July 31, 2008

What’s that got to do with the price of coffee?

Much of the fun in the outdoors, whether it be hunting or fishing, hiking or back-packing – or anything else you do outside – comes with the meals you eat and the beverages you drink. Even today, thinking back on November deer hunting trips from half a century ago, the memory of them seems wrapped up in the smells of food cooking. A daydream about a childhood hunting adventure always smells, in my mind, like hot cakes and syrup. I can clearly remember stirring around under the thick covers in my room, and listening to the thump and crackle of the coal furnace that sat just outside the walls of my bedroom as it spewed out heat into the nearly freezing house at 4 a.m. on a winter morning. The syrup scent wafted from the kitchen where my mom was making pancakes and eggs with plenty of bacon and, of course, that lovely Vermont maple (real in those days) syrup.
The other thing I remember vividly, even as a youngster, was the smell of coffee making in the hours before dawn. I also remember how good it tasted poured from a dented metal Thermos in the front seat of our old station wagon on some neglected two-track that lead into mule deer country or to some hidden trout stream. I liked my coffee then, as now, with a bit of sweetener and some cream, while my father drank his black. Like pipe tobacco, the scent was better than the actual taste, but it was all wonderful on a frigid, star-filled, before-sunrise morning.
It was just as good poured into a hefty china mug in some little mom and pop restaurant in the middle of nowhere, USA. Both my Dad and my Mother liked their coffee, and when we stopped in the middle, or the end, of a fishing or hunting trip, we usually celebrated it with coffee. It was a ritual that I liked then, and with reservations, still like today.
Over the years, I’ve drank a lot of coffee. The late science fiction writer Robert Heinlein wrote in his wonderful adventure “Glory Road,” that coffee comes in roughly five descending stages: Coffee, Java, Jamoke, Joe, and Carbon Remover. After more than a half-century of coffee consumption, including four years in the Navy, I’ve tried them all – particularly the version of Carbon Remover we used to create in a 48-cup coffee maker that ran 24 hours a day in the electronics shop on board the aircraft carrier I was on for two WesPac cruises during the Vietnam business.
Disregarding that horrible junk – one step below Heinlein’s Carbon Remover – pushed on the public by Starbucks, most of it is roughly painless, but a cup of coffee in a restaurant these days is usually pretty awful – and awfully expensive. It didn’t used to be that way.
Coffee in most of the old, back-roads restaurants came with a heady scent and a honest taste, even better when poured into one of those old Anchor white coffee mugs. The waitress was usually a local lady, not some collage kid who comes on strong with phony excitement at you arriving at “her” table. They used to just give you coffee and a menu and then leave you alone until you were ready to order. When your cup was empty, they filled it without you having to wave your arms for 20 minutes to get some attention.
The other thing, of course, is the price. If you had just come here from another planet, and were depressed by the cost of a gallon of gasoline, you would go into catatonic shock over the current price of a cup of restaurant coffee (again excluding Starbucks, which charges prices so far above market value that you would need to be a member of the Royal Saudi family to drink it regularly).
Earlier this spring, after spending a morning fishing for rainbow trout at a local lake – I had one 20-inch fish jump nearly a dozen times – my friends and I stopped by a small restaurant for a late breakfast. I had bacon and eggs with hash browns – and a cup of coffee. When the bill came I was startled to discover the cost of the coffee was almost as much as the rest of my meal. Indeed, in my part of the country, coffee by the cup ranges from $1.60 to $2.25. Oh, sure, the refills are “free.”
Being old enough – the term “senior citizen” grates on me – I can easily remember when good restaurant coffee cost you one nickel for a cup, and refills were really free. I figure that these days, to get your money’s worth, you would have to drink a volume of coffee that would fill a child’s wading pool to even come close to breaking even.
I sat down the other day, and did some rough figuring; The coffee maker I use at home will make 12 cups of ordinary coffee – quite good coffee, actually – neither too weak, or Starbuck’s-like sludge – for one scoop from the can. Using a digital scale I measured that plastic scoop, then filled it with coffee grounds, and measured again. Subtracting the negligible weight of the scoop gave me the actual weight of the coffee required to make a dozen cups of coffee.
It turns out that with my coffee maker, one ounce of dry coffee grounds, which weigh next to nothing, but is large in volume, will product 40 honest cups of brew. Multiplying that figure by 16 ounces shows that I can cook up 640 cups of coffee at home with a pound of grounds. A quick check of the weeks’ grocery store ads showed Smart & Final selling a three-pound can of brand name coffee for $8.
The final math showed that at today’s retail prices, a cup of coffee – not counting my time, and the modest consumption of water and electricity involved – costs me 2.4 cents to brew. The way I figure it, that also means I could still make a better than 100 percent profit selling coffee for five cents a cup just like a half century ago. I could, then, sell 640 cups of coffee for $32 and probably make money, or at least break even. By contrast, if a restaurant charges $2 per cup – not unheard of these days, they will get $1,280 a pound for their coffee (not counting water, electricity, and, of course, labor).
And you thought you were being screwed by the oil companies!
 

