Thanksgiving Thoughts

There’s nothing like a good snowfall to put me in the mood for Thanksgiving. The weather systems that moved across western Montana last week put a good cover of snow on the landscape and we’re thankful for that. Here in the semi-arid West we depend on winter snows to give us water through the rest of the year; water for irrigation, drinking, wildlife, fish, fishing and boating. Precipitation is always good in Montana. Occasionally it comes at inconvenient times, of course, but it’s always good.

A good snowfall also puts a cap on the autumn season so we can move on to winter. I remember a farmer friend back in North Dakota who was thankful when a good snowstorm finally came after an extended period of mild weather. “I can finally get a little time off,” he said. “As long as the ground was bare I kept tinkering around with stuff. None of it was important, but since I could do it I kept on doing it.”

Thanksgiving comes at a good time. We’re approaching the end of the hunting seasons and many of us have harvested wild game and have put this bounty of nature in the freezer to help feed our families over the coming months.

When the Pilgrims and their Native American neighbors celebrated that first thanksgiving dinner in 1621, most of the food on the menu was wild game, including venison, turkey, ducks, geese, swans, fish, lobster and clams, plus wild berries and fruit. Pumpkin and squash would have been among the limited crops available for the dinner.

Hunting and fishing made that first Thanksgiving dinner possible. Indeed, hunting and fishing is the only way that tiny band of ill-prepared immigrants to this cold New England coastal area could have survived, and that was mostly due to the kindness of the Wampanoag Indian tribe who shared their food and hunting skills to help them survive their first winter. Incidentally, there are now about 2,300 surviving Wampanoag people, compared to the estimated 6,500 people at the time the Pilgrims came to Plymouth. In the 1600s, the native peoples of Massachusetts were pushed out of their homes, exposed to disease and killed in warfare. By the end of that century they had all but disappeared.

It’s almost 400 years since that first Thanksgiving and it’s good we still set a day aside to give thanks. Here are a few of the things for which I’m thankful this year.

I’m grateful for the gifts of family. Our children, their spouses, and our grandchildren give us hope and confidence for the future. They make us proud.

I’m grateful for the wild things of our creation. They fill the skies, the earth and the waters and give us food, a sense of wonder and a delight for the eyes. I’m grateful for the many people who work so hard to make sure that wild things continue to be a part of our lives.

I’m grateful for Montana Tech head football coach Bob Green. Coach Green is a total class act and has been through his career as a coach and mentor of young men who play football, study engineering and sciences – and graduate. I wish Bob and his wife, Pam, nothing but the best as he begins retirement. Football season in this part of the world is going to be a lot duller without him. I will share a bit of advice, however. Coach, there is life after football.

I’m grateful for the people who till the soil, produce crops, raise livestock, and produce the food for us on Thanksgiving Day and every other day of the year. Feeding the world is a noble profession.

I’m thankful for the men and women in our armed forces that serve our country so faithfully. My biggest wish is that our nation can find a way to world peace and bring you home. In the meantime, we’re grateful for your continuing service.

And to all of you, who read this column, may you and your families have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.

Pheasants in the North Dakota Oil Patch

Flicka bringing in a pheasant that didn't get away.

“Those are industrial strength pheasants,” I told Flicka, as a rooster pheasant flushed from the edge of the shelterbelt—the wrong side of the shelterbelt—well screened from my view except for a fleeting glance as it flew off to safety. Another pheasant had given us the slip.

Flicka, my Labrador retriever and always-enthusiastic hunting partner, and I were hunting pheasants on Wildlife Management Areas along the shores of Lakes Sakakawea, the big Missouri River impoundment in western North Dakota. I’ve hunted that area off and on around 30 years, and we’ve been making trips there regularly in recent years so that Kevin, our son who lives in Minot, and I can hunt together.

The area has been undergoing rapid change in the last few years. Some of those changes are natural and others are industrial.

The area is smack dab in the middle of the Bakken Formation oil patch of western North Dakota and eastern Montana, and the pace of development is almost mind-boggling. Almost everywhere you look you can see derricks, indicating where new wells are being drilled, site preparation where wells are going to be drilled, oil wells that are pumping, and occasional flames indicating where natural gas is being flared off. The number of natural gas flares is less than a year or so ago, as the oil companies have built natural gas pipelines to capture the gas and send it to market.

