they knew it; what remains is not a vertical spire of rock but a modest, rounded loess hill.

Too late again.

* * *

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time of colonial intrigue on the Great Plains of North America. On the Atlantic seaboard, the United States had won their independence, but the great European powers of Britain, France, and Spain still vied for control of the continent's center. The Kingdom of France had ceded the Louisiana Territory to Spain in 1762, but then Napoleon's Republic of France regained Louisiana in 1800, trading away certain lands in Italy coveted by the Spanish. Napoleon intended to build a French empire in the New World, but was forced to consider consolidation when confronted by other challenges, including a rebellion in Haiti and renewed war with the British. He found a way to consolidate: When envoys were sent to Paris by President Thomas Jefferson to negotiate for the purchase of New Orleans, they were instead offered the entire Louisiana Territory. The Louisiana Purchase triggered a constitutional crisis in the United States, ultimately resolved in Jefferson's favour, but the Spanish were not best pleased.

In the late summer of 1806, a Spanish expedition under the command of Lieutenant Facundo Melgares arrived at a Kitkehahkis (Republican Pawnee) village near the present town of Guide Rock. The Melgares expedition had been dispatched, along with three others, from the Spanish provincial capital of Santa Fe, apparently with the goal of intercepting and capturing any Americans in the Louisiana Territory, notably the Lewis and Clark expedition. Melgares presented gifts and a Spanish flag to the Pawnee, extracting a promise that the Pawnee would expel any Americans who might come into their territory. 

The Pawnee, for their part, insisted that Melgares proceed no farther. Like Napoleon a few years earlier, Melgares recognised that he was overextended; he had already suppressed one mutiny, lost many of his horses, and divided his forces—half of his troops were back on the Arkansas River. Faced now with the prospect of Pawnee opposition, Melgares did the only thing he reasonably could do: he departed the village on the banks of the river near Pahūr, collected his men from the Arkansas, and trekked back to Santa Fe.

Shortly after the departure of the Spanish, a much smaller American military force—two dozen men led by Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, accompanied by Osage and Pawnee guides—arrived in the same village. Pike treated with the Kitkehahkis, as well as some visiting Kanzas, and at a grand council a few days after his arrival, demanded that the Spanish flag be lowered, to be replaced with the flag of the United States. It was a tense moment, but the ranking chief, Sharitarish—not himself a Kitkehahkis but a Chaui Pawnee who had insinuated himself into the village—eventually complied. Sharitarish also insisted, as he had with Melgares, that Pike turn back; Pike, however, was more resolute than Melgares had been, or possibly his position was less precarious, and he defied Sharitarish to stop him. In early October, the Pike expedition proceeded on toward the Arkansas on fresh horses obtained from the Pawnee.

[Zebulon Pike, engraving after 1808 portrait by Charles Willson Peale.]

A few years later, Sharitarish led the Kitkehahkis in an ill-advised and politically-motivated war with the Kanzas, and the Republican Pawnee were forced to abandon their eponymous river valley. They returned for a few years in the 1820s, but by 1833 they were gone for good, living with other Pawnee bands on the Loup River. In that year, the United States signed a treaty with the Pawnee (all bands now treated as a single tribe), in which the Pawnee ceded all their lands south of the Platte River.

* * *

That tense moment in September 1806, when the Kitkehahkis hauled down the Spanish standard and raised the Stars and Stripes, seems to me emblematic. Its significance: The Pawnee did not at this moment, or ever after, fight against the United States. 

Notwithstanding their father's rash action against the Kanzas, three sons of Sharitarish later became principal chiefs of the combined Pawnee nation. His second son and namesake traveled east to Washington and realised that his father had been prudent not to oppose the Americans: too many, too powerful.

[Sharitarish the younger, as painted by Charles Bird King in 1822.]

I think about that on the way back to Lincoln. The Pawnee never took up arms against the United States. On the contrary, Pawnee warriors in large numbers fought with and for the U.S. Army against traditional enemies including the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa.  And as I drive, I reflect, not for the first time, that the Native nations who fought alongside the United States—the Pawnee, the Crow, and others—are not appreciably better off than those which resisted. (And anyone who wishes to deny that systemic racism is endemic within American society had better be prepared to explain that.)

[Flag of the Pawnee Nation, incorporating the Stars and Stripes.]

