Ryman Setter Remington Model 870 Pump Shotgun Remington

February 2010
$3.99
Southeast Goose Action
Remington Model 870
Pump Shotgun
Ryman Setter
Set No 1 (20” x
30”) — Winter Birds,
Marsh and Water Birds,
Waterfowl, Birds of Prey
Set No 2 (20” x 30”) —
Mammals of Farm and
Woodlot, Mammals of the
Mountains, Birds of the
Forest, Birds of Field and
Garden
Set No 3 (11” x 14”) — All eight
charts listed in Sets 1 and 2
Shipping & Handling
$6.01 to $20.00 = $2.95
$20.01 to $35.00 = $4.95
$35.01 to $60.00 = $6.95
$60.01 to $100.00 = $8.95
$100.01 to $150.00 = $10.95
$150.01 to $200.00 = $12.95
$200.01 to $250.00 = $14.95
Over $250.00 = $16.95
Sets 1 & 2 are
$11.32 each, Set 3,
$9.43, plus s&h. PA
residents add 6%
state sales tax. Order
from “The Outdoor
Shop,” at
www.pgc.state.pa.us; by
writing The Pennsylvania
Game Commission, Dept.
MS, 2001 Elmerton Avenue,
Harrisburg, PA 17110-9797; or
by calling 1-888-888-3459.
People, people & more people
“I
DON’T LIKE people, so, I’m going into
wildlife biology.” To any wildlife biologist, this is the punch line of a bad joke. In
every wildlife management class, students
are told wildlife management is ten percent animal management and ninety percent people management. As a student, I
heard these words and I understood them,
but I’m not sure I truly believed them. Even
through graduate school, students are relatively insulated from the social side of wildlife management. I’m not sure anything
could have prepared me for the public tsunami that, at times, seems to drown out
anything that has to do with wildlife.
Many on the outside think biologists
live in the wilds, keeping the company of
animals, worlds away from humanity. Being part of a state deer management program is more like living in a fish bowl. And
everyone is tapping on the glass, watching
us swim around.
In February, our fish bowl gets really
sloshed around. After hunting season is
over, ’tis the season of
sports shows and
open houses.
This is when I
question if I have the right degree on the
wall. It says wildlife biology. But after a day
at the Eastern Sports & Outdoors Show, a
degree in sociology, psychology or communications might seem more useful. Our job
is not only to gather and analyze data and
make management recommendations, but
also to help people understand why the recommendations are made. Most people
don’t see the hundreds of hours of data
collection, analysis and deliberation that
go into forming recommendations. Deer
management is a complicated business and
people have questions.
When you flip the light switch at your
house and the light goes on, do you think
about the coal that is being burned, the
complex inner workings of the power plant
that changes that heat into electricity, the
power lines and transformers that transport
that energy to your electric meter, the wiring from your meter through your walls,
finally connecting to your light switch?
Imagine having to explain that process to
someone in a few minutes . . . imagine
explaining it to every person you speak
with . . . all day.
Welcome to the fish bowl!
By J. T. Fleegle
PGC Wildlife Biologist
AUGUST 2008
1
Volume 81
P E N N S Y L V A N I A
•
No. 2
FEBRUARY 2010
(USPS 426180)
FEATURES
Edward G. Rendell
Governor
COMMISSION MEMBERS
Gregory J. Isabella, President
Philadelphia
Ronald Weaner, Secretary
Biglerville
Life & Times of the Whitetail Biologist
3
A Master with a Gun and a Pen
8
Tundra Swans
By J.T. Fleegle
James J. Delaney, Jr., Vice President
Wilkes-Barre
1
By Bill Bower
By Lori D. Richardson
14
In the Shadow of a Sycamore
16
Puzzle Solved
19
A Pennsylvania Story
24
In Honor of the American Chestnut
26
The Warren County Warden
29
The Ledges
33
Halcyon Days for Southeast
Goose Hunters
Thomas E. Boop
Sunbury
David W. Schreffler
Everett
David J. Putnam
By Jerry Zeidler Jr.
By Lowell E. Bittner
By John D. Taylor
Centre Hall
Robert W. Schlemmer
Export
Ralph A. Martone
New Castle
EXECUTIVE OFFICE
Carl G. Roe
Executive Director
Michael W. Schmit
By Ron Virden
By James H. Ferguson
By Ben Moyer
Deputy Executive Director
BUREAU DIRECTORS
Dorothy R. Derr
Administrative Services
Robert L. Strailey
Automated Technology Services
By Tom Tatum
DEPARTMENTS
38
43
Field Notes
Conservation News
48
Off the Wire
49
Another View
52
The Naturalist’s Eye
56
Straight from the Bowstring
60
Fun Game
61
Lock, Stock & Barrel
64
Crossings
Joseph Neville
Information & Education
William A. Capouillez
Wildlife Habitat Management
Richard Palmer
By Bob D’Angelo
By Linda Steiner
Wildlife Protection
Calvin W. DuBrock
By Marcia Bonta
Wildlife Management
GAME NEWS
Robert C. Mitchell
Editor
Robert D. D’Angelo
Associate Editor
Lori D. Richardson
Education Specialist
Patricia E. Monk
Administrative Assistant
Carol A. Petrina
Circulation
♦ Preliminary 2009 bear harvest
ranks second
By Mike Raykovicz
By Connie Mertz
By John McGonigle
By Scott Weidensaul
COVER PAINTING BY SCOTT CALPINO
(Cover story on p. 7)
PENNSYLVANIA GAME NEWS (ISSN 0031-451X) is published monthly for $18 per year, $45 for three years; to Canada and all other foreign
countries, $24 U.S. currency, per year. Published by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, 2001 Elmerton Ave., Harrisburg, PA 17110-9797. Phone
717-787-4250. Periodicals postage paid at Harrisburg, Pa. CHANGE OF ADDRESS: POSTMASTER: Send both old and new addresses to
Pennsylvania Game News, 2001 Elmerton Ave., Harrisburg, PA 17110-9797. Allow six weeks for processing. Material accepted is subject to our
requirements for editing and revising. Author payment covers all rights and title to accepted material, including manuscripts, photographs, drawings
and illustrations. No information contained in this magazine may be used for advertising or commercial purposes. Opinions expressed here do not
necessarily reflect those of the Pennsylvania Game Commission. Copyright © 2010 by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, an Equal Opportunity
Employer, the programs of which are all administered consistent with the goals and objectives of Affirmative Action. All rights reserved.
