May 8, 2008

Public and Wildlife Sold Out
Death knell sounding for
the historic Tejon Ranch

I have been one of those lucky few people who’ve been able to spend time wandering on the vast Tejon Ranch. I shot my first deer on the ranch as a teenager, and my family and I have been hunting, bird watching, sitting around oak campfires, and hiking on this 270,000-plus-acre property over the last 40 years since that first deer hunt. The photo on the opening page of this web site was taken on the Tejon. It’s even rumored that my uncle’s ashes are scattered on a hillside above an old hunting cabin that we’ve been privileged to use during that time.
Ironically, I was even there early this week while the finishing touches were being put on a land deal that is the worst of all worlds for the historic ranch (see my news column here). There were rumors in the wind this week about the details, but I didn’t want to believe it would be this bad.
But the signs were there. The developers have been doing stupid things for several years. They had all the flooded trees removed from Tejon Lake because “they weren’t pretty,” ruining top-notch bass habitat. They’ve put in little plots of wine grapes and keep them tended, not because there is any intention of making wine, but because they looked nice and would help sell the multi-million dollar homes. There were bronze European red deer (the dumb asses couldn’t even get native tule elk bronzes made) plunked down in the middle of wild settings all over the proposed development area. There were monuments built and placed in near-wilderness locations to denote where golf courses and lodges would be situated. If it wasn’t so depressing, it would have been laughable.
Yet, if you were able to overlook the bad things, the ranch managed to retain its character. When you drove through one of the gates, you drove back in time 75 years or more. This was a working cattle ranch, really little changed in 200 years. Oh, the grizzly bears were gone (the last one from Southern California being killed nearby), but you could still see a badger (the ranch’s namesake) or a mountain lion on any day, and you would most certainly see deer and dove and quail and more types of woodpeckers, hawks, and song birds than you could imagine. Feral hogs have replaced the grizzly bear, turning the soil under the oak trees just like the bears did, looking for acorns, digging wild onion bulbs on the hillsides, or rubbing against fence posts. On Tuesday this week, I watched a weasel hunt, slipping in and out of ground squirrel holes, and later I was shown a photo of nine condors perched on an oak tree on the north side of the ranch. I photographed a Western Tanager feeding on beetles in a giant, sprawling oak on Wednesday morning.
The wildlife on the Tejon is as prolific as in Yellowstone and probably more diverse, but when I think of the Tejon, I think of oaks. The ranch web site says there are nine different kinds of oaks, some 400 years old. I’ve sat under many of those old giants. Some are like old friends.
Oak fires on the ranch are like a cremation ritual, where you celebrate the warmth, the flames, and the thought-provoking coals the tree limbs provide, toasting their passing. You do that while laughing with family and friends and telling stories. The oaks are always a backdrop on the Tejon, one way or another.
Today, I cringe to think that it might have been over a Tejon oak fire where the soul of the ranch was bargained away for money and control. But a lot of souls were sold or bartered away in this deal, and I suspect they will experience a different kind of fire.

April 30, 2008

Why Can’t Humans Be A Part of the Equation?
Whining over wolves continues
even after population is healthy

