04-JAN-A-2
THE NEW YEAR BEGINS WITH A
AND A
AND THEN A VISIT WITH DALE KRAMER AND
FAMILY
TO PREPARE US FOR A RARE EVENT NOT
ENJOYED
FOR A DECADE IN THE
January 1—2, 2004
The New Year 2004 has certainly got started with a big bang! Quite a few of them, in fact! And many of them were shot off by me!
I had a
quiet New Year’s Eve, with what might be called a minimum of carousing—unless I
rolled over an extra time or two in bed.
I was making plans for a full day following, and I had just returned
from a good run with Joe on the afternoon in which the balmy temperatures
approached the sixties. WE had to run a
bit after this ideal ambient temperature, in a summertime mimic of the early
winter we had previously recovered from in early December, now entering January
with a bizarre warm spell. Joe had had a
problem with their Toyota Camry which refused to start, so Betty took it in for
what was thought to be a need for a battery and came out with a new coil and
regulator and other electrical equipment, so Betty did not come back until
dark, as Joe and I visited for a couple of hours while trying to get the kids
to take a nap so that they might stay up late to watch the silver ball descend
in Times Square. Joe and I then ran
along
If the Aukward kids stayed up to watch the New Year arrive, I did not, since I had a big day planned for the first and a fair amount of administrative close out to do on the 31st of the 2003 year-end. I had got a few rolls of film back from the Christmas holiday tours and the pictures of the twins and the Udvar-Hazy NASM were just now turned in—and, now, I will have another roll complete with a number of my feathered late friends!
NEW YEAR’S DAY:
AN EARLY LONG RUN WITH JOE,
AN INTERESTING “BACK HOME VISIT” WITH
THE KRAMERS
IN MD AND PA, WITH ONLY ONE DOWNER FOR
THE DAY:
THE ROSE BOWL USC 28: UM 14
As with
many of our holidays, the first one of the year began with Joe and me doing a
long run from Ken-Gar to the turnaround at the
I drove
the A-4 quickly to
We left
to go north through the upper border of
We drove
north while Bonnie looked over a few pictures of the past year, and then turned
in for a New Year’s Day Family
I got
returned to Dale’s house to watch the second half of the Rose Bowl Game where
not very much went right for
ALMOST AS IT ONCE HAD BEEN,
ON A PARTICULARLY GOOD MORNING FOR
WATERFOWL
I turned in early as it began to rain, which it did all night. We had plans to go on a guided goose hunt in the morning with several of Dale’s colleagues at work as well as his son Lance, who is also working with D. G. Liu. I had done a lot of goose hunting at the Eastern Shore, until someone had decided it was an endangered species and had limited the season to a few days and the bag limit to one goose—hardly enough to warrant a big effort to go out for geese. I had said as much when I was told to my surprise, that the limit at this time where we would be hunting is five birds per hunter, and we would have five clients and two guides doing some shooting. This is in contrast with the information that Craig Schaefer had been told, when he went out on the Eastern Shore and was told three times by different quasi-official sources that the limit was one goose per hunter. But, we had the closest scrutiny that the law will allow, and we seemed to have done quite well.
I tried
to follow Dale Kramer from his house in the heavy rain and got stopped by a red
light somewhere between
We got into their vehicles, and we pulled out into the sodden fields of cutover corn almost immediately adjacent to rows of new townhouses. We have to be careful, since there are a lot of close by residents who might not appreciate the legal harvest of the game we would be pursuing who would not doubt hear our shots. We waited for the guides to deploy the decoys just before light, as the rain fell on us until when sunrise would have started. Then, they put out the Intimidator “Final Approach” camouflage blinds with flap doors on the front, which we stuffed with cornstalks as added camouflage. These geese have been shot at several months now so they are careful about where they decide to settle in to feed after daylight. It may have favored us that there was no moonlight for them to feed by before daylight, and even the daylight was subdued with the rain and cloudiness that persisted all morning with rather mild temperatures.