By 1859, the Pawnee were forcibly confined to a reservation on the Loup, and in the 1870s they were relocated (at their own request, prompted by ongoing hostilities with the Lakota) to the Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. Since then, the tribal government has been dismantled and later reconstituted; communal lands have been broken up and redistributed to individuals, often ending up in non-tribal hands; Pawnee children were sent off to boarding schools such as the one at Genoa, Nebraska, where they were systematically stripped of their language and culture in the interest of making Native Americans more "American". Red Cloud, Nebraska, a pleasant town of pleasant people on former Pawnee land, bears the name of a Lakota chief. And Pahūr was apparently dynamited decades ago, one of four nahurac lodges (out of five) that have been destroyed or irrevocably altered.

It seems a poor reward for their alliance. The Pawnee seem to have assumed that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", but if so, their faith was sadly misplaced.

* * *

It's easy to question whether the Pawnee or the Lakota had the wiser approach, whether Native Americans should or should not have unified to oppose the United States, whether it was better to be a "friendly" or a "hostile". I have engaged in that sort of speculation myself. But it misses the point. 

The real problem is the United States, the invading culture that made such calculations necessary, the Americans. Not just too many and too powerful, as Sharitarish the younger perceived, but too ruthless in the aggregate.

There is an element in this country—the general "they", the people in charge—which is inherently and entirely self-serving. They want what they want, and have no regard for the indigenous people who were here first. Nor do they have any regard for those who came here after they did, or those whose ancestors came here involuntarily.

"They" may claim to care about legal versus illegal immigration, but their contempt for people whose language and customs are different from their own gives the lie to that claim. "They" seem unable or unwilling to distinguish between peaceful protest and rioting; they may claim to respect the former, but likely as not they frothed at the mouth when Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players took a knee during the national anthem, which gives the lie to that claim as well. "They" have always been in charge; small wonder that Indian allies fared no better than those who resisted. The people who condone (outright or through denial) murder-by-cop are the same sort of people who condoned Sand Creek and Wounded Knee.

And against that, it is always better to fight.

Oil and water

If the mysteries of the Great Plains have a heartland, it is the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The Sand Hills stretch two hundred miles east to west, from the valley of the North Platte in the south to the Black Hills and Badlands of South Dakota in the north. They are one of the great deserts of the world, an American Rub al Khali or Gobi. A desert in disguise: walk out of Valentine, Cody, Whiteclay, Chadron—one of those ephemeral little Sand Hills cow towns whose main street looks like a painted stage set with nothing behind it—and dig. Beneath the brittle grass and the thin smoke of soil, you hit sand; you are standing in a sea of dunes. And if you dig deep enough, you will come to an even stranger realm: a vast ancient subterranean ocean, the 156,000-square-mile Ogallala Aquifer, with more water in it than Lake Huron. A sea inside a desert wrapped in a green prairie.

—Rob Schultheis, The Hidden West

If you're anything like me, a figure like 156,000 square miles is a bit abstract, Lake Huron hard to picture out of context. Take a quick look at the map and then come back here.

Okay, now another quote from The Hidden West:

The last time Martha went home to visit, she found her father sitting at his desk with a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's and a mess of farm journals and scientific reports. It's all over, he told her. Sand Hills cattle ranching's dead. We've got maybe thirty years left, and then the whole business is going to dry up and blow away; from Denver to the hundredth meridian, this country's gonna look like Afghanistan. The dirt farmer and the rancher's gonna be as gone as fifty million buffalo, as dead as Crazy Horse, as rare as a set of jackalope antlers.

Martha Schaller's father was contemplating the drying up of the Ogallala Aquifer through overuse, the mining of fossil water for thirsty crops like corn and lawn grasses. But overuse isn't the only thing threatening the aquifer, and thereby the economic and ecological underpinnings of this region.

TransCanada has proposed to build a pipeline (Keystone XL) through the Great Plains: a 36-inch crude-oil pipe running from Hardisty, Alberta, to the Texas Gulf Coast. Nebraska would be a 254-mile link in the project. The draft environmental impact statement has been completed; the public comment period closes in mid-June and will be followed soon thereafter by the final EIS. Until recently, this looked like a done deal. But if there's an upside to BP's recent/ongoing Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf, it's that people are taking a closer look at safety issues.