May 22, 2008

My Black Rifle

     If you remember the uproar about this, a few months back famed outdoor writer Jim Zumbo got raked over some pretty hot coals by the firearms folks for declaring he didn’t much care for the modern “black rifle.” He about got drummed out of the business for this admission. I don’t feel exactly that way. I don’t care one way or the other about what other shooters and hunters like in their rifles, as long as they hunt ethically and shoot safely. However, it dawned on me the other day that I also have a black rifle.
     It’s a sort of sinister looking thing. Outfitted with a composite material stock and fore-piece, it is light, accurate, easy to carry, and provides me with the firepower I feel I need for hunting everything from deer to rabbits. It’s just that my black rifle is not quite the same as your black rifle. When I pull the trigger of my black rifle, it goes BANG. Just once: Then you have to reload it.
     My black rifle is a simple, single-shot model called the Handi-Rifle, made by New England Firearms. They are inexpensive, pretty well made, accurate and fun to shoot. There are other good single-shot rifles on the market, notably from Thompson-Center, and Rossi, to name a few. Mine came with two easy to swap barrels. One is chambered in .243, sufficient for mule deer or reaching out and touching coyotes at a distance. The other barrel is for the older – but still fun to shoot – .22 Hornet, which is a bit much on ground squirrels, but will work on pretty nearly everything up to and including coyotes and bobcat.. I plan on ordering a third barrel for my black rifle in .223 so it will shoot the same ammo as other black rifles. It will, however, still go BANG just once.
     I’ve always admired single-shot rifles. Had I the money, I would be shooting something like a Ruger No. 1, or one of those beautiful reproduction Sharps in some caliber designed for pulverizing dangerous game – and your shoulder. Since I’m an outdoor writer, which one friend, with some accuracy, called being self un-employed, and there ain’t many rogue elephants running around Southern California to hunt with a monster single-shot cannon, I chose the less expensive alternative. Having multiple barrels, the little gun covers a lot of different hunting and shooting tasks. I like that.
I don’t know it for a fact, but I suspect single-shot rifles make us better hunters, and maybe better shooters as well. When you only have one shot, you work hard for one-shot kills, and when plinking or target shooting, having just one round at a time lets you concentrate and put that one bullet where it counts. It becomes more a contest between you and your nervous system than just spraying down the neighborhood and hoping something fall down.
     I got my first single-shot rifle more than a half-century ago. It was an already ancient Remington .22 that you cocked by pulling back on the little round handle at the back of the bolt. My grandfather gave it to me after I downed a jackrabbit with a single shot, using open sights, at just over 100 yards, with the little rifle. I was twelve. No kid was ever prouder of a firearm.
     I hunted with that little .22 for several years, taking a lot of rabbits, squirrels, and even some larger critters with a well-placed hollow-point. I actually used to hunt several days a week, being able to walk across the street, through our neighbor’s yard, climb their back fence and drop into a big wash that held a tiny creek in its flat bottom, along with brush, trees, and a couple of cattle corrals that belonged to another neighbor. I could stalk rabbits, squirrels, and other small game to my heart’s content, and still be able to hear my mother call when she had supper ready.
     This of course, was in a time when you could take the rifle to school with you, put it in your (unlocked) locker (remember school lockers?), and then take it hunting after school. The only safety requirement was that you slip the bolt out and put it in your pocket so the rifle was rendered safe. The faculty didn’t order the school locked down, and the cops and Homeland Security didn’t send in SWAT teams to rescue your friends – but that’s another story.
     I used to get up on Saturday mornings, grab the little single-shot, mooch 50 cents from my dad for a box of cartridges, and head out for a day of adventure. That little box of .22 long rifle hollow-points were a penny a round in those days, and balancing the rifle across the handles of my bike, I would ride downtown to the drug store to stock up with bullets and a candy bar for lunch then pedal out of town for a whole day of hunting. Most often I came back with half a box of ammo for next Saturday’s hunting.
I suspect I like single-shot rifles because I started with one. I suspect that today’s crop of shooters and hunters who favor the modern semi-auto black rifles are exactly the same. These days, most kids don’t hunt, instead they play video games and watch too much TV. Our current crop of black rifle shooters and hunters probably got their hands or a rifle for the first time when they joined the service. Before then, they played video games where the guy with the full-auto gadget usually wins, or they played paint-ball, another endeavor that favors rapid fire.
     Just as my father’s generation had a life-long love for the service rifles of WWII, today’s younger adult hunters and shooters probably like the black rifle because they carried it in service to their country. I must admit I have a fondness for the older bolt-action military conversions that so many hunters and shooters of my Dad’s time liked. I still have the customized Enfield 30-06 my Dad started in the early 1950's. He spent one whole winter fitting a beautiful Bishop stock to the rifle, and we both have hunted deer with it. I probably will use it to hunt deer again one of these days, just for the fun of it. However, I still like single-shot rifles.
     To me a hunting rifle is best when it is most simple. Many of today’s hunters and shooters, on the other hand, like their rifles to be dripping with add-on gadgets. Ok, why not? Shooting, competitive or otherwise, is fun with any kind of firearm. As for hunting, it doesn’t matter a damn whether you go to the field with a single-shot or something that can put out bullets like the snout of an A10 Warthog. The ethical hunter will still hunt within the law. So you see, black rifles are ok. You like yours, and I like mine. Mine does what yours does. When I pull the trigger, it goes BANG. But just once.