     You’d never know the impacts exploding wolf populations are having on the Rocky Mountain West and upper Midwest by reading the Los Angeles Times’ editorial page today.
     In both an editorial and an op-ed piece, there is moaning that 35 wolves from a population conservatively estimated to be over 1,500 animals have been killed since the animal was delisted a month ago and management turned back over the states (Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming).
     The wolf population is five times higher than goal of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to delist the animal – five times! -- and all three management states have programs in place to keep the wolf population from growing beyond what is sustainable for the wildlife and human community.
     The whining from the urban environmentalists (and the L.A. Times’ opinionists) is that humans should get out of the way and let the wolves take back over the entire Western landscape. To them, that is what is sustainable. And that viewpoint is the only valid one.
     A little perspective: Since the reintroduction of wolves into central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park just 13 years ago, the animals have reclaimed a vast portion of their historic habitat in the Northern Rockies. It took man more than 100 years to eradicate wolves in the same region through a concentrated, government-funded program of constant trapping, poisoning, shooting-on-sight, and digging pups out of dens.
     Yet, in just 13 years, wolves are spilling across the Montana plains into the Dakotas (although no one is sure if those are Yellowstone or Minnesota wolves, or both meeting in the middle), across most of Wyoming and south into Utah and Colorado, and west into Oregon and Washington. The wolves moving out of the core areas are animals that have been driven from existing packs and are forming new packs and producing even more pups. The 1,500 estimate is very conservative, according to some biologists.
     This is a modern conservation success story; a story of how a population can bounce back from total destruction in a region over a very short period of time. But what is happening to other wildlife and livestock in wolf country is giving people who live in the region an idea of why wolves were eradicated in the first place. A story in today’s Bozeman Chronicle noted that wolf predation on cattle and sheep has more than doubled this year and that it is 10 times higher than predicted by federal wildlife officials. In 1996, the year after wolves were reintroduced, there were eight cattle and 42 sheep killed by wolves. As of Tuesday this week, there were already 110 cattle, 442 sheep, and six other types of livestock verified killed by wolves this year. Ranchers will tell you the numbers are much higher, but those are verified wolf-kill numbers. If wolves keep eating livestock at the same pace, the tally will be pretty impressive by the end of the year, approaching 500 cattle and 2,000 sheep.
     Of course in urban environmental American, the attitude is “screw those ranchers.” These folks believe those cattle and sheep are probably feeding on public land, where they don’t belong, and should be fair game for the wolves, which do belong.
     But the wolves impact on native wildlife is also staggering. Coyotes, which were common throughout most of Yellowstone, are a rare sight today. Wolves kill them to eliminate competition. Moose, once a fixture in every beaver pond and small lake in the region, are all but gone from northern Yellowstone, killed by wolves. And elk and deer populations are plummeting everywhere wolf populations spring up.
     Shane McAfee from Salmon, Idaho, has been an outfitter in that wild, wonderful country for over 30 years. Since 1996, when the wolves were first introduced, he has watched the elk herd and local hunting success fall right into the toilet. In a letter he wrote to the Idaho Fish and Game Department, he tells how in 1996, he had 10 hunters in camp who killed nine bull elk, mostly quality, mature bulls. That was a pretty typical year for McAfee before wolves. Most hunters shot elk and deer on his hunts. In 2007, out of 20 hunters in camp only one killed a spike bull elk and only four took deer.
     “On my first three hunts, I went 15 days on horseback guiding and never saw an elk,” wrote McAfee, who said most of his hunters have refused to come back to Idaho until things change. “I wonder what this is doing to the economy of our small towns in Idaho.”
     That lament is being heard throughout deer and elk country where there are now wolves. Game herds are plummeting.
     Again, the writers of the L.A. Times’ editorials and the people who read that whining drivel don’t give a rat’s butt about rural people, and they care even less about hunting and hunted wildlife. Wolves belong there and should be left alone, they say. In their world it’s OK for wolves to eliminate the coyotes as competition, but it’s not permissible for humans – especially those whose livelihoods depend on livestock or visiting hunters – to keep the wolf numbers in check so they can have an elk or deer for the winter meat supply. That attitude is just plain prejudicial. These people condone the planting of vineyards that wipe out California’s native oak grassland so they can drink their designer wines, but God-forbid we keep wolf numbers in check so we can kill a deer or elk so we can have lean, natural meat on our barbecue.
     Ironically, none of the states have plans to eliminate wolves (in spite of how you might read the two Times’ stories). Even most of the ranchers and outfitters don’t mind having wolves back in the West. But let’s be reasonable about it. Keeping the wolf numbers in check with sport hunting programs, trying to keep them confined to certain areas where they will cause the least livestock problems, and tuning out the shrill voices who would turn the whole West into a humanless wilderness, is the sensible thing to do. Montana, Idaho, and especially Wyoming, have it right with their management plans. Wolves will still flourish, but maybe we can keep wolf numbers in check so that elk, deer, and livestock numbers won’t be overly affected. Maybe.
     Based on our past efforts to wipe out wolves, I kind of doubt we’ll be able to stay ahead of them with the foothold they’ve already established.
     The L.A. Times editorial called for a minimum wolf population of 1,000 animals, lamenting that two percent of the 1,500 population had already been killed in the first month they were off the threatened species list (and you were supposed to gasp when you read that). With the way the wolf population has grown over 13 years, I’d bet the states can’t keep the wolf numbers from growing and expanding their range under their current management plans. Wolf numbers will continue to grow even if we kill 30 percent of the population each year. The Times will get its way under the current plans.
     So before we worry about the wolf getting pushed back onto the endangered species list in the lower 48 states, let’s see if the current management plans will even begin to keep the numbers just in check.
 

