keely – Page 37 – State of Wilderness

Current Issues in Outdoor Ethics: Smartphone Apps

Lately, I have been reading about this debate that is raging in the birding community. It used to be that the hobby of birding involved a lot of watching and waiting. It takes patience to be a birder, apparently. The popularity of smart phones and the inundation of technology into our daily lives is changing that, and some are not sure it is for the better. There are apps that can be downloaded to help identify birds (J and I use one called I-Bird Pro) that also play the bird calls for help in identification. These apps can be used, and abused, to lure birds into coming into view.

One side argues that these apps are potentially damaging to wildlife. The National Park Service has banned use of bird calls in its parks, calling it an “intentional disturbance” to bird behavior and biology. It can lead the birds to become desensitized to the calls of others of their species, if they respond to it several times and don’t see another bird on the other end. We don’t always understand the true nature of the calls we are broadcasting, so it is possible it could off territorial birds or interfere with breeding. The birds leave nests unattended to come seek out the call, leaving the young exposed to predators. Federal biologists who were using the call to find spotted owls by listening for them to “whoo” back soon learned that those call-backs would draw attacks on those owls by the more-aggressive barred owls, so the biologists scaled back on this practice in the best interest of the birds.

The other side argues that drawing the birds out is actually less stressful for the birds than tromping through their habitat, disturbing their areas for longer time periods than the short time it takes to play the call. There is no specific data to demonstrate that there is an actual effect on the wildlife, especially when the calls are played correctly (short durations and only when necessary). Experienced hunters and birders have been mimicking animal calls for generations to lure animals to them with no real negative consequences. Before these apps, field researchers relied on the use of cassette tapes to bring the animals out. Is it judicious to assume that everyone who uses these apps will use them irresponsibly, thereby affecting the animals in a negative way?

Another way technology is being used to view wildlife differently is Wildlife Spotting Phone Apps. Apps such as Where’s a Bear and YNP Wildlife let visitors to Yellowstone National Park know where sightings are occurring, up to the minute. Therefore, visitors who are hungry for a bear sighting can find out where the bears are, and get over to that area of the park. If the animal is still in that area, a crowd could develop, which can be negative in terms of human and animal safety. One potential side effect is that repeated exposure to humans desensitizes the bears to them, and potentially grizzly bears that have become desensitized to humans are more likely to attack them.

I am on the fence about these apps. Having been to Yellowstone and seen NO bears or other exciting predators, I would have loved to have up to date information on where the animals were. However, I would hate to do something that is detrimental to wildlife.

Brazos Bend Part II: It’s For the Birds

After staying up until midnight talking, drinking, and eating with our friends on New Year’s Eve, we headed off to our tent. Despite the predictions of cold temperatures, it actually was not a bad night in our sleeping bags, and we felt quite rested in the morning. I flipped us some oatmeal-banana-chocolate chip pancakes that I had found a recipe for on Pinterest while J broke down camp. After all this, we had to drive back up to the headquarters to deal with some unresolved check in issues, and then finally we were ready for our actual goals for the day: work on finding some of the caches in the park we had not found, and record a list of bird species observed for the day.

I had decided that this year we were going to actually keep a species count of the birds we saw. I would say that it was our Big Year, except that we have really never had a “Year” at all. I would actually say that in fact, this is our “Baseline Year”. From the moment we got up, I had been keeping a watch out with the binoculars, bird book in hand, checking off the ones that flitting about the campsite in my Brazos Bend birding checklist that I had downloaded and printed out before we left the house.

When we pulled up at Diane’s campsite to see if anyone else wanted to go caching with us, I still had those items in my hands. We found Rod, and set off down the trail. We spent two hours hiking about along the Bluestem and Bayou trails, attempting to make cache finds. We ended up finding two out of the three we looked for, and I was able to drop off a travel bug I had been carrying for much too long. I was interested to see how my ankle held up, since we want to do some distance hiking this year. I was carrying a little bit of weight in my pack, but not a lot, and my ankle was a bit sore by the time we got back. I hope this will not slow me down from hiking this year. I probably should wear hiking boots and not sneakers when I go – it might help the stability of my ankle, although it is pain in my right heel after long walks that keeps me reaching for the sneakers and avoiding all other shoes.