NOTICE: Subscriptions received and processed by the last day of each month will begin with the second month following.
PRINTED ON RECYCLED PAPER
For questions about your subscription, call 1-888-888-1019.
www.pgc.state.pa.us
A Master with a
Gun and a Pen
An Interview With Bob Bell
By Bill Bower
“T
HERE IS NOTHING more stimulating to a man’s spiritual and
physical being than the realization of a
duty well performed.” Those words,
penned by Ross Leffler, appeared on the
cover page of the first Monthly Service
Bulletin, dated July 1929.
By today’s standards, the ability to
communicate back then was archaic.
The first Service Bulletin was comprised
of four pages, and
mimeographed
copies were sent to
the Game Commission field force to
keep them informed
of the agency’s
activities. This
bulletin became
popular with the
field force, and soon the general public
began requesting copies of the bulletin.
This led the Commission to make the
bulletin available to the public, still in
mimeographed form, its first Game News,
in April 1930. Two years later, the first
printed Game News magazine was
published and made available to the
public on a subscription basis for 50 cents
per year, with a circulation of 5,000.
Game News, which became the
agency’s official monthly magazine, is
one of the oldest state conservation
magazines in the country. Game News
quickly became popular not only in
Pennsylvania, but also across the country.
By 1937, the circulation was more
than 25,000.
Through the years, Game News
has always retained its outdoor
image, with features and other
information for women, farmers,
hunters, trappers, gun enthusiasts
and articles about outdoor Pennsylvania. At first, the magazine was
12x9 inches, but in September 1950,
the format was
changed to 6x9,
like it still is today.
A magazine is
only as good as its
editor, and Game
News seems to
have a way of
attracting the very
best. From April
1932 until 1949, Leo Luttringer was
the editor. In 1949, Will Johns
became the editor. In 1951, Johns
was called to active military duty
and, in his absence, Ned Smith —
the agency’s staff artist at the
time — became the acting editor
and served until November 1952,
when Johns returned from military
leave. Johns continued as editor
until October 1961. The reins were
turned over to George Harrison in
November of 1961; then to Jim
Bashline in February 1966, and then
to Bob Bell in February 1967. Bob
Bell remained as the editor until he
When asked what was
the most important
thing an editor had to
do, he replied, “Keep
the readers happy.”
FEBRUARY 2010
3
retired in February 1990 and was
replaced by the current editor,
Robert “Mitch” Mitchell.
Bob was born on December 2,
1925, in Danville, Pennsylvania, the
only child of Robert M. Bell and
Mary Elizabeth Buckley Bell. He
always had an interest in writing,
and while in high school, Bob began
his writing career by penning an
article on different types of sleeping
bags. The article, which was submitted to a national magazine, was
written with a fountain pen on plain
paper. Bob received a check for five
dollars when the article appeared in
print. He couldn’t believe that
people actually got paid for putting
words on paper.
Anyone who knows Bob knows
that he’s a gun enthusiast, and this
was evident even at a young age.
When Bob was four, his dad gave
him a Daisy BB gun. When the two
went out shooting, his dad had to
cock the gun for him. Bob and his
dad shared many good times with
the BB gun, and it led to many more
birthday guns. On his sixth birthday,
he was given a Crossman pellet gun,
and at age 11, he received a Winchester M72 bolt action .22 rifle.
Later, a Weaver 2½ power scope was
put on the .22. Although Bob has
owned and sold hundreds of guns
throughout his life, he still has
the Winchester .22, with the
same scope.
At age 12 Bob began looking
at bigger guns and got his heart
set on a M94 Winchester .3030 caliber rifle. The gun,
though, sold for $27.50, and Bob had no
way of raising the money. He could only
dream. Then an older cousin who was
building a house made a proposal Bob
couldn’t refuse. If Bob helped out during
the summer, his cousin would purchase
the gun for him. Bob jumped at the
chance and worked six days a week all
summer long. As fall approached, the
cousin was true to his word and bought
Bob a gun; however, the gun was a .32
Special. Bob was thrilled with the rifle
and didn‘t care that it wasn’t the .30-30
he had dreamed of owning. Bob later
figured out that he had worked that
summer for about a nickel an hour.
When Bob graduated from high
school, in 1943, his dad presented him
with a .348 Winchester. Bob could
hardly wait for deer season, but as it
turned out, he had to wait several years
because WWII postponed his plans. He
was only 17 when he enlisted in the
Army, and like all young men, he wanted
to get in on the fighting. When he scored
well on a test, however, the army
assigned him to an Army Specialized
Training Program (ASTP) and he was
sent to Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie
Mellon) in Pittsburgh. Bob didn’t like
the school or being in the city, and after
one semester, he asked the CO if he
could transfer to another unit. The CO
said that it could be arranged, but that
Bob would have to go to basic training
BOB enjoyed hunting just about
everything, but pheasants were
high on the list. He’s shown here
admiring a long-tailed rooster,
while CHUCK FERGUS, left, and
WES BOWER look on.
4
GAME NEWS
and would probably then be sent
overseas to the front lines. Bob quickly
replied that that was what he had signed
up for.
Bob was transferred to basic training
and then sent to mortar school, where he
spent time lugging mortars and equipment around the swamps of Alabama.
His heavy mortar battalion was then sent
overseas, where they joined the 8th
Division. The new CO asked Bob what
he could do, and Bob replied that he
could shoot a rifle. That led to Bob
becoming the main rifleman for the
mortar crew. He saw combat in France,
Belgium, Holland, Luxemburg and
Germany. Although the newspapers said
that the Americans had not crossed the
Elbe River, Bob said that his division had
crossed the Elbe River and liberated the
Wobbelin Concentration Camp.
The Wobbelin Concentration Camp,
which was near the German city of
Ludwigslust, held 5,000 inmates. The SS
had moved inmates from other camps to
the Wobbelin camp to prevent their
liberation by the Allies. It was on May 2,
1945, when the 8th Infantry Division and
the 82nd Airborne Division liberated the
camp. They found deplorable conditions
in the camp, which had little food and
water and about 1,000 dead inmates. In
accordance with the policy of General
Dwight D. Eisenhower, all atrocity
victims were buried in a public place
with crosses placed at the graves of the
Christians and Stars of David on the
Jewish graves. When Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, Bob said that his
unit was in the town of Krak.