March 26, 2008

At Least We Think It Was a Fish
Hesperia Lake’s 268-pound
sturgeon and photojournalism

     My friend Ed Rister and I were talking just this week about what geniuses we were.
     Ed is the manager of little Hesperia Lake in the high desert. Before he took over the job, I bet you couldn’t find one in 1,000 fishermen in Southern California who had ever heard of the place. Today, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find one in 1,000 who hasn’t heard of the lake.
     That’s because of Ed. He’s positioned the lake to compete directly with the long-running programs at Santa Ana River Lakes and Irvine Lake, planting the lake with tanker-truck loads of trout in the cool months and then putting in catfish when the water gets warm. He’s stocked the lake with really big trout and huge catfish to entice anglers. Last year, he bought a load of monstrous sturgeon to 200 pounds to give fishermen something even bigger and different. Anglers came in droves. The big fish played their role well. In fact, some of those sturgeon put on amazing shows. The small ones – the 25 to 40 pounders – would tailwalk and jump like tarpon when they were hooked. The big ones were more methodical: They were simply jerking complete rods and reels into the lake, sometimes dragging rod holders and lawn chairs with the rods holders attached to them right into the water, too – gone. More than one angler was pulled into the water, cluthing his rod and reel for dear life, before he remembered to loosen the drag.
     Then on Tuesday this week, there were sturgeon at 268 and 215 pounds caught and released on the same day [see my newspaper column from this week for the complete story]. A pretty amazing story: the two biggest freshwater fish ever landed in Southern California were caught on the same day from the same lake. That would make headlines.
     Maybe Ed really was a genius.
     Ed said he had pictures taken with his new Cannon SLR digital camera. This was during the same conversation where we were spouting off to each other about how smart we were.
     Apparently Ed’s genius does not extend to camera operation, however.
     When the photos arrived via e-mail, I shouted for my son to come and see the images. I opened the file while he peered over my shoulder.
     “What’s that?” he asked.
     We looked harder. Every rule of “hero” photography had been broken. The image was underexposed, sun was at the fisherman’s back, he had on sunglasses, and the huge fish was covered with dirt. You really couldn’t see any of this in the original photo. It was only because I knew what was supposed to be in the photo, and was able to do magic with the image in Photoshop that I can tell you this. What Ed sent could have been a silhouette of a sandstone formation at Lake Powell for all we could tell at first. As proof:
     “Really, what’s that supposed to be?” My son asked again.
     I shooed him off, assuming I could salvage the image in Photoshop. You can see the “fixed” photo with my column. At least you can tell it was a really big fish and a happy angler. But I fixed up another version that I sent back to Ed. While I know everyone was far more concerned about releasing this fish back into the lake alive than getting a good photo, I couldn’t resist picking on Ed.
     I yelled for my son again so he could see the efforts of my Photoshop work and know – once and for all – what was in the photo. Even Bo, who doesn’t ever think I’m funny, about fell on the floor laughing. The doctored photo is below, but I find it odd that I haven’t heard back from Ed. Yet.