At a recent meeting in York, Nebraska—click here for the Lincoln Journal Star's article—attendance was up compared to a previous meeting in Fairbury, presumably because of growing awareness of the situation in the Gulf. "For the life of me," said one landowner, "I can't see how they can even consider this pipeline and take the chance of it ruining the groundwater in Nebraska."

Unfortunately but perhaps inevitably, those with a financial stake in the project—and here I'm going to include politicians, who typically have a tough time saying "no" to projects that stand to bring in revenue—are viewing things much more rosily:

"TransCanada agrees absolutely that it's a very critical resource for the state of Nebraska. And that's why we're taking steps to make sure we don't jeopardize it with this pipeline." —TransCanada official

"I think TransCanada is second to none on safety and environment." —union representative

"I think they're a good company. I trust them to do the job." —county commissioner

"I'd say I'm reasonably comfortable." —state senator

The obvious problem here is that plenty of people had confidence in BP and its partners in the Gulf before things went catastrophically wrong, just as plenty of people trusted Exxon before the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound. Now, I'm willing to grant that everyone involved in Keystone XL is well-intentioned, that TransCanada's surveyors and engineers and technicians are competent, that in all likelihood nothing will go wrong. But the nature of the petroleum industry is that no one—no engineer, no corporate executive, and certainly no politician—can guarantee nothing will go wrong. [Link to an (incomplete) list of oil spills.] And the consequences of failure in this environment, even if the risk of failure is small, are simply too high.

If oil gets into the Ogallala Aquifer, there will be no volunteers cleaning the beaches of tar balls, no Coast Guard to deploy oil-containment booms, no practical recourse at all that we can count on—because the whole thing is underground. TransCanada will do its best to act (in public) like a good corporate citizen while (behind the scenes) seeking to limit its financial liability. Politicians will point fingers, convene hearings, and inevitably someone will describe the breach as "unforeseeable". And although everyone will agree in hindsight that the economic benefits of Keystone XL were not worth it, it will be too late: "From Denver to the hundredth meridian, this country's gonna look like Afghanistan."

The better to see you with, my deer

The Nebraska Department of Roads (in any other state it would be the Department of Transportation) plans a deer fence along a four-mile stretch of I-80 between Lincoln and Omaha in order to reduce deer-vehicle collisions. Everywhere else, of course, motorists (and deer) will have to take their chances as usual.

Another approach: kill 'em all. (Fortunately, this proposal has been modified extensively following an outcry by deer hunters and others with values that go beyond the purely economic.)

I just want to see the critters. To that end:


That's a pair of Hella 500 driving lights (packaged as "sport activity lights" for the Subaru Baja) and a pair of Hella 550 fog lights on a Rally Innovations lightbar. When everything's switched on, the road is lit up like Memorial Stadium. (A big thanks to Chris Cook at PTC Factory Outlet, Chase at RI, and Lael Cleland at Lael's Import Performance.)

[Tom Ford at Top Gear describes Hellas: "think tiny suns trapped in glass".]

New Zealand raptors

Rachel Stewart sent the following pictures from her farm in New Zealand:

Her garden of native plants.

The hill out back. I suppose a person could get used to seeing this every morning...


Australasian harrier or kahu (Circus approximans) on roadkill


New Zealand falcon or karearea (Falco novaeseelandiae)


The karearea appears on the NZ $20 bill [sorry for the tiny picture, but notice how nicely the green matches Rachel's photo!] and is endemic to New Zealand. The kahu is also found in the wetter parts of Australia and on many of the region's islands. Apart from an occasional Australian kestrel (Falco cenchroides), which occurs as a vagrant, there are no other living diurnal raptors in New Zealand.

New Zealand also has one owl, Ninox novaeseelandiae, called ruru in Maori and morepork in English; both names relate to its two-note call. [Photo below courtesy of the Maungatautari Ecological Island Trust.]

Rachel writes that it's frustrating to see such magnificent raptors on a regular basis knowing she'll likely never be allowed to fly them, due to New Zealand's ban on falconry: "You Americans don't know how lucky you are!! Actually, you probably do know how lucky you are and, indeed, it has been more hard work than luck. Praise be to NAFA!"