Because Bob’s unit had seen a lot of
combat time, they were sent stateside for
rest and recreation. The unit was
stationed at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and from there they were to join in
the Pacific Campaign. On September 2,
1945, Japan surrendered, ending WWII.
Bob was on a furlough and at a theater,
in Columbia, when the movie was
FEBRUARY 2010
interrupted with the news that Japan
had surrendered and the war was
over.
While waiting to be discharged,
the unit turned in their motor
equipment, but were later reissued
their rifles. In order to keep the men
busy while waiting for their discharge papers, the CO held a
shooting contest. If a man was able
to attain an expert score, he was
given a 3-day pass; a sharpshooter
score earned a 2-day pass and a
marksman score rated a 1-day pass.
Bob earned scores in all three
categories and earned a 6-day pass.
However, the men had received no
pay since the unit moved; and
hence, no one had money. Those
who won passes complained to the
CO, who told them that they
wouldn’t have to meet musters;
could eat at camp; come and go as
they pleased and didn’t have to
stand watches or inspections.
While still on his 6-day pass, Bob
was found in his bunk by the
inspecting platoon leader. He woke
Bob up and demanded to know why
he was still asleep. Bob replied that
he was on his pass and not to bother
him. The leader just turned around
and walked away. Next, Bob was
sent to Camp Swift, in Texas, and
from there, to Fort Meade, Maryland, where he was discharged.
Finally, in 1946, Bob was able to
go deer hunting. He went on
Montour Ridge, between Danville
and Northumberland, and bagged an
8-point buck, with the .348 his dad
had given him for high school
graduation. Although Bob has
hunted and killed many whitetails,
mule deer, elk and other big game,
that 8-point rack holds a prominent
place on a wall in the Bells’ home.
Bob stayed in Danville until the
next spring and then headed to
5
BOB BELL bagged plenty of
whitetails over the years,
plus some mule deer and
elk. Here he helps a guide
dress a moose taken in
Quebec by Wes Bower.
Besides being an expert on
firearms and shooting
optics,
Bob
is
an
accomplished hunter.
Idaho, where one of
his Army pals had a
job with a logging
outfit waiting for
him. He was to set
the chokers, which
was the lowest paid
job on the logging
crew, and probably the most physically demanding, too. Bob and his
friend worked from early spring until
October, when they then turned
their attention to hunting elk and
mule deer.
After two years, Bob returned to
Danville, where he met a young lady
by the name of Terry Rossi, who was
training to be a nurse. I’m sure there
were many things that attracted Bob
to Terry, but I wonder if her last
name had anything to do with it.
(Although unrelated to Terry, the
Rossi Firearm Company was founded
in 1889 and is still selling guns
today.) After Bob and Terry married,
Bob went to work for the Merck
Chemical Company. His job was
breaking down a press, which
consisted of handling plates with dry
cow blood and sulfuric acid. Bob had
continuous heartburn and believed
that the job was affecting his health.
6
After working at the company for five
years, and hating every minute, he quit.
Bob told his family that he was going
back to college. He and Terry headed
West, to the University of New Mexico.
After taking most of the English courses,
he transferred back to Penn State, where
he majored in creative writing. Then Bob
wanted to take some courses offered by
Wallace Stegner, whom Bob considered
to be the best writing instructor in the
country. So, off to Stanford for graduate
work. But when Wallace took a sabbatical, the wanderlust got to Bob again, and
he and Terry headed for California.
Once on the West coast, they planned
to go to Mexico, where it would be
cheaper to live while Bob wrote a book.
However, he and Terry had not been
back to Pennsylvania for quite some
time, and decided to make a trip back
home to see their parents.
Terry was sick for the entire time, and
while visiting their parents, they found
GAME NEWS
out she was pregnant. Instead of going to
Mexico, Bob got a job as sport’s editor
with the Morning Press, a newspaper in
Bloomsburg. But unless it was hunting or
shooting, Bob didn’t know a lot about
sports. During that time at home, Terri
gave birth to a daughter, Patricia Jo,
which was eventually shortened to PJ.
Bob’s next job was in Philadelphia, as
an assistant editor of a magazine called
Official Detective. The family lived there
about five years, until the magazine was
sold to a New York firm. Bob was asked
to move to New York City but turned
the offer down. He had been writing
hunting and shooting articles for
different magazines, and it was about this
time that he was offered a job as an
associate editor with Gun Digest. He
accepted the offer, and off the family
went to Chicago.
Although Bob was pleased to be
writing about guns, he was not fond of
the Midwest, and when he heard that
Pennsylvania Game News was looking for
an editor, he applied. After an interview,
he was offered the job, and back to
Pennsylvania they moved. With Bob’s
experience, I’m sure the Commission felt
very fortunate to have him on board.
During Bob’s tenure, the Game News
hit a circulation of 229,000. Bob was not
sure if this was only paid circulations or
included copies given to the
COVER PAINTING
Commission’s programs such as
Safety Zone and Farm Game
programs.
When asked what was the most
important thing an editor had to do,
he replied, “Keep the readers happy.”
The Game News had a wide variety
of readers, so the magazine had to
cover a lot of different subjects.
When purchasing a story Bob always
asked himself if he was buying it for
the readers or himself. Bob held the
position of Game News editor for 23
years, until his retirement in
February 1990.
Writing an article about an
accomplished outdoor writer is a
daunting task. I was held in awe by
Bob’s knowledge of guns, scopes,
hunting, shooting and the outdoors,
and captivated by the experiences of
his lifetime. Although Bob has had
many accomplishments, his tour of
duty with the U.S. Army, while
protecting his country, may be the
most important.
Since his retirement, Bob has had
two strokes, which have slowed him
down. While he realizes that his elk
hunting days are over, he is still able
to do some long-distance shooting at
woodchucks, and still able to just sit
and enjoy the outdoors while
waiting for a whitetail to walk by.
BY
SCOTT CALPINO
JUST LIKE THE black-capped chickadee, the tufted titmouse, depicted on this month’s
cover “Bittersweet Season,” is a welcome sight in the winter landscape in Penn’s
Woods. Although they are year-round residents, they are more often observed at
birdfeeders during the winter months, where they devour seeds and suet placed
out for them and other birds. In late winter, mating pairs break from their flocks to
search for nesting cavities and soft lining materials to incoporate in their nests.