May 8, 2008

Your Government Strikes

Again - The Raven Project

     Have you ever read or seen something so blatantly, jaw-dropping stupid that you just couldn’t believe it? I recently did. It was a newspaper article in the Press-Enterprise recently about a Federal Government plan to control raven populations in our deserts to protect the desert tortoise. For those of you who don’t know, the desert tortoise is in serious trouble– has been for decades, and so far, tortoise recovery and protection plans haven’t been worth the paper they are written on, mostly because of ravens and coyotes.
     Now comes the latest in this pathetic line of effort. Starting in the spring of 2009 (note that since the situation is dire, they plan on waiting yet another year to do something), federal wildlife officials– mostly the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but also including the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, two other stellar government agencies that manage to screw up most wildlife programs in our deserts, intend to put an expensive program in place to remove some ravens, hopefully to allow the survival of more baby tortoise.
     It seems that ravens are a major predator of baby tortoise. I only mention this in passing for those of you who have been living elsewhere– in a cave– for several decades, and have never seen a raven or a desert tortoise. Everybody else, including the above mentioned agencies, who works or plays in the desert has known this for at least a half century, maybe longer. The tortoise have known it since ravens and tortoises started sharing the desert together.
     In it’s draft Environmental Impact Statement for the then brand-new East Mojave Preserve, the National Park Service noted that coyotes and ravens were the two top threats to desert tortoise survival within the Preserve. That was written close to a decade ago. What did they do to combat these twin threats? In the case of coyote predation, they tried to eliminate sport and predator control hunting within the Preserve, and in the case of the raven they did nothing at all. To nobody’s surprise, that did not work.
     Neither did anything else, or did anybody else. Oh, there were always a few folks that “forgot” that ravens were a protected species– why I’ll never understand. They shot the ones that were a nuisance. I’m pretty sure at least some game wardens across the west did this, and I suspect a few BLM rangers did likewise, though none would ever admit it.
     Now the Fish and Wildlife Service has a plan to control ravens– sort of. Let’s examine this plan. First, they intend to hire two– count ‘em, two– employees to cover all of the land within Riverside and San Bernardino counties that might have populations of tortoise which presumably might be threatened by ravens. This single aspect of the “plan” if I can use the term to describe this silly idea, would doom it to failure.
In case you hadn’t noticed, Riverside County and San Bernardino County are the two largest counties in the United States. Each is bigger than a number of eastern states. Tortoises are spread out over tens of thousands of square miles. So are ravens. This effort is going to be like having your Grandmother guarding our southern boarder from Milwaukee with a pair of cheap opera glasses– it won’t work. The bad part of all this is either the people in the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service know this, in which case they are deliberately designing this to fail for reasons we don’t understand, or worse yet, they think this ridiculous attempt will achieve something.
     Next, this program would only allow these two raven control employees to shoot, poison, or otherwise remove ravens that they actually see killing tortoise. I guess that means they can’t touch one of these black-feathered predators unless they actually catch it in the act of eating a baby tortoise. By then, of course, it’s too late. At least they did not allow themselves to be pressured into trying to use raven birth control devices by the loud clamor of various animal “wrong” groups. These goofy clans of disturbed city people always get in the way of any attempt to do serious pest or varmint control, thereby limiting their effectiveness to the point of complete collapse. They needn’t bother this time, the government is going to screw it up without their help.