Another indicator of change is the volume of heavy truck traffic, with tanker trucks, heavy equipment movers and gravel hauling trucks fanning out across the countryside. While farming operations continue next to the oil wells it’s easy to see that energy is the driving force in western North Dakota.

Energy creates other impacts. Schools in a couple communities have put up apartments and houses specifically to provide their teachers with subsidized housing. With the influx of oil workers, housing in many small towns is at a premium.

For better or worse, Mother Nature has drastically changed the lakeshore hunting areas. The drought cycle of a few years ago resulted in low lake levels. While that hurt fisheries and boating it also created vast expanses of wildlife habitat as weeds, brush patches and groves of trees took hold, creating a paradise full of white-tailed deer, pheasants and waterfowl.

After just a couple years with heavy runoff the big impoundment is virtually full, as is the Ft. Peck impoundment in Montana, and some pheasant hotspots of a few years ago are now under 40 feet of water. In fact, lake levels increased 13 feet over the course of this past summer, going from 1837 feet above sea level in March to 1850 feet in July. Right now, the Corps of Engineers is dumping water from the reservoir at the rate of 30,000 cubic feet per second to lower lake levels to make room for next year’s runoff. Water is still coming in at the rate of 20,000 cfs, so it takes awhile to reduce the lake level, which stood at 1845 feet on October 31.

On October 31, while other people were getting ready for Halloween, Kevin and I were out walking along the lakeshore into a bitterly cold south wind, watching the surf roll in. Lines of driftwood above the current shoreline mark this year’s high water mark, while offshore, drowned trees are still standing in deep water. On this Halloween, the pheasants played all the tricks and, except for the sandwiches we’d packed for the day, we got none of the treats.

A couple days earlier I’d hunted by myself and collected a three-bird limit in relatively short order. The pheasants seemed to be bunched up in sheltered areas following an early snowstorm that roared through a couple days earlier.

After a couple days of warm sunshine the pheasants, especially those big gaudy roosters, seemed to have scattered and were hard to find. Who knows, maybe some of them strolled over to that new oilrig operating just a few hundred yards from the wildlife management area and hired on as roughnecks.

Some Notes on Veterans Day

Tomorrow, November 11, is Veteran’s Day, the annual tribute to the veterans of our armed forces who have sacrificed in so many ways to protect our country and freedoms.

The holiday originally was Armistice Day, commemorating that 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month, November 11, 1918, when World War I, or the Great War, as it was called for years, finally limped to an exhausted end. While the war didn’t officially end until June 28, 1919 when the various governments signed the Treaty of Versailles in Paris, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation designating November 11, 1919 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day to honor “the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory…”

In 1926, Congress passed a resolution designating Armistice Day as a day “to be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”

It was not until 1938 when a law was passed to designate the 11th of November as an official holiday. In 1954, a decade after an even more horrible war, World War II, and just after the Korean War, Congress amended the law to change Armistice Day to Veterans Day, a piece of legislation signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower, the five star general who commanded the allied forces in Europe to end the European part of that war.

For several years, Veterans Day was observed on the fourth Monday of October, following the 1968 legislation establishing a number of three-day weekends. When that law took effect in 1971 it was clear that not everybody agreed with the change. In 1975, President Gerald Ford signed legislation to put Veterans Day back to November 11, beginning in 1978.

In most countries of the British Commonwealth, November 11 is observed as Remembrance Day, and British military units begin their observances with a bugle call, the Last Post, which usually signals day’s end. Similar to Taps, the Last Post is a part of military funerals in Commonwealth countries. Another tradition in the Commonwealth nations is to observe two minutes of silence at 11 a.m.

Armistice or Remembrance Day is not a public holiday in the Republic of Ireland. In July Ireland observes a National Day of Commemoration for Irish men and women who died in past wars or in service with United Nations Peacekeeping Forces. Still, in Dublin there is the National War Memorial Gardens, a memorial dedicated to the memory of the 49,400 Irish soldiers serving in the British armed forces who lost their lives in the Great War. Remembrance Sunday, the Sunday closest to November 11, is marked by ecumenical ceremonies at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.