Bittersweet Season, which is the third in the series of “The Fence Post Sitters,” is
limited to 150 signed and numbered giclee prints and sells for $60.12, which
includes sales tax and shipping. To order, contact the artist at 275 S. Garfield Road,
Bernville, PA 19506; [email protected]; 610-488-8158.
FEBRUARY 2010
7
Tundra Swans
— a PA ‘responsibility species’
by Lori D. Richardson
Wildlife Education Specialist
I
N MARCH of 2009 I took a trip to
Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Lebanon County, but
not just to hear the cacophony of the
thousands of snow geese and tundra
swans migrating through. I went to
hear what a group of people are saying
and doing to keep the tundra swans a
part of that cacophony.
Tundra swans (Cygnus columbianus)
are large white birds with wingspans
of about six feet and weights of up to
18 pounds. They have black bills and
feet, and most adults have a yellow
patch just in front of their black eyes
that distinguishes them from trumpeter swans, which are also larger.
They differ from the non-native, and
invasive, mute swan, which has an
orange and black bill. Juvenile tundras
have a grayish cast to the plumage on
their heads and necks. Tundra swans
establish lifelong pair bonds at about
four or five years of age, and their highpitched vocalizations earned them
their former name as whistling swans.
Why should we care about swans
that live on the tundra? Tundra swans
have one of the longest migrations of
any waterfowl — 4,000 miles. It takes
8
them two to three months to get from their
arctic breeding grounds in northeastern
Alaska and northern portions of the Yukon,
the Northwest Territories and Nunavut in
Canada to their wintering grounds. Tundras winter along both U.S. coasts. The
eastern population is slightly larger and
winters from southeastern Pennsylvania
and the Chesapeake Bay south to coastal
North Carolina.
Tundra swan families migrate together
until the young have traveled both south
and north routes with their parents. They
spend 40 percent of the year in migration,
30 percent of the year on the breeding
grounds and the remaining 30 percent on
their winter range. The eastern population
visits four important sites during winter:
Middle Creek, the Chesapeake Bay, the
Potomac River, and the Tri-Refuge area in
North Carolina.
The Game Commission’s Middle Creek
Wildlife Management Area has been managed for migrating waterfowl since it was
created in the 1970s; more than 6,000 acres
are cared for by agency employees. A 400acre lake is visible from the Visitor Center. Birds staging in the area in winter and
spring roost on the lake at Middle Creek,
nearby quarry ponds and other large bodGAME NEWS
ies of slow moving water.
They feed in large agricultural fields,
mainly of harvested corn and winter wheat,
in Lebanon and Lancaster counties. But,
when the swans arrive in those fields, they
are finding that some have already been
consumed by something else — houses.
The Middle Creek Initiative is a combined effort of many organizations to preserve open spaces, specifically agricultural
fields around Middle Creek, for tundra
swan feeding areas. The Lebanon Valley
Conservancy, Lebanon County Conservation District, Highland Coalition and the
Game Commission are among the organizations engaging in this effort.
By the 1800s, tundra swans had been
extirpated from much of North America.
In 1918, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and
the national refuge system began affording
some protection. Their population has
more than doubled since 1955, from 40,000
to 100,000. But, although the population
of tundra swans is currently secure, their
habitat may not be.
Nowadays, swans from more southerly
wintering areas begin arriving on
Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River drainage in late winter, and Middle Creek has
been known to hold as
many as 17,000 during
staging periods. During
this spring migration, it
is critical that the birds
load up on nutrients to help fuel their
northward journey and to provide the
energy needed to nest successfully.
Agricultural lands are an excellent
source of these essential nutrients.
Though there are many crop fields
maintained on the Wildlife Management Area, the birds apparently prefer to feed on private agricultural
lands, mostly to the northwest of
Middle Creek. Although farmers
sometimes suffer crop damage from
grubbing snow geese and Canada
geese, they are more tolerant of tundra swans, which merely graze on waste
grains and hardy crops that seem to
recover readily.
Research shows that while most
tundra swans roost on only one site,
they tend to feed on at least two different sites. Use of multiple feeding
sites is important for management implications. It shows that a habitat complex is necessary. During winters when
the lake at Middle Creek doesn’t freeze
over, a few hundred swans may stay
all winter. In fact, research shows that
most birds that winter in Pennsylvania tend to stay in Pennsylvania all
It takes tundra swans
two to three months
to get from their arctic
breeding grounds to
their wintering
grounds along both
US coasts. The eastern
population is slightly
larger and winters
from southeastern
Pennsylvania and the
Chesapeake Bay south
to coastal NC.
FEBRUARY 2010
9
winter, while others move north, a
little at a time, as weather conditions
thaw along their northward journey.
In 2001, 27 percent of swans marked
in southern states throughout the eastern range were confirmed passing
through Pennsylvania, demonstrating
that in some years the habitat com-
10
plex around Middle Creek is used by a large
portion of the eastern population. Therefore, maintaining the health of this habitat complex is not just of local importance,
it has regional, national, international and
global impacts.
Game Commission biologist Ian Gregg
says, “Acting locally will conserve conti-
GAME NEWS
AFTER a summer of raising young and months of migrating,
tundra swans are ready to loaf on the lake and bulk up on needed
nutrients. But, when they get to their favorite food haunts, they
may find them filled with houses. It’s been nearly four years
since tundras graced the ground of the subdivision below. The
barn and silo still stand as remnants of the old farmstead.
nentally with this species. That’s why the
tundra swan has been deemed a ‘responsibility species’ — one that our state plays a
key role in keeping common — in
Pennsylvania’s Wildlife Action Plan.”
So what do we do to fulfill this responsibility? Tundra swan roosting areas are
fairly stable and secure. Problems could,
FEBRUARY 2010
however, arise with adjacent land development and increases in disturbance. Biologists suggest that 500 acres
of known or potential roosting habitat in the Lebanon/Lancaster County
region be secured and that human disturbance at current roost sites be
monitored and, if necessary, managed.
11
TUNDRA SWAN sightings are indicated on this map of southern Lebanon County by
red dots. The green shaded areas are farmsteads preserved with agricultural
easements. No farms are currently preserved where the major concentration of swan
sightings is occurring. Although there is a waiting list of about a dozen landowners
interested in selling conservation easements on their farm properties, it takes
$250,000 to secure a 100-acre farm. Funding is the primary limiting factor in
protecting this open space.