A few decades ago, when falconry was unregulated but not explicitly banned, a man named Rob Wheeldon enjoyed very modest success flying kahu at (introduced) rabbits. In a 1992 Hawk Chalk article, he recalled that 14 rabbits in a season had been his best record:

It goes without saying that the harrier is certainly not the ideal falconer’s bird. Nevertheless, this bird does provide a challenge to get the very best out of its limited potential and possibly that of the falconer as well, which when everything goes according to plan makes the sweet smell of success just so much greater.

The ban may very well have been enacted as a direct response to Mr. Wheeldon's activities, which is especially unfortunate since he seems to have been a typical falconer/conservationist. In addition to rehabilitating injured harriers, he and his wife ran a breeding-and-hacking project aimed at bolstering the population of the New Zealand falcon.

Karearea have been also captive-bred abroad, and are perhaps most notably employed by Nick Fox's mounted hunt in the UK, the Northumberland Crow Falcons. Sadly, they seem to be on the decline in their home country despite legal protection. But Dr. Fox, who wrote his dissertation on the New Zealand falcon, has embarked on an interesting conservation programme called Falcons for Grapes, the goal of which is to provide nesting sites in New Zealand's vineyards; the falcons in turn should reduce losses to depredating birds such as starlings, blackbirds, and thrushes.

Essentially we propose to use one wildlife problem—the conservation of falcons—to mitigate another one: bird damage to grapes. Conservation is a luxury; it costs more money than it generates. In this project we plan to generate funding from commercial beneficiaries—the wine industry—to conserve the falcons. It will be a symbiotic relationship.

Unlike most bird abatement projects employing raptors, Falcons for Grapes does not require that the birds be trained or actively managed. But there are, I suspect, a few enthusiasts like Rachel who would love to have the opportunity to train and fly their native raptors at quarry. Given the negligible impact of well-regulated falconry on both raptor and game populations—not to mention the fact that so much of the likely quarry in New Zealand is non-indigenous anyway—I can think of no compelling reason they should not be allowed to do so.

I've encouraged Rachel to get together with Australia's Peter Nolan and other like-minded people to form an "ANZAC Falconers' Association" to lobby both governments for a change, and I'm sure that many NAFA members would be glad to share the benefit of their experiences in opening up previously closed states and provinces. Free the Antipodes!

Daylight Saving Time and the tyranny of tradition

Ask any falconer about Daylight Saving Time and the response is likely to be a groan. It's not the concept, necessarily, but the implementation—it's applied to the wrong part of the year.

Blame it on Ben−or maybe not

The concept of Daylight Saving Time (DST for short) is often attributed to American publisher, inventor, and statesman Benjamin Franklin. (See, for example, this recent piece in Scientific American.) According to this version of the story, Franklin (himself a wealthy man) originated the concept as a thrift measure: by setting clocks forward, an hour of early-morning darkness could essentially be traded for an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day, thereby reducing demand for beeswax and other candle materials. In Franklin's own words, "A penny saved is a penny earned."

In reality, however, the operative proverb is "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise"—what Franklin actually advocated, while on a diplomatic mission to France, was that Parisians should get more accomplished during daylight hours by rising earlier in the day, firing cannons and ringing church bells if necessary to implement his plan. The suggestion may have been tongue-in-cheek, but even so it's a poor diplomat who accuses the local inhabitants of laziness—which probably accounts for Franklin's publishing his comments anonymously.

The actual inventor and foremost advocate for DST was an Englishman named William Willett. He lobbied unsuccessfully for the adoption of DST from 1907 until his death in 1915. In the end, the First World War accomplished what Willett could not: British lawmakers enacted DST in 1916, but not until the Germans and their allies had beat them to it.

The United States, late arrivals to the war, were late in adopting DST as well: DST went into effect in 1918, and was dropped the following year. The Second World War saw a revival of DST, but once again it was discontinued at the end of the war. DST was observed sporadically on a local basis until 1966, when the Uniform Time Act made DST more or less standard; since then, there have been minor tweaks to the system as states have chosen to opt out (or back in) and various localities have changed time zones, but American society has come to accept DST as routine.


An answer in search of a problem

Several justifications are typically given for implementing DST, many of them easy to discredit. It is often claimed, for example, that DST is beneficial to agriculture, but in fact most farmers work by the sun and not by the clock. Health and safety benefits are also claimed, but in most cases the evidence is ambiguous—or benefits at one time of year are counterbalanced by deleterious effects at another time, resulting in an overall wash. For example, a recent (2008) study in Sweden found that the incidence of heart attacks rose immediately after the "spring forward" but fell by a comparable amount after the "fall back".