     The Fish and Wildlife Service did bow to the idea of spending taxpayer money on programs to get folks who live in the desert communities to quit watering their lawns and start putting lids on their trash cans. It seems that these groups who want tortoises protected without killing ravens think that these simple steps will reduce raven populations enough to save the tortoise. Just think, eco-minded citizens, you can save the desert tortoise by letting your lawn die. I suspect the ravens will just move down the street and drink out of your neighbor’s swimming pool or visit the sprinkler system at one of the water-wasting golf courses that spring up like weeds in the desert.
     A friend of mine who works on developing and maintaining water for bighorn sheep in the Mojave Desert remarked that “this sounds like an idea that– when it doesn’t work– will get them going on removing water sources for sheep and other game animals.” Maybe he’s a bit paranoid, or perhaps it’s just that he’s dealt in the past with the National Park Service which broke its own environmental regulations to remove wells vital to the survival of wildlife from the East Mojave Preserve.
     Now covering the trash cans is a good idea. Ravens eat out of trash cans. However, the problem is not that ravens eat discarded french fries out of the dumpster behind McDonalds, its that they eat baby tortoise in the spring. I’m all in favor of covering up trash with a container that has a secure lid. It prevents ravens and such things as feral dogs and coyotes from pillaging trash– all the secure trash cans in the desert, however, will not deter ravens from eating tortoises.
     This ridiculous plan would have this army of two scour the desert during the spring months– when predation of baby tortoise by ravens and coyotes (and probably other predators as well)– is the highest. If that doesn’t work, then these two orphans of the system will get to shoot, poison, and/or trap and euthanize ravens in specific areas that may, repeat may, have enough tortoise in them to justify the practice.
     Now here is the kicker to this brain-dead plan. This program is estimated to cost the taxpayers $200,000 per year, with the total take of “problem” ravens being 200 per year. This means, if my math is correct, the government intends to spend $1,000 of your money for each raven shot or otherwise dispatched. They plan on running this program for at least a decade. Add it up yourself. It will not work to save tortoise. It is a black hole in the desert in which to pour your money.
     I have a much simpler solution: Remove ravens from their current protected status (something they probably never should have had anyhow). Put them in the same category as coyotes. If the idea of allowing desert dwellers, hunters, and other folks to shoot a few ravens anytime they wish bothers you, then put a short spring hunting season on them in areas where they need to be thinned.
     There are probably at least some folks who would buy a hunting license and pay a small raven-hunting tag fee to shoot a number of ravens as prescribed by the regulations. This would not cost you a single dime, it would make money for the state, or for the feds, if they would just stop and think. Limits on ravens could be established by competent wildlife biologists, just the way it is for all other game species. Doing that could contribute to the long term survival of desert tortoise, and by setting sensible limits on raven take, we would always have ravens as well.
     The only problem with this idea? It might work. And that would probably destroy the government. Imagine, a government program that worked. Folks who run Washington would probably drop dead at the shock of it all.