Feeding areas are, in contrast, very vulnerable because they are subject to development. Biologists want to identify
key areas used by the swans in Lebanon and Lancaster counties and to preserve, conserve, protect and secure at
least 25,000 acres in those areas.
Jim Binder, Land Management Officer at Middle Creek, boils it down,
“Like much of southeastern Pennsylvania, Lebanon County is under pressure from development. Farm fields
that a few years ago held winter wheat
and tundra swans now hold suburbia.”
The director of the Lebanon
County Planning Department, Earl
Meyer, notes that an area important
for tundra swans has some upcoming
planning issues with the potential to
significantly impact agricultural land.
The current septic system in some
12
municipalities is in need of improvement,
and a public sewer system connected to the
Lebanon City system is being considered
as a means to update. There is great concern that if a public sewage infrastructure
were in place, lands around the new system would quickly be consumed by development. Some areas that tundra swans currently use are likely to be the target of development.
The Lebanon County Agricultural Land
Preservation Program provides agricultural
conservation easements that preserve farmland. An easement is a permanent deed
restriction that restricts development. The
farmland, in this case, is protected. Easements don’t restrict the landowner from
selling the property but the restriction stays
with the property indefinitely. Easements
may offer landowners some tax savings as
well. Binder says, “The beauty of conserGAME NEWS
Want to Know More?
• To view video of capturing tundra swans at Middle Creek for a telemetry
study and to read about the research project, visit the Game Commission’s
website at www.pgc.state.pa.us, click on the Wildlife link at the top of the
page, then Birds, Waterfowl Home, Swans and Tundra Swans.
• Check out the tundra swan migration video on National Geographic’s
website. http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/animals/birdsanimals/waders-and-waterfowl/swan_tundra.html
Want to Help?
• Report your swans sightings by using PA e-Bird at http://ebird.org/content/
pa. Registration is free and your data could augment existing data on
feeding site locations and be used in the future to identify areas where
conservation easements are needed.
• Contact the Lebanon Valley Conservancy, Inc. at 717-273-6400 or
www.lebanonvalleyconservancy.org.
vation easements is that the land stays in
private ownership, it stays in agricultural
production, open space is preserved and,
in this case, the swans also benefit.”
Currently, easements exist on about 11
percent of the land that qualifies. But, the
major concentration of swan sightings is
where no farms are currently preserved.
There is a waiting list of about a dozen landowners interested in selling conservation
easements on their farm properties, but it
takes $250,000 to secure a 100-acre farm.
Funding is the primary limiting factor.
Government support, when available, requires matching dollars, so acquiring local
private dollars is very important.
The Lebanon Valley Conservancy emphasizes, “The success of the Middle Creek
Initiative will be measured in dollars raised
to purchase agricultural easements as well
as the number of acres of farmland removed
from development. Inaction is not an op-
tion for Lebanon County. If the cropland necessary to sustain the feeding
habits of this migratory species is not
protected, it will have a direct and
negative impact upon the local and regional economy.”
For more information and to support the Middle Creek Initiative to
preserve open space and protect tundra swan habitat, contact the Lebanon Valley Conservancy, Inc. at
www.lebanonvalleyconservancy.org or
752 Willow Street; Suite E; Lebanon,
PA 17046; 717-273-6400.
THE Lebanon Valley Conservancy and other
folks involved in the Middle Creek Initiative
to preserve open space and thereby protect
the habitat of tundra swans that spend time
here during the winter, hope to see more
of these signs popping up around
southeastern Lebanon County.
FEBRUARY 2010
13
In the Shadow
of a Sycamore
By Jerry Zeidler Jr.
artwork by jim obleski
I
WALKED the creek bottom
slowly, flintlock in hand, all
senses on alert. I had never hunted
this area before, and every rustle and
swish surprised me. I was used to
hunting deer on wooded
mountainsides, with long visibility
that made the sources of sounds easy
to locate. Creek bottom hunting was
nothing at all like that. Tall grasses
spanned the spaces between the
dense copses of multiflora rose,
tangled thickly with bittersweet
vines. Sparrows and blackbirds
scattered before me at each step,
heedless of the idea that October
was coming to a close, and winter
had already uttered its first threats
14
here in northcentral Pennsylvania.
Ahead, I spied a grand sycamore tree,
bravely clinging to its last few leaves. I
made the tree my next goal, and decided
that under its branches I would take my
lunch and rest before braving the thorns
ahead of me once more.
I realized that the sycamore grew not
far from the edge of the creek I had been
paralleling. Rather than fight the snarl of
thorns and vines directly ahead, I opted
to make my way to the stream’s edge and
step along the rocky shoreline toward the
sycamore’s nearly naked boughs.
I paused when I reached the water’s
edge, as I always do, and watched the
surface of the cold, slow moving pool
before me. A brook trout rewarded my
GAME NEWS
patience by rising to take
some unseen insect off
the surface. I catalogued
the location in my
mental fly-fishing file
and, following a sandy
pathway created by high
water during a recent
rainstorm, proceeded to
the tree where I would
take my break.
The path allowed me to
directly approach the
enormous gray and tan trunk
without a sound from my
footfalls. As I stepped into the
clear ground under the
sycamore’s branches, I froze at the
sight of a furry tail protruding from
behind the tree’s trunk, not eight feet
away. Grizzled gray, with a hint of
ruddy-brown, the tail remained
motionless and low to the ground for
what seemed to be eons.
I summoned every bit of patience I
had, and ignored the growing ache in my
right knee from standing still for so long
in an awkward and uncomfortable
position. I was rewarded for my efforts,
though, when a gray fox leapt forward
and pounced into a low tuft of weeds. I
watched, thrilled, as the fox lifted its
head, a chubby brown field mouse
hanging from its jaws. Half a moment
after snatching its dinner from the weeds,
the fox realized something was amiss and
then spotted me. The two seconds that
he stared me in the eyes before darting
off with his prey allowed me ample
opportunity to study the details of the
scene, and etch them into memory. With
luck, in 50 years, I will be telling my
grandchildren about this fox, with its jet
black eyes, brilliant white brows and
throat, gray and red ears, and the
wriggling, squeaking mouse dangling
from its mouth. As quickly as it appeared, the fox darted off into the tall
grass, leaving only paw prints in the sand,
FEBRUARY 2010
and a memory of a rare and beautiful
encounter that few are lucky enough
to experience.