Our total bird species count for the day was 14. We could have gotten a lot more if we had made it over to the lakes, since we only claimed one water bird species today. There are 4, 987 acres in this park – there was a lot of land we did not cover. We mostly saw birds at the campsites, and just a few different kinds along the trail. My favorite species of the day was the Eastern Bluebird that I saw on our way to the last cache. It was also during this sighting that I somehow lost the cover to the viewing glass of the binoculars, which J found understandably annoying.

These are the birds we saw today: Black-bellied Whistling Duck, Snowy Egret, Black and Turkey Vultures, Killdeer, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Eastern Phoebe, Northern Cardinal, Yellow-Rumped Warbler, Eastern Bluebird, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Tufted Titmouse, Carolina Chickadee, and American Crow. There were probably dozens more, but we are still novices at this birding thing.

These were, of course, the most common species seen today. Go figure. This only confirms my theory that we are making the world a very good place for vultures (or, if you read my previous post – maybe we can blame this on the coyotes).

Brazos Bend State Park: Tales of the Wilderness

It is our annual tradition to spend New Year’s Eve on a camping trip with a certain core group of geocachers, give or take a few. For me, this is only the third year I have been involved in this tradition, but for J, this goes back about ten years. (It would be the fourth for me, but last year we had to cancel it due to weather and my leg injury). I knew about it back in the day, but I had trouble convincing my family to go, until my family dynamic changed. This is the second time since I have been involved that we had it at Brazos Bend. The first year, there was a whole group of us there. This year, it was down to a handful.

When we got to the park, we had about an hour until the sun went down, and it was immediately apparent that J and I had different agendas. He was in a race to get the campsite set up, and I wanted to get those last two geocache finds to help me end the year by logging the event as my #3300 geocache find. He encouraged me to take the dogs and make the finds while he situated camp.

In retrospect, we realized that what he meant for me to do is to swing by the other campsite and pick up our friend Diane and maybe her friend, and have them come with me. I didn’t get that part, and plus they had their own thing going on, so I went off by myself at dusk to try to score some finds. I think if I had a friend or a flashlight, it would have been a little different experience for me.

The picture up above is a scene from the trail I took, the Hale Lake Loop. Also, below, a shot of the water from the bridge I crossed to get there. I was really brazosbend 1 enjoying the quiet serenity of having the park to myself – I saw a person when I first set out, but once I got on the trail, not a single soul.

However, the thing about being in the woods is – you are never really alone, even if you think you are. I realized this as I reached ground zero for the first cache I was after, which was about 250 ft off into the woods. I saw a big, black animal moving in the woods about 80 ft in front of me. I thought it was a bear for a moment before I remembered I was in Texas, so it was certainly not that – but in fact, a feral hog. They are a huge pest species in our state, and generally speaking will leave you alone – unless they are in a group, or feel threatened for some reason. I was worried this one would in fact be threatened if my silly dogs decided to start barking and lunging at it, and considered going back for a moment – but I really wanted that cache find, so I stood still, and that is when I realized that pig was not alone. One, two, three, FOUR pigs in a line passed within about 50-80 feet of us. I was amazed that when I told my dogs, “quiet,” they actually listened, and stood stock still, even stopped panting, to watch the pigs pass quietly. We made the cache find, and then got the heck out of dodge.

The sun was going down, but I wanted that next find, so I set off for the next one along a side trail that was the closest one to me. I started reading the cache description, and started getting a little spooked. The cache was called “Cat Tracks”, and it turns out the reason why that name was chosen is because the cache owner said they saw the biggest bobcat they had ever seen at the cache site when going for the hide. As I got closer, I began to get the paranoid feeling that I was being stalked. I had to go about 180 ft into the brush, which by now was kind of dark inside, and when the dogs and I were about halfway in the thicket, we heard a branch snap nearby. We all froze…and then beat a hasty retreat outta there.