The strongest argument for DST, dating back to Franklin and Willett, has traditionally been energy savings. But, as Charles Q. Choi notes in the Scientific American article, recent analyses indicate that changing patterns in energy usage, including increased use of personal electronic devices (this means you, bloggers!), may have rendered this argument obsolete. When Indiana implemented statewide DST for the first time in 2006, the result was "a 1 percent overall rise in residential electricity use, costing the state an extra $9 million."

The enemy wears plaid

Not all of the economic arguments have to do with energy. Quoting Choi again, "Retailers, especially those involved with sports and recreation, have historically argued hardest for extending daylight time." Chief among these, it seems, are purveyors of golfing equipment: The National Golf Foundation estimated that an extension of DST could result in a $200-300 million increase in equipment sales and greens fees. (Choi quotes the figure as $400 million, but who's counting?)

Even my friends, it seems, are out to get me. Greg McManus, with whom I coach high-school lacrosse, e-mailed me a practice plan for this coming Monday: "Wow! We'll actually have an hour and a half practice from now on. Daylight savings rocks!" It's true that our first few practices have been cut short as dusk falls, but the days are rapidly getting longer even without the help of DST. Which leads us to...

A modest proposal

Instead of applying DST to spring and summer, when daylight is naturally longer, how about applying it to the winter months instead, when it might actually do some good?

The sports retailers lobbying for DST to start earlier in the spring and end later in the fall represent warm-weather sports, golf being the prime example. But surely falconers aren't the only field-sports enthusiasts who find weekday afternoons too fleeting during the depths of winter—couldn't gunners (and their lobbyists) make a case for DST reversal?

There are economic and public-health arguments to be made as well. For example, many people, particularly in northern latitudes, suffer from seasonal-affective disorder (SAD) as a result of light deprivation: For a good part of the year, they commute to work before the sun comes up, toil inside all day, then drive home again after dark. If DST were instituted in the winter months, they would have the benefit of afternoon sun. A decrease in SAD could save millions in mental-health care—enough to offset golf's losses?—and perhaps even save lives.

Someone is sure to ask, as someone always does, "What about the children?" Wintertime DST would mean darker mornings, and yes, the poor kiddies might have to wait for the school bus in the dark. I have no answer to this, other than to say that I always enjoyed waiting for the bus in the dark: that's when we were likeliest to see white-tailed deer, or red fox, or owls headed off to roost. Sometimes I suspect that my affinity for wildlife stems, in part, from these early-morning encounters when the world was quiet and dark—imagination and wonder flourish under those conditions.

I'm not going to tilt too hard at this particular windmill—for one thing, I don't have William Willett's energy or enthusiasm—but I thought I'd toss the idea out there for discussion. Ultimately, I think the mnemonic "Spring forward, fall back" is too powerfully ingrained to withstand reversal. Ah, well...another good idea undone by a slogan.

Don't forget to set your clocks forward tonight.

"Alice's Restaurant Massacree"

Someone had to post this for Thanksgiving...may as well be me.



I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Arlo perform this on his "Alice's Restaurant" tour a few years ago. Other highlights included, of course, "City of New Orleans" and a spooky rendition of "House of the Rising Sun".

The historical background on the Massacree is here for anyone who might be interested.

Back later with some falconry...

Please?

The eagle says it all in this cartoon by Bob Englehart at the Hartford Courant. Congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama, and to us all.

Three days

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide, the chance won't come again
Don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who that it's namin'
And the loser now will be later to win...
For the times they are a-changin'

All in due haste

Somebody has lit a fire under these guys to get this done in due haste.

—Jamie Rappaport Clark, executive director of Defenders of Wildlife, former director of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

In what appears to be a parting shot at any semblance of meaningful environmental protection, the Bush Administration is attempting to fast-track (really fast-track) the review of public comments on proposed changes to endangered-species rules.

The changes? Well, when considering the potential effects of federally-reviewed projects such as dams, power plants, etc. on endangered species, concerns about greenhouse gases would be dismissed a priori—and, if that's not incredible enough, the advice of federal biologists at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service would not be sought. Whiskey...Tango...Foxtrot.