I marveled at my good fortune for
a moment, then sat under the tree
and pulled a sandwich and water
from my backpack. After a quick
meal, I settled back against the trunk
of the sycamore and closed my eyes.
I dozed off immediately and dreamed
of my kindred spirit, the gray fox,
who walked where I walked, and
hunted where I hunted.
I awoke, pulled my backpack
onto my shoulders, and checked the
priming powder in my rifle. I left the
sycamore behind me, and followed
the creek along my planned route. I
saw one deer that afternoon, a lone
doe, browsing on the buds of some
thick brush, far ahead of me. I never
moved close enough to even
consider a shot. But I returned to my
home with more than when I had
left.
15
Puzzle Solved
T
HINGS WERE GOING well.
All units were in place and
hadn’t been observed while taking
up their positions. Shortly after
midnight, a vehicle was seen
entering a field where deer were
often present. A powerful spotlight
was cast from the vehicle and a shot
was fired. All lights went out. In a
short time a smaller light was seen
moving about, and then it stopped
at one spot. This was consistent with
activities associated with fielddressing a deer. Then, that light
went out, too.
The PGC officers watching knew
there was only one way out of the
field. When the vehicle came out,
they would be in position to stop it.
But, after too much time had passed,
the officers began to feel uneasy.
What could have gone wrong? Was
there another way out of the field?
Could the vehicle have left unseen,
by keeping its headlights off? After
several more hours of waiting, the
officers left, thinking the poachers
had escaped.
This series of events took place
on the day after Thanksgiving, in
northeast Schuylkill County, late in
the 1960s. The officer in charge of
the operation was one of my
deputies — the late Mason
Spancake.
Back then, when a vacancy came up
in a district, a deputy would be appointed
to the position of “acting” Game
Protector (our official title at that time).
I had the western district in Schuylkill
County. The eastern district was vacant
at that time, and “Spanny” had been
appointed to serve there until a fulltime
officer could be assigned. He was a great
choice. Spanny was one of the best
investigators and most dedicated officers
I ever worked with.
On that Sunday afternoon, the day
before buck season, Spanny called to ask
for help first thing on Monday morning.
He had information about illegal
activities in the northeastern part of the
county. He had secured search warrants
for two properties and did not have
enough experienced officers to search for
illegally taken deer on both properties at
the same time. Although I was reluctant
to leave my own district on the first day
of deer season, I knew I had capable
deputies who could handle things until I
got back.
We met early on Monday morning. I
had one of my deputies, John, with me
and Spanny had Bill, and was going to
pick up Dick on the way. Both Bill and
Dick were new deputies and had never
helped in executing a search warrant.
John and I took the warrant authorizing
a search in Sheppton and the others
searched a farm in Ringtown Valley. We
By Lowell E. Bittner
Retired Law Enforcement Supervisor
artwork by carrie andraychak
16
GAME NEWS
knew that the farmer’s wife in the valley
and the occupants of the house in
Sheppton were related.
When John and I knocked on the
door in Sheppton, a teenage girl greeted
us. We asked her to get her father or
The officers watching
knew there was only one
way out of the field.
When the vehicle came
out, they would be in
position to stop it.
mother, and the mother appeared. We
informed her of our purpose there and
she said she had to go to work, but that
her sister was also home. A tall woman
appeared and we made a quick but
thorough search, finding no illegal deer
or parts.
We then proceeded to the farm and
found Spanny and Bill in the yard. They
had searched some of the buildings and
FEBRUARY 2010
were about to start investigating the
barn. The only thing they had found
was a fresh deer hide hanging on a
wash line and some deer parts being
chewed on by a dog chained in the
yard. The farmer muttered something about deer damage. Bill said he
would retrieve the evidence from the
dog.
About this time, Dick pulled in.
He said he’d seen two hunters
dragging a deer through the pasture
below the barn on his way in (it was
now legal hunting time).
John and I left the others to
complete their search and went to
check the individuals dragging the
deer. We found the deer, a small
buck, to be untagged. One of the
hunters said he’d shot the deer right
at starting time, about a half hour
earlier. The body heat of the deer,
however, was much too low to have
been killed that recently. In checking his license and ID, we found that
he was from Philadelphia. The other
individual did not have a license
displayed and said he’d seen the
17
hunter dragging the deer and
stopped to help. They claimed to not
know each other but, when we
checked his license and ID, we
found he was from Camden, NJ, and
worked at the same place as the
hunter he was helping — an amazing
coincidence.
About that time, Bill came over
and said they had found three illegal
deer at the farm. We took the two
suspects and the evidence up to the
farm to put everything together.
Nothing had been found in the barn
or other buildings, and the farmer
claimed to know nothing about any
illegal activity. Dick spotted a few
drops of blood on the ground, and
the trail led to a small pile of brush
in the yard. He pulled back some of
the brush and found old blankets
and rugs. When he pulled those
aside, steam from three freshly killed
does spilled out. There was a small
depression in the ground and the
deer had been concealed there. Now
the suspects were willing to talk.
The hunters from Philadelphia
and Camden had been staying at the
farm. On Sunday evening, the two of
them and the farmer had gone out
and shot the three does. Unfortunately for the farmer, they were not
killed on his property, so crop
damage could not be claimed. The
deer were taken back to the farm
and hidden. Early Monday morning,
the suspects threw a spotlight on the
pasture, saw a buck, and the guy
from Philadelphia shot it and left it
lay. The two suspects had been in
the process of bringing it in when
Dick spotted them.
There were many violations in
18
this situation and everything was settled
at the local justice of the peace. The
penalties were severe and appropriate.
We felt we had done a good days’ work,
but there was an unexpected bonus.
Remember the fresh hide on the clothes
line? There had been no accounting for
it. It seems the tall young lady from
Sheppton, her boyfriend from Frackville,
and the farmer had taken the farm truck
out early Friday morning, after Thanksgiving, to kill a nice buck. It was to be
entered in the big buck contest at a local
sporting goods store. They entered a
nearby field, spotted a nice buck and
fired one shot, killing it. They had
extinguished all lights and dressed the
deer by flashlight, then loaded the deer
on the truck only to find the truck
wouldn’t start — the battery had died.
They walked back to the farm and came
back after sunrise with a tractor to pull
the truck with the deer home. Of course,
this violation resulted in more penalties.