April 24, 2008

Forest Service kills brown

trout in violation of the law

     Most of you reading this first page in my new blog probably know I work on California Hog Hunter and California Bucks newsletter/magazines for Outdoor News Service which hosts this blog. Most probably also know I am the warmwater columnist for California Fly Fisher magazine, and thus make at least part of my living writing about fly-fishing for bass.
     Some may be surprised to discover that my not-quite secret love in fly-fishing is the brown trout. I just get a kick out of catching a brown that I don’t get when fishing for rainbow trout. Browns fight well, and are great survivors. They grow big and are wary. Some anglers don’t like them, as they can be finicky and often harder to catch than rainbows or cutthroats.
     Browns are not a native species. They were imported from Europe and found their way into California in 1893. They have been widely stocked in waters across the state in waters that didn’t have viable populations of native trout, or to replace them in waters where angler pressure was high enough to reduce native trout to near extinction. In recent years, the brown trout has fallen into some disfavor with the politically correct just because they are “not native.” I usually get that line of reasoning from some guy who isn’t native to California either.
     Indeed, this disavowal of brown trout as a worthy catch for California’s anglers has reached nonsense proportions in some places. My own fly-fishing club recently changed it’s handsome badge, which had a brown trout on it, to a Golden trout, just to be more “politically correct.” I thought it was a dumb idea and said so. At some point, however, antipathy towards non-native species in California becomes dangerous to sportsmen’s interests. Take the case of the brown trout in the Santa Ana River.
Last September, I received an e-mail from a friend that informed me of a fish kill in the Santa Ana as a direct result of fishery professionals from the San Bernardino National Forest, and the California Department of Fish & Game conspiring to kill brown trout. It seems that Southern California Edison, who operates three ancient hydro-electric power stations on the Santa Ana (these are among the oldest in California, being installed about the same time as the brown trout came to California), had asked for help in rescuing trout in an area adjacent to one of the power stations so Edison could dredge silt out of the area.
     This was done. According to my information there were a lot of trout in the pond above the power plant, and these were all successfully re-stocked in another part of the stream– all that is except for some two dozen brown trout. According to the story, the browns were killed and given to the Edison workers to take home and eat. The reason? The fishery workers wanted to be politically correct. It’s a damn shame they couldn’t have been law abiding while they were at it.
     I take the position that the brown trout are not the property of the Edison crew, nor are they the property of either the San Bernardino National Forest, or the California Department of Fish & Game. Both of these latter agencies are supposed to protect wildlife, including our sport fish. Now Southern California Edison didn’t do anything wrong. The asked for help removing trout, and that was done. The Edison crew ought to have known better than to accept the trout, but that’s not the point. The real point is that experienced fishery professionals who are supposed to be out there protecting and enhancing our sport fisheries didn’t.
     To my way of thinking, those fish belong to the people of California. It shouldn’t be up to some fishery biologist to arbitrarily decide to kill sport fish. Especially when the real reason behind this act was a non-too-subtle threat by a bunch of environmental lawyers who go around scaring the pants off of government agencies by threatening lawsuits over every endangered posy and butterfly you never heard of.