February 9, 2008

From the SHOT Show

How has ‘green’ become a dirty

word with the hunting industry?

     I have to admit that I wearied of people telling me that I should move out of California at the Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show held in Las Vegas Feb. 2-5.

     By about the third day, it got old.

     Not that I don’t understand the sentiment, but it’s clear a lot of these people believe all the clichés. When it gets that far down the road, the fun joke becomes ignorant prejudice and I don’t like to play along any more. To the largely ultra-conservative guns and hunting community – of which I consider myself a card-carrying member – California is the land of fruits and nuts and political liberalism just a click off socialism. OK, that’s pretty close to true, but that doesn’t mean everything said or done in this state is automatically wrong.

     The lead-poisoning-wildlife issue is one of those things that apparently the hunting and shooting industry still doesn’t understand – perhaps because it’s coming from California, a place everyone loves to hate.

     I have always said that if you show hunters the mounting scientific evidence that says that lead bullet residue in gutpiles is poisoning scavenging wildlife, they would happily – and voluntarily – refrain from shooting lead. We didn’t need regulations like those passed here late last year: Hunters would do the right thing for wildlife on their own – even big, ugly condors.

     I still believe that.

     We would do it because hunters are the first, best, and most diligent conservationists in the world. That’s who we are. Our efforts and money do more for wildlife conservation in a single year than all the lobbying and lawsuits by today’s extreme environmental groups have done in their entire history. If being green is defined by actions, hunters are the real greenies.

     But the way the people in the shooting and hunting industry are behaving toward the mounting evidence that lead is bad for a wide variety of wildlife (not just condors in California), I’m wondering if the makers of these products are more interested in profits and keeping the status quo than doing what would be best for wildlife and those of us who love to hunt.

     I suspect it was the industry’s stubborn and bullheaded approach to the issue that helped make the lead ban in condor range possible. The industry attitude spooked legislators and regulations in this state and convinced them that hunters would not do the right thing unless we were forced to do it. A lot of these regulators don’t particularly like hunters as it is – this is the land of liberalism, after all – and we certainly don’t need to give them fodder to hate us. Industry people in denial about the science behind the lead issue are a black eye for the hunting community. Much of this data is so rock-solid that we look stupid when we deny it. Yet, some of this industry howling was louder than the leveler heads of our hunting community at the meetings and hearings. The hunting industry claimed to represent us, but I’m not so sure.

     The SHOT Show reinforced this suspicion for me. After being surrounded by members of the hunting industry for four days, the ignorance and arrogance was stunning.

     There’s no question that some of the legislators and whacko environmentalists glommed on to this issue to get at hunters. And, yes, there are grant whores who will write the science however you want it. They are all pretty easy to spot. But there are also a whole bunch of good people in the political and scientific process who just want to do what’s best for wildlife and hunters. I shouldn’t have to defend good science and good people; I shouldn’t be ridiculed because I write about this issue, at least not in my own house, among my own family. Green should not be a dirty word with hunters and the hunting industry. It should be a goal.

     Thankfully, there are some people in the hunting and firearms industry who accept the science and simply see this as a business opportunity: Hunters need a non-lead product for big game and varmint hunting in a big swath of California. So there is a rush to fill that need and do something good for wildlife and the hunter’s image in the process.

     I happen to believe that the current non-lead bullets for big game hunting are among the best bullets on the market. We don’t sacrifice anything using them. The Barnes’ lines of X-bullets are available in all calibers for rifles, handguns, and muzzleloaders. Nosler is also making a non-lead big game bullet called the E-Tip. Non-lead varmint slugs are already available from Barnes (Varmint Grenade) and Speer is entering the marketplace this year (TNT Green). If you aren’t a handloader, Federal, Winchester, PMC, Black Hills, and Weatherby are all loading some of these non-lead bullets into factory ammunition for common calibers and pricing is no more than for other premium hunting ammunition.