The drill on the blinds is that the gunner lies down in the “sarcophagus position” looking up through the camouflage flaps with the shotgun at the side with the muzzle sticking out the foot end. The shotgun is plugged for a three shell capacity. The hunters and guides can sit up, or stand to see if there is any flying bird somewhere on the horizon and then we dive in to cover up. The guides were on the far ends with their several goose calls, and they would talk sweetly to the flying birds while the spread of decoys had been arranged to entice them into the field with a cleared area for a landing, with the wind direction to help them. The wind shifted twice during the morning and we had to turn the blinds around. It was a highly regulated hunt with the rules that we would stay put and not get up by pushing open the flaps until the guides told us to do so, and we would let the birds circle until they were in front of us. There would be no shooting sideways or behind us, but only the sequence of us to be shooting directly off the foot end of the blinds. I heard them talking about the past hunts and it seemed that the day was favorable with weather, so we would just wait for the geese to get up from their roosting areas on the nearby ponds and river.
The birds started making noise, and then could be seen as they whirled over the water on which they had been resting overnight. We dove into the blinds and waited as the birds saw the decoy spreads and heard the calls and zeroed in on us. Two birds; locked up and were committed at the first time I saw them as far as a half mile away. They came in locked up and landing gear extended, and got in front of Dale’s and my blind and each fell with a single shot. I had heard the guide yell “Take ‘em!” so that everything worked according to plan.
I immediately heard a large flock of geese behind us, and we went into blinds and the guides were calling. The birds made repeated careful wary passes, wheeling around us and checking out whatever they could see. One of the birds was out in front and flew in so close I could see it had a band on its leg. It sailed right over my head and landed in the corn stubble behind me probably not more than a gun-length away. There were a number of birds out in front who were approaching, and one that was locked up and on final approach coming straight at me. I heard a yell on my right from the direction of the guide, so I slipped open the flaps and drew a swing on the approaching bird and with a single shot, it folded up and fell straight at us, hitting the closed flaps of Dale’s blind. I then realized no one else was up and shooting, and the reason was that the guide had just yelled, and not yelled “”Take ‘em!” Mike yelled again “Who was that?” I said it was I, and I had heard a yell from him. “Well, there were a half dozen all locked up coming up our way and you got one goose instead of a big bunch of them!” “But, there was no doubt about that!” added Dale, “Since he was dead in the air when he fell like a dud bomb onto my blind!”
For about an hour, we shuttered down and watched lots of geese coming close around us and they flew around in circles out of range, as the birds would see the decoys and check out each of the details of the landing site they were drawn to but were careful about picking a place that suited them without problems they had experienced in being decoyed into others. A big group came so close over head I thought they would land right on my head, but they were behind me, and we are not supposed to shoot in that direction. When they moved off we turned the blinds around since they had wanted to and into the wind and it had shifted. With the next group, a number of them came in just over treetops and sailed into the decoys right at our level. I had borrowed Dale’s pump turkey shotgun, and had troubles re-loading the second shot, until it was found that the three inch shells did not eject from the 2 ¾ inch chamber. I learned later that there was a pattern that the for end of the pump needed to be pushed forward for the trigger to work—a finding that I learned after I had saved the life of a couple of low-flying geese. After I got the glitches of a borrowed shotgun worked out, it did not require second shots from me on most of the times we were all shooting. I never emptied the shotgun and at most shot twice once. The other single shots seemed quite effective since the goose I was looking at fell with the single shot, either mine or one of my nearby hunters. The two guides were out on the flanks and enjoying themselves shooting 3 ½ inch Ten-Gauge pumps—enough to put big hoes with number 1 steel in close flying geese.