Long time readers might recall that I’ve had a long-held interest in World War I. In recent years there have been a number of books, fiction and non-fiction, published about the conflict.

The most recent book is “Fall of Giants,” by Ken Follett, a novel and the first volume of a planned trilogy about the 20th Century. It’s a heavy book, almost 1,000 pages long, about people and events leading to the war, significant events during the war and, finally, the end and aftermath of that war. Follett is a best-selling author with a long list of novels. This planned trilogy will definitely be a major achievement in his long writing career. I just finished reading it and while that book may be hard to pick up, it’s even harder to put down.

The battle of the Somme, a multi-month battle, with over a million casualties, including over 300,000 deaths, on both sides of the conflict after repeated fruitless battles, probably represents, more than other battles, the tragedy and futility of trench warfare. A recent book is a non-fiction volume by Peter Hart, “The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front.” And, yes, the Somme is a significant event in the Follett novel, as well.

Next week I’ll get back to fall hunting, but let’s take time tomorrow to honor the legacy of our nation’s veterans.

It's November and the Seasons Are Progressing

The Bounty Under a Cold, Late Autumn Sky

“Don’t go to Montana or Idaho. The wolves have gotten all the elk and deer. There’s nothing left.”

This spring our son, who lives in North Dakota, reported on attending a sportsmen’s show and that was the message blared out by a person promoting his business of booking hunts in Canada. Right now I think a lot of Montana hunters would say the guy was full of beans.

Opening weekend of the big game rifle season is just a small part of the season but if the initial reports from game checking stations hold up this could be a great hunting season. Certainly the heavy snow that pelted the high mountain peaks is a positive factor in hunting success on the opening weekend. That snow can also make hunting difficult when it comes to navigating some of those back country roads, but it also forces deer and elk to lower elevations where hunters have a better chance of finding them.

The big question is what will the weather do as we progress through the season? Certainly we’ve had other years when stormy opening weekends turned into mild and sunny Novembers, better for flyfishing than big game hunting. If nothing else, with the election campaign ending yesterday the weather should be cooling off. There will be a lot less hot air blowing around.

If you’re looking for some new hunting territory, you may be interested in knowing that the new Spotted Dog Wildlife Management Area near Deer Lodge is open to hunting this season. While there was some controversy as to whether the state should have acquired the property in the first place, it’s a done deal and the area is an important acquisition to the public lands open to hunting. More information is available at the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks website at http://fwp.mt.gov. You can download interim regulations for the area as well as a map.

While elk and deer are getting a lot of attention this time of year let’s not forget that there are a lot of other hunting opportunities right now.

I always figure that right now is a good time to go pheasant hunting. Now that we’re almost a month into the season a lot of the people who were out tramping pheasant country in early October are now up in the mountains looking for elk or might have even quit hunting for the year. This means that some landowners will be more receptive to a polite request for hunting permission. In addition, as hunting pressure eases pheasants may be returning to some of the high quality game habitat on public land areas.

Last month I spent several days in and around the Freezeout Lake Wildlife Management Area near Fairfield, Montana. There is some great pheasant habitat in areas of the complex, with brushy shelterbelts, food plots and about as much grassland as you care to walk. The birds get pushed hard in the first few weeks of the season, but things get better.

Mountain grouse kind of get forgotten as we get into the late autumn, but right now is a prime time for hunting ruffed grouse. In Midwest and eastern states ruffed grouse get a lot of hunting attention. Here in Montana hunters often ignore these wonderful game birds. Granted, it isn’t always easy hunting, climbing up and down mountain foothills and wandering the aspen thickets. With leaves off the trees, however, it’s slightly easier to find the birds and to follow their flights through the forest.

If you’re out in search of upland birds, however, don’t forget to wear blaze orange clothing. It’s just about the most important thing you can do to stay safe.

The waterfowl season has been open for a month but I always figure the best hunting is yet to come as some of these winter weather systems sweep across the western Canadian provinces and the northern prairies of Montana. Each storm means fresh flights of ducks and geese heading for southwestern Montana.

As usual, the biggest problem is finding time to do it all. Good luck!