About twenty feet back down the trail, I started second guessing myself, and started to go back in…only to see or sense something jump down off a nearby branch, which then bounced up and down from the relieved weight. Nevermind!

As I was headed out of the woods and towards the bridge that would lead me back to the campsite, I started hearing cracking and snapping of branches in the woods to my right. Several times the dogs and I stopped to listen, and I became convinced there was a whole herd of feral hogs in those woods, about to bust out and chase us down. As the sun was finally setting, I came to two realizations. One: those sounds, and the faint hissing sounds I was also hearing, where in fact only vultures settling in to roost, fighting over the best spots, and knocking down dead branches as they went. Two: that at dark, Brazos Bend State Park belongs to the creatures. That, although a frightening thing, is also how it should be, and I am glad the creatures have a place to call their own.

That night as we sat around the campfire sipping our adult beverages and telling life stories, I heard a sound. It increased in intensity, and J noticed it, too, and agreed with my consensus: coyotes howling. It sounded like a lot of them.

The next day, when we were hiking with Rod (from the caching team “uptrain”), he told us that earlier that day, he had come across the carcasses of four feral hogs that had been tore up. He had told the ranger about it, and the ranger explained that was the work of the coyotes. The coyotes lurk around the edges of the pig trails, working together to take down the weak and the young. I am not sure if it was the four pigs I had seen the day before – Jerry didn’t think so, because they were on the far end of Hale Lake, not the side I had been on – and I am not sure whose side I am on in this nature’s scheme, but I did find it interesting to think about what kind of dramas played out in those woods once the sun goes down.

Coming Soon

I have neglected this poor blog, and if you are a regular reader, bless your heart and I am sorry. I was consumed with wedding planning, as I tried to put together a wedding in less than three months with a very bare-bones budget. It’s over, and it was a success, and now I can focus on other things.

We haven’t been doing much exploration of the great outdoors and the wilderness, because we were focusing on home and family. There were two adventures we had in the past couple of months: going to Corpus for a weekend to see my brother, and driving out to La Grange to buy some mead for the wedding. We went geocaching along the way in La Grange and I made a new friend:

This year, I am hopeful we will have more adventures, and that I can share with you some of the fun and interesting things we do.

Of course our plans for the New Year’s include getting in better shape, like most people. We really need to work on that. We need to get in good shape to be better parents for the kids we have here, and for those we might want to have together. These are some of our other plans:

1) Discover Houston – from a kid’s point of view. We made a list of the places that make Houston unique, and set dates to take the kids to the ones we haven’t already taken them too.

2) Hiking: I have also set some dates and made some plans for that. I want us to get backpacking equipment rather than car camping equipment, so we can do long distance hiking. I would LIKE to do the Lone Star Trail this year and make some preparations to do pieces of the AT in following years. We don’t have specific plans for more that a weekend hike on the Lone Star Trail, though

3) Geocaching: there are two people I would really like to catch up to and pass, because I am competitive like that. They are about 300-500 caches ahead of me. I usually find around 500 caches a year, but we have really slowed down on geocaching this year. I want to get back up there, so I have also set aside dates to work on caching series. I am also working on solving the puzzle caches in my area and would like to find those, and widen out the distance to our nearest unfound cache to about three miles from our house. There are still ten pages of caches that are within three miles of us right now!

4) Explore Glacier National Park: this is the vacation I am planning for us this year. I also think we could take the opportunity to drive through Utah and try to get that Potters Pond cache that we were unable to get the last time we were out there. More grandfather caches! More western adventures!

5) Run a 5K with my oldest son – as part of my road to recovery, and something that he and I can do together.

6) Re-invest in my faith – get involved with the youth group again (now that I have that marriage certificate), and also spend some quiet time with God every day, and teach my sons to do the same.

I also want to investigate wineries, invest more in my friendships, replace my bike and go riding more often, and set up a regular revolving housework schedule that we can all stick to. What are your plans for the new year?