In one close
pass we all got a chance to pick out the birds in front of us and geese were
raining down from the sky. It was only 9:00 and we had not started the hunt
until the birds were flying—unusually late, because of the darkness of the
rainy morning—and we had half a limit for all lying on the ground assembled so
as to be additional decoys in front of our blinds. We continued to try to attract the fewer
flying flocks of birds in more spaced out intervals from
At
We each
welcomed him, a young fellow named Friend, and he came along to check each one
of us. The thing I had been checked for
previously he seemed to show no interest in—the last time I had magnets applied
to my shells to see if they were all steel as opposed to the outlawed lead that
might weaken eggshells if the waterfowl ingest it to help their gizzards fill
with grinding gravel. The second item he
did not check is my driver’s license to see that I was indeed a MD resident as
my license says I am. But everything
else he had checked—the capacity of the shotgun was plugged for a three shell
limit. One of the guys had a shotgun
which he had assumed was plugged but which showed on the probe that the officer
used was longer than three shells in the magazine. The second problem was that the federal stamp
for each of us, in addition to the
Since the festivities were interrupted by the appearance of “The Man” and two of us were out of action for the day, Dale Kevin and I picked up all the decoys, and gathered the geese, and collapsed the blinds. We were packed up and packed out, stopping back at the McDonald’s and parceling out geese. We had got 24 geese in the two hours among the five hunter clients and two guides—a good picture finish that, inevitably, I will send to you!
BACK HOME, GOOSE CLEANING,
AND BEING TAKEN TO THE CLEANERS
ON SEVERAL SEPARATE EXPENSIVE ITEMS.
WITH AT LEAST AN EFFICIENT AUTO
I drove the A-4 Quattro out of the junction of 108 and 32 and entered Olney as the warning light showed “gas tank empty” on the Audi. I filled it up with 13.67 gallons and saw that the trip meter had showed 367 miles—this is the first time I had I had tried to figure the mileage on a tank of gas, although I had been watching the computer screen on the Audi dash showing the actual mileage per gallon and the average which it calculates under different driving conditions. The total on this tank seems to be 26.7 miles per gallon in mixed driving, so that is favorable. I had seen Eileen’s Toyota Prius and its Hybrid engine/motor, and it gets its best mileage in city stop and start driving. She has had it one month and has not yet refilled the tank, which was not full when she got it and it is an exemption to the HOV regulations on I-66 here in Virginia so that she has a lot of good things to say about its operating efficiency.
I worked hard at goose cleaning. I consider it wasteful to do what most folk do given a sudden “feast” in the feast/famine cycle of the hunter/gatherer which is to “breast out” the goose, throwing away its legs and all other meat from the rest of the carcass and taking only the breast meat. It would certainly make the cleaning effort easier, but I carried five big geese back with me and skinned and dressed them all out for the maximum yield. These are the first geese I have had to put away in many years of the hiatus of MD goose hunting when the 1994 season was canceled since the species was considered “threatened”. From the tens of thousands of these black and white big birds overheads, in public parks and devastating farmers’ fields, it is not likely that we will be doing any endangering of them, but I am still not going to condone any “wanton waste” of game, so I packed away as much as I could of the goose feast to come.
I got a
phone call from Charlie, the not-very-smooth fellow at North American
Taxidermy, who swore at me and told me I had better come over and pay him a
second premium price for the big buck mount I have from the “Phantom of the
Derwood Deer Woods” which he had mounted and finally finished several years
after I got him, and almost immediately, all the hair slipped on the
mount. When I turned it back in to him
he chopped out the antlers and threw it in the dumpster. Over the subsequent years, I had brought in
the cape from the big buck I had got a t
I have a number of other items that I should resolve, but many of them are revolving around the withdrawal of a continuing contact which is making me lonely. I was moping along; figuring that I should go for a run to use the unusually warm pseudo winter, and Joe could not go as planned. I decided to stop at Derwood to see if the mail had been delivered. I went to the house which has all the dry wall panels packed in each room where it will be installed on Monday. The driveway is chewed up in the warm wet unseasonable weather with all the truck traffic rutting it. I stopped to see if there was any mail in the mailbox since I found none at home.
There was
a small piece of paper with a note from Shifflett Tree Service dated
So, the New Year has got off to what might have seemed a Big Bang start, but there are some very big Downers in the immediate horizon as well. I hope I can get through the latter and back into the former shortly, and that maybe a resolution of the Big Problem might be a good start on all the rest.