A most interesting adventure and, in this
case, the good guys won.
GAME NEWS
The Ryman setter: the gentleman’s shooting
dog celebrates a century.
A Pennsylvania
Story
By John D. Taylor
P
ENNSYLVANIA has legitimate claims
to being the location of many historical firsts, particularly key turning points.
Witness Valley Forge, the Continental
Army’s 1778 winter encampment; or Civil
War turning point Gettysburg, where a
nation divided brother-against-brother
clashed, and began the long, bloody road
toward reunification. But were you aware
that Pennsylvania was also the birthplace
of a revolution, and the resolution, of a civil
war in hunting dogs, specifically English
setters?
It’s true, and it all began more than a
century ago, during the winter of 1907, in
Wilkes-Barre, with the birth of a squirmy
white puppy named Sir Roger DeCoverly.
Sir Roger was a singular canine. His
blue belton blood connected two
sharply divided camps of English setter people: the “form” group versus the
“function” group — the civil war
among English setter owners.
This schism began in England during the early 1800s, when English setters as a breed emerged, and Englishmen decided it might be fun to compare and contrast their dogs. At the
time, there were only Setters. All three
of the modern setter breeds — English, Gordon and Irish — were
blended and bred together to create
the Setter. Another 50 years would
pass before the three varieties would
be recognized as distinct
breeds.
Anyhow, these mostly
good-natured my-dog’s-better-than-your-dog comparisons soon developed into
more structured “games” —
bench shows and field trials. Originally conceived as
fun, they were not about
prizes, accolades or oneMODERN Ryman setters
retain their gold standard
grouse dog rankings across
a century of evolution.
FEBRUARY 2010
19
upmanship, but rather to bring people
of similar interests together, to further
their own cause. It’s similar to how
sporting clays, during the mid-1980s,
began as a clay target practice game
for hunters, but in 20 years has evolved
into a highly specialized shotgun sport.
Bench shows were focused on form:
comparing dogs against a breed standard, a benchmark created by breeders who mutually agreed that certain
physical attributes represented what
their ideal dog should look like. Today, for example, English setter breed
standards say English setters should
stand about 25 inches at the shoulder;
have deep, narrow chests; long lean
necks; wide, muscular thighs; and a
straight tail, tapering to a fine point
with straight, silky feathering.
Field trials were function-focused:
whose dog was the best hunter. They
began in England during the 1870s.
However, as more structure entered
the game — when dogs were braced
(paired) against each other; when scoring and prizes arrived — factors other
than hunting entered the formula.
Now, “race,” the speed and style with
which a dog moved, and bird encounter numbers (not which dog best
handled the birds so its hunters could
take game) became most important.
During the mid-1800s, dog shows
and field trials came to the United
States. Both “sports” grew along parallel lines, each becoming more specialized. Field trialers, for example,
tended to forget looks; they bred specifically to create dogs of superior nose
and race, ignoring the importance of
balanced form.
Show aficionados did the same, ignoring nose and field functions in favor of coat and confirmation. So, from
the same root dogs, two divergent
strains of English setters evolved: Big,
pretty dogs that lacked their progenitors’ bird-finding ability; and squat,
20
AN EARLY promotional piece from the
Ryman Gun Dog Kennels.
snipe-muzzled English streaks who, although they might find every bird in three
counties, didn’t match their hunter’s pace
and weren’t much to look at. By the early
1900s, both here and in England, two decided camps among English setter owners — bench vs. field — had emerged.
During the early 1900s, the Pocono
Mountains were a grouse and woodcock
hunter’s nirvana. Pennsylvania’s northern
tier forests had been logged following the
Civil War. Late 19th century photos show
little forest across what hunters now know
as the “big woods,” and the Poconos, cut
during the 1880s, were rife with a secondgrowth of forearm-thick aspen, birch and
cherry sprouts, shrubs and blackberries.
Also at that time, the region’s alder-ringed
wetlands were intact, not drained. In addition, many of the farmers who had followed the loggers into the region were giving up their hardscrabble mountaintop
farms for city jobs. No people, tons of cover,
abundant birds — sign me up!
Sportsmen from around the region —
especially growing Wilkes-Barre and
Scranton, but also New Jersey and New
York City, quickly learned about Pocono
grouse country. They’d catch trains from
the cities into the Pocono’s hinterlands
each autumn to hunt.
GAME NEWS
These gunners had two basic bird dogs
to choose from — English pointers or one
of the three setters. The popular “versatile” European breeds, including Brittanies,
were uncommon in America prior to
World War II. Labs and springer spaniels
were used far more as retrievers than birdflushers in those days.
Many Pocono grouse hunters favored
English setters, believing the dog’s coat to
be better protection from dense, thorny
growth, and that setters were better suited
to northern climates. The longer these
sportsmen — many were wealthy industrialists — gunned the Poconos, the more
evolved their tastes became.
By the early 1900s, they came to prefer
a larger, exceptionally handsome English
setter with superior bird-finding abilities
and the disposition to work with their gunner, not for themselves. They called these
English setters dual setters or gentlemen’s
shooting dogs. Several Pocono-area kennels bred dual setters. Their bloodlines often included dogs imported into the U.S.
before the field versus bench division.
Enter Sir Roger DeCoverly, a
gentleman’s shooting dog with the best of
both worlds — bench blood with exemplary field ability; field blood with refined
looks — entwined among his DNA. His
owner, M. I. Mangan, a Pittston industrialist, recognized this. So did 18-year-old
George Harvey Ryman.
Prior to 1907, Ryman lived an
outdoorsman’s life. He market-gunned
grouse to feed Canadian railroad crews.
Legend claims he could walk into a dog’s
point with an unloaded side-by-side and
shoot a brace of grouse on the rise. He also
earned some of his living raising and training bird dogs for Pocono grouse gunners.
His family was based in Shohola Falls, near
the New Jersey border.
Recognizing that he could sell dogs of
this lineage to Pocono sportsmen, Ryman
wanted some of Sir Roger’s blood. Eventually, he obtained one of Sir Roger’s sons,
Sir Roger II, and in 1916 — using capital
FEBRUARY 2010
from a Delco electric generator franchise — Ryman began his own English
setter kennels on 700 acres near
Shohola Falls. At the juncture of
Springbrook Road and PA Route 6, he
erected a 12-foot-high sign, emblazoned with a blue belton Ryman setter, proclaiming it the domain of the
famous Ryman’s Gun Dog Kennels.