Now, it's reasonable to assume that a significant portion of the public commentary might be in opposition. Is that a problem for the administration? Not at all. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service proposes to bring in a team of 15 experts (speed-reading experts, apparently) to review all 200,000 or so comments in a 32-hour session. Do the math: 200,000 comments, divided by the 32 hours devoted to the task, divided by 60 minutes per hour, divided by 15 team members sharing the workload. Each of the 15 experts will need to read almost 7 comments per minute. That works out to not quite nine seconds per letter—and I don't mean letter as in character, but letter as in note, missive, epistle, some of which may be several pages long.

This is beyond cynical, even for the Bush White House. Apparently one or more of the Interior Department's many lawyers pointed out that Interior was required by law to read the comments—and so the administration will adhere to the letter of the law while flagrantly trampling on its spirit. Why bother actually discussing or thinking about public opinion (or, indeed, the public welfare) when you've already made up your mind to disregard it?

Read the AP article here if you are even slightly disinclined to believe any of this. An attempt to ignore global warming, by rule, and bypass or ignore biologists on endangered-species issues—and then to gloss over public outcry—does sound like parody from The Onion, but that's really what has been proposed.

Utterly disgraceful.

Dolores Umbridge and the wolves

A bit of slightly lazy blogging today, in that I'm borrowing much of this from Defenders of Wildlife. I will point out first that I don't always see eye to eye with DoW. One action I did admire was their compensation program for ranchers in Yellowstone region who could document stock losses caused by wolf depredation. This innovative, straightforward measure did much to ameliorate tensions in and around Yellowstone. Moreover, they were on the right side of the issue—returning wolves to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—while a few other conservation groups, notably the National Audubon Society, opposed the reintroduction on the grounds that 10(j) designation as a "non-essential experimental" population reduced legal protection for (purely hypothetical) wolves that might wander in from other parts of the country where they enjoyed full ESA protection. Unfortunately, DoW later fell into the same sort of thinking—"protecting" individual animals from a carefully-designed program that would have no negative effect on populations—when they opposed an extremely limited and highly regulated take of eyas peregrines in the western U.S. for falconry.

They're on the right side of this one, though. Like most conservation groups and, indeed, hunters worthy of the designation, they are opposed to aerial hunting of predators like wolves and bears. Unfortunately the Repulican nominee for vice-president, Sarah Palin, thinks aerial shoots (and bounties on wolves) are a great idea.

Here's some more information on her record as governor of Alaska, courtesy of Defenders of Wildlife:

Sarah Palin and the Environment

Governor Sarah Palin has an extreme anti-conservation record on issues ranging from global warming, energy and drilling to wildlife and habitat protection.

Aerial hunting of wolves and bears

Governor Palin is an active promoter of Alaska's aerial hunting program whereby wolves and bears are shot from the air or chased by airplanes to the point of exhaustion before the pilot lands the plane and a gunner shoots the animals point blank.

Palin offered a $150 bounty for wolves to entice hunters to kill more wolves in certain parts of the state, with hunters having to present a wolf's foreleg to collect the bounty.

She actively opposed a ballot measure campaign seeking to end the aerial hunting of wolves by private hunters and approved a $400,000 state-funded campaign aimed at swaying people's votes on the issue.

She also introduced legislation to make it easier to kill wolves and bears and which would have also removed the aerial hunting initiative from the ballot and block the ability of citizens to vote on the issue.

The Board of Game, which she appoints, has approved the killing of black bear sows with cubs as part of the program and expanded the aerial control programs.

The media is currently looking into reports that state officials implementing one of the aerial wolf killing programs illegally killed five-week old wolf pups just outside their dens.

Global Warming

As recently as August 2008, Governor Palin questioned whether man-made fossil fuel emissions are responsible for global warming, defying worldwide scientific consensus (Newsmax 8/29/08). And her drill-drill-drill approach to energy issues will do nothing to ease the causes of global warming, promote the use of clean, renewable energy sources, or break our addiction to foreign oil.

Endangered Species

Palin has repeatedly opposed the listing of endangered animals under the Endangered Species List despite overwhelming scientific evidence that such listings are warranted.

Polar Bear

The U.S. Geological Survey predicts that loss of summer sea ice - crucial habitat for polar bears - could lead to the demise of two-thirds of the world's polar bears by mid-century, including all of Alaska's polar bears. The Bush administration has proposed listing the polar bears as threatened under the ESA to help protect polar bear habitat from threats such as oil and gas development.