     Other companies will follow suit, some dragging their heels, kicking and screaming the whole way. These are the same type of folks who balked at setting hunting regulations a century ago.

     We all understand that research and development is expensive, but there will be a good side to all this.

     I happen to believe that with the skyrocketing costs of lead and copper, we will actually see some developments in the use of an iron matrix (or some other material) for bullet cores that will keep the price of .22 ammunition as cheap as it’s ever been. Need drives innovation.

     Even though it will be California that forced open the door for these developments, I’m not holding my breath the ridicule about this state will stop when some very good things come out of it.

     Anyway, I plan to stay here – in spite of all the unsolicited advice I received at SHOT. I like the climate, the people, the fishing, and the hunting. (Wyoming’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.) I also like to argue. So this is a good place for me.

January 31, 2008

Heavyweight Bass Classic
A tale about the Elshere
father-son fishing duo

     The Heavyweight Bass Classic, a winner-take-all event, held at Casitas Lake last Friday (Jan. 25) was the first in a new series of events that get more at the heart of what tournament fishing should be about: Whoever catches the biggest largemouth bass wins. Wins it all.
     That’s how most of us compete with fishing buddies or anyone else we see at a lake. We all put a $5 in a pot and the guy who gets the biggest one takes the cash (and is then expected to buy dinner, at least in my crowd). In regular tournament bass fishing, you might have run 25 one-pounders through your live well over the course of the day to catch five runty fish topped by a little two-pound, three-ouncer, and win a total poundage event. But everyone will cheer the guy who pulls out a 10-pounder, even if it’s the only fish the other guy caught this month. Big is where it’s at.
     But this really isn’t so much about big bass and the first HBC held last week (you can read that here in the news portion of our web site, or visit the HBC site at http://heavyweightbassclassic.com/) than it is about two local Ojai anglers who entered the event.
     Larry Elshere, 51, and his son Eric, 23, didn’t win the competition against some of the best big bass anglers in the state, but they both proved their mettle by being among just 20 anglers out of the 50 who even landed a fish in the ghastly conditions. Hail, rain, and howling winds that normally would have closed the lake, made the fishing tough, but Larry caught a 5.22-pound bass, which put him in sixth place. The junior Elshere was 18th with a 1.46-pound bass. I’m sure his father has been rubbing in who caught the bigger fish in the family ever since Friday. In fairness, however, I should point out that Eric has caught a 15.25-pound bass from Casitas against his father’s best of 14.6 pounds. I suspect family big-fish competitions are lifetime events, and that Eric is still winning, but Dad can brag for a while.
     Randy King, the manager of the Casitas marina, has been friends with the Elshere family for many years, and he was really pulling for the junior entrant.
     “I’d have love to have seen him win. He’s just such a sweet kid,” said King.
     I’ve known King a long time, probably since before Eric Elshere was born, and I was pretty sure the 23-year-old wouldn’t want to be called a “sweet kid.” I’m sure he had to endure that and far more from King, who laughs easily. I was also sure that the sweetness was in spite of all of King’s good-natured efforts to corrupt him, and told King that. Then King started giggling and I knew a story was coming.
     When Eric Elshere was about 11, he, his father and King went to San Diego to fish on an albacore boat. A veteran of these trips, King was introducing Larry Elshere to all of the old-timers on the dock.
     “I wasn’t introducing the kid, but every time I introduced his dad, he’d step forward and stick out his hand and say, ‘I’m Eric Elshere,’ just as cute as hell. That was back when his dad was still someone really important in his life, and he looked up to him and wanted to be a part of his life,” said King.
     He did this three or four times as introductions were made, and finally King took the young angler aside.
     “Look, you know tomorrow when you Dad is tangling everyone’s lines and breaking off their fish, you might not want to have people know he’s your Dad,” King said to the younger Elshere.
     The boy’s face turned solemn and King immediately thought that he might have stepped over the line. Always quiet, Eric Elshere grew even quieter for a time. Then it was time to introduce his father again, and again after King’s introduction the youngster stepped forward, sticking out his hand.
     “I’m Eric. Eric Anderson.”