     After talking with both of the men who were responsible for killing the brown trout instead of returning them to the stream– and no, I’m not going to name names here, despite this blunder, they are both men who I respect for years of good stewardship of our fisheries in this area– I discovered that the reason they acted this way was a creature called the Santa Ana Sucker and an even stranger creature called the Center for Biological Diversity. It seems that the Santa Ana Sucker is an endangered fish native to the Santa Ana River. For a variety of reasons, this fish is in trouble. Gee, maybe it was the hundred years of habitat loss caused by Edison de-watering a major portion of the Santa Ana River. Or maybe the brown trout eats too many suckers.
     When I discussed this with a senior Forest Service biologist, he noted: “Some people would like us to completely eliminate the brown trout from the Santa Ana. You know we wrote the in-stream flows for the Santa Ana River below the confluence of Bear Creek and the Santa Ana to favor the rainbow over the brown trout. There were more rainbows that brown from what I understand. I dunno, it sounds like it probably wasn’t a wise thing to do. I like brown trout too; I love catching them.”
     There have been efforts underway to restore the Santa Ana Sucker to a more viable status within its home range. It was placed on the Federal list of Endangered Species in 2000. There is a consortium of groups called the Santa Ana Sucker Working Group, which is working on this problem. Just like the groups that called for removal of trout from some waters in the Sierra to help endangered amphibians, the idea began to grow within this group that the big problem with the Santa Ana Sucker isn’t diminished river flows caused by power plants, or any other environmental changes caused by humans living along the Santa Ana River like making the lower Santa Ana River into a giant cement conduit to send valuable rain water to the sea instead of letting it soak into the ground and flushing all kinds of contaminants into the water. No, it had to be brown trout.
     This is ignoring the fact that rainbow trout also eat other fish when they get big enough. Various studies have shown that brown trout are indeed fish eaters when they mature. With that in mind, there are people who want brown trout removed from the Santa Ana River (actually you can find people all over California who want all kinds of non-native fish removed from the state), and with this in mind, the Center for Biological Diversity wrote a letter to Supervisor of the San Bernardino National Forest that suggested “clearly mountain suckers will have a better chance of survival in the absence of brown trout.” What is just as clear from the past performance of this group is that there is an implied threat of a lawsuit over this issue. This, I believe, is what set the stage for this illegal action by people who ought to know better.
     I find it interesting that the Center for Biological Diversity’s rational is that another species of sucker, in another state, and another watershed, perhaps didn’t do as well in the presence of brown trout as they might without them. Clearly there have been no studies down on the Santa Ana, or they would have cited them. This is another case of a bunch of lawyers getting ahead of the science.
     I have nothing against the Santa Ana Sucker. It’s just that I have nothing for it either. Sometimes you just have to decide if you want to be politically correct of if you want sport fish that are of value to the public for their recreation. What concerns me even more is that if the decision was ever made to remove brown trout from the Santa Ana, they might have to think about destroying the brown trout population in Bear Creek, a brown trout fishery of note that merges with the Santa Ana a little West of the community of Seven Oaks. Bear Creek is one of California’s designated Wild Trout Streams. I used to think the Forest Service and the Department of Fish & Game were dedicated to maintaining this blue-ribbon fishery. Now I’m not so sure.
     One final thought. The day before I wrote this, I happened to fish with the same friend who sent me the e-mail that started this. He informed me that he had just fished the Santa Ana this week with two other men. They caught nearly a dozen healthy and beautiful brown trout, and no rainbows at all in the section they fished.

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