Governor Palin has actively opposed the listing of the polar bear despite the fact that Alaska's top marine mammal biologists agreed with the federal scientists who believed the bear should be listed. She wrote the Secretary of Interior urging him not to list the bear on the ground it might hurt the state's oil- and gas-dependent economy. After the bear was listed, she recently filed suit seeking to overturn the listing of polar bears.

Beluga Whales

Alaska's Cook Inlet beluga whales are a unique group of white whales whose numbers have dramatically declined in the past two decades due to pressures ranging from pollution to increased ship traffic. Governor Palin opposes the listing of the Cook Inlet beluga whales, citing the listing as a threat to oil and gas development, despite their genetic uniqueness and the fact that their numbers have decreased from 1,300 in the 1980s to about 350 today.

Drilling

Palin is a strong supporter of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a vital wilderness area. It is home to hundreds of thousands of caribou who use the refuge as a calving ground, more than one million migratory birds, and countless other wildlife. It's the most important onshore denning habitat for female polar bears. Senator McCain himself has repeatedly voted to protect this pristine wilderness area. Palin is also a supporter of drilling in Bristol Bay and other offshore sites despite the risks to sensitive marine wildlife in the area, including the endangered polar bear and Beluga whale.

Clean Water and Pebble Mine

Governor Palin actively campaigned against a state ballot measure this summer aimed at protecting Alaska's Bristol Bay. The mining industry seeks to develop a gold and copper mine in the area that would pollute the Bay's headwaters and threaten the spawning grounds for the largest remaining wild salmon run. The initiative would have prevented large-scale mining operations from dumping waste materials into salmon watersheds.

I already had concerns about Dolores Umbridge—excuse me, I mean Governor Palin—being a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. But while I can't say the above information surprises me, it does still shock me a little.

You can express your opposition to aerial hunting by purchasing this nifty pin from Wm. Spear Design in Anchorage. (I can't believe this is the first time the link has appeared at Flyover Country; I'm a huge fan of Bill's work.)

And you might also consider not voting for the McCain/Palin ticket this November.

(HT Julie for putting this on my radar.)

In a nutshell

So here's the thing:

The guy has access to good information. Sometimes knowledgeable people, experts even, come to him...


Occasionally he might seek them out.


He might take his time, weigh the options...


But just when it seems he might be getting it...

He goes and makes the lame decision anyway.

(Gotta love the stylin' "Members Only" jacket, though.)

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: please read

On the off chance that there's anyone reading Flyover Country who doesn't also read Terrierman's Daily Dose, please read this post at least.

Thank you.

And that's final

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled today on two cases that will ensure Randolph College (formerly Randolph-Macon Woman's College) continues as a co-ed institution. [Brief article from The Chronicle of Higher Education here.]

One suit was filed by students who argued that they had, upon admission, been promised an education at an all-female college. The court held by a 5-2 margin that no such contract existed.

The second suit was filed by alumnae and other donors who argued that gifts to RMWC had been intended to support a women's college specifically. This sounds like a stronger argument to me, but the court ruled unanimously that the laws cited by the plaintiffs did not apply to this case.

Why do I care? First of all, I was a member of the last all-male undergraduate class admitted to Washington & Lee University, about an hour away via U.S. Highway 501 over the mountains. I remember hearing the argument, similar to that employed by the Randolph students, that we had been admitted to an all-male school and should be allowed to graduate from one. I don't know, however, if that argument was ever made before a court. In any case, I was content not to be "grandfathered in"—W&L's single-sex status wasn't a major factor in my decision to go there instead of Johns Hopkins or Maryland—and things turned out well in the end, as I eventually met my wife at W&L.

Another reason for my interest is that I have a number of friends from RMWC, mostly of the long-lost variety but one of whom qualifies as a lifelong friend. (In fact, I heard from her this morning after a long hiatus. I don't know yet if this was coincidence or if her thoughts turned to me because of the news, but I suppose I'll find out soon.) I suspect most of them would have preferred, for nostalgic reasons at least, that RMWC stayed RMWC.

I do think there are reasonable arguments to be made for the option of single-sex education, at private institutions anyway, and I'm mildly disappointed that this option was closed due to financial considerations at Randy Mac. On the bright side, my RMWC sweatshirt (if I can find it again) is now a collector's item...