January 30, 2008

Beginning a Blog
Flirting Octogenarian

     I envisioned starting this blog last October. I knew it wouldn’t be an everyday thing, but it would be reserved for outdoorsy things that didn’t belong in the weekly newspaper column, deserved more coverage, or simply a different perspective than the column slot might provide. Or something I knew the editors would change drastically. Finally, I knew I needed a place like this to write when I met an older woman for lunch in October and just had to share the tale.
     Carrie Dooman Emilio’s eyes sparkled as she flirted with the younger men giving her their undivided attention. At 84, she was one of an iconic breed of Southern California women who did things women didn’t do in the 1950s and 1960s, she was a fisherman. She didn’t go with her husband; she went by herself or with other women from Pomona Valley Lady anglers. She did it before there was such a thing as women’s liberation, knowing she was as liberated as she wanted to be.
     “I wanted to get away from my husband,” she laughed like a school girl.
     She must not have wanted to get away too badly because she was married to James Dooman for 57 years. He was a teacher and a football coach at Upland High School. She was the angler in the family.
     “He was so jealous. He went out for yellowtail. Once. He didn’t catch a thing – not even a cold. So he quit going,” said Dooman.
      Then the fishing stories started. Mostly, they revolved around handsome men.
“I had to be really careful back then,” she said, smiling. There was a story coming.
     Dooman met Lee Marvin on a fishing boat out of Davey’s Locker in 1965, the year he won the best actor Oscar for his role in “Cat Ballou.”
     “He was gorgeous,” she swooned, envisioning it all again. “I was the first one to hook-up a yellowtail and he said to me, ‘You get ‘em tiger.’ I just fell in love with him. He quoted poetry to me. He was divine.”
     She was less impressed with actor Vincent Price, who she also met on a fishing trip, this one out of Ensenada.
     “Vincent Price? All he wanted to talk about was his art, and I wasn’t interested in art,” said Dooman.
     And she fished with a group of the nation’s first astronauts who’d chartered a boat in the 1960s. The landing operators asked a group of the girls to go along to show the guys how to fish.
     “They were watching our rear ends while we were fishing,” she said, looking over the top of her glasses.
     She laughed when I told her that we recruit our brightest and best to be astronauts.
     Dooman spread a few pictures out on the table. Here, she was whitewater rafting. There was her with a dorado, another with a yellowtail, and a marlin. There’s a shot of her on a boat going through the locks in Panama, and here was Dooman with a wahoo caught off Florida.
     I noticed the smile hadn’t changed with time.
     She pointed at the wahoo from Florida. She and her husband had chartered a fishing boat and she landed the fish – stealing the fishing spotlight from her husband as usual. The captain said he didn’t have a flag for wahoo because one hadn’t been caught in the area for seven years.
     “He told me, ‘you go into the head and take your panties off and we’ll run those up the pole instead. Then when we come into port everyone will still ohhhh and ahhhh and come to see what we caught.”
     Then she almost blushed.
     She looked up at me. “I’ve lost two better halves,” she said. “But my grandmother had three husbands, so....” I told her I didn’t think I could keep up with her, and then I almost blushed. We both laughed.
     The July 21, 1961 cover of Western Outdoor News featured Dooman with an albacore, and “Tiger” was sporting the same smile in that photo she had been flashing all through her stories. (A copy of that cover is displayed in the Islamorada Fish Market Restaurant at Bass Pro Shop in Rancho Cucamonga. While the store may seem to be devoted to Otis Chandler memorabilia, Bass Pro has also tipped its hat to rank-and-file anglers like Dooman who make their own history.)
     We all have our stories. We always have. Whether we chip them on cave walls, scrawl them on parchment with ink, jot them in notebooks around campfires, or tell them across dinner tables, the best stories involve the outdoors. They have trees, to use an old literary jab. This spot will be devoted to stories.