By the 1920s, his kennel had more
than 150 dogs, with more in satellite
kennels spread across the region (an
anti-distemper strategy). The Ryman
setter also began influencing the larger
English setter world, producing both
show and field trial winners.
A great grandson of Roger II and
Ryman’s Grouse Queen, Feagin’s
Mowhawk Pal, won the National Field
Trial championships in 1926, 1928
and 1930. In addition, Ryman setters
became the ruffed grouse gunner’s gold
standard, the dog against which others were measured. Things were looking up.
During the 1930s, Ryman met Ellen
Kernan, a dark-haired beauty, 22 years
his junior, when he tried to buy a dog
from her father. They married in 1938,
honeymooned at Ryman’s Quebec dog
training grounds, and for the next 35
years, Ellen was hands-on in Ryman’s
dog business, at home and in the field.
She ran his “puppy house,” personally
socializing and weaning about 4,000
puppies, and every post-1938 Ryman
pedigree bears her touch.
Throughout the 1940s, Ryman
earned $150 for puppies, $1,500 for a
bitch, while paying more than $1,000
for some stud dogs. He claimed to be
spending more than he took in
through the end of World War II.
However, by 1948, Ryman, too, was
experiencing a post-war boom, selling
finished setters for $2,500 ($35,000
today). By the early 1950s, the kennel, approaching its 50th anniversary,
was growing again.
21
However, in 1953, tragedy struck,
when a stroke hospitalized Ryman.
After a two-month rehabilitation, he
returned home, never to get better. He
died in 1961, age 72, leaving Ellen to
continue his legacy. She was just 50,
and an extremely busy widow.
During the early 1960s, Carl
Calkins, a Ryman customer since
1931, returned to the kennel for a new
puppy, only to discover Ryman gone
and Ellen in charge. This Princeton
engineer was in construction, but only
so he could follow the woodcock
flights from New Brunswick to Louisiana each autumn.
Calkins had noticed pretty Ellen
before his wife’s tragic death in 1958.
Yet it was the new puppy, Ryman’s
Bold Return, which brought them together. During a 1962 dinner date,
Ellen confided how she’d been forced
to sell some of the kennel’s breeding
stock to pay medical bills, and how she
hoped to get those dogs back and revitalize the kennels.
Calkins recognized this opportunity
and cashed out his construction fortune and home, and devoted himself
to Ellen and the kennels. He spent
$30,000 in three months to buy back
40 dogs critical to the kennel’s breeding program. Without him, the line
would not have survived.
Ellen and Carl married in 1963, and
for the next 11 years — until 1975 —
they operated the kennels, perpetuating five distinct Ryman varieties.
Puppy prices began at $200, started
dogs at $750, and finished setters,
when available, at $950.
In 1967, a passionate young
Wilkes-Barre grouse and woodcock
hunter called the Ryman kennel to
schedule a visit — during his honeymoon. From the moment they pulled
into the kennel driveway, the newlyweds, Ken and Nita Alexander, were
smitten. Also, unbeknownst to them,
22
their future was being cast.
A year later, when Alexander returned
for his second Ryman, he learned about the
Calkinses’ impending retirement; how, if
they couldn’t find a buyer for the kennels,
the dogs would be destroyed. Understandably panicked, Alexander asked about buying the kennel. The Calkinses knew he
couldn’t afford it, but admired his passion.
During the next several years, they took
him under their wing. They allowed him
to acquire enough high quality Ryman
blood to perpetuate his own kennels, and
shared with him their knowledge on breeding selection, kennel operations, puppy
rearing, etc. Shortly thereafter, Alexander
began breeding dogs, Ryman-style, for the
kennel to sell, but not for the public.
In 1975, the Calkinses retired. They
sold the kennels — including 70 remaining dogs and the right to the Ryman
name — to Robert Sumner of Lewisburg,
West Virginia, and gave Alexander a final
dog, Ryman’s Grand Return, necessary to
perpetuate the Ryman breeding pattern in
his kennel. A week later, the 59-year-old
Ryman kennel in Shohola Falls was bulldozed and seeded to grass.
Between 1975 and 1977, the new
Ryman Gun Dog Kennel, under Sumner,
operated from West Virginia. Despite a real
effort to conjoin Alexander’s breeding operation with Sumner’s kennel, negotiations
failed, and in 1977, both went their separate ways. The Calkinses suggested
Alexander, now free to sell setters to the
public, open his own kennel—
“DeCoverly,” to separate it from the Ryman
name, yet maintain the bloodline link.
In 1977, Sumner’s kennel folded, taking nearly seven decades of three peoples’
lives with it. At the same time, DeCoverly
Kennels, with the largest remaining pool
of original Ryman blood, emerged; the
Calkinses remaining crucial to its operation through the mid-1980s.
The Ryman setter did not end in West
Virginia. The line was maintained through
DeCoverly Kennels, under Alexander’s
GAME NEWS
careful stewardship, but there was no gain
without a good deal of pain.
During the 1980s, the Alexanders decided to go “all in” with the setters. Ken
left his mental health career, putting the
retirement funds he and Nita had accumulated into the business George Ryman began. He also returned to Ryman’s original
breeding patterns, spending much of the
decade cleaning up issues malingering from
the Calkinses’ last years with the kennel,
when genetic isolation, line-breeding and
selecting for larger-than-Ryman-standard
dogs created health problems.
This period was a roller coaster of “magnificent highs and very deep lows,”
Alexander said. The lows included a
parvovirus outbreak, when he and Nita
maintained a continuous vigil, changing
intra-venous drip bags on 23 sick dogs every two hours; and the disintegration of his
relationship with the Calkinses, particularly after George Bird Evans declared
DeCoverly the Ryman line “heir” in 1990,
which angered the Calkinses.
Technically, no kennels publicly received the Calkinses’ blessing as the continuation of the line. Yet they “blessed”
three different operations, each in its own
time — Sumner’s in 1975; DeCoverly in
1978; and, during the 1990s, the Calkinses
mentored Lee and Sheila Stelrekcht, interested in beginning their own smallerscale Ryman-blooded breeding program,
Bold Return Kennels.
The highs were living the upland shooting life, being with the setters full-time.
Also during the 1980s, Alexander sold a
started setter named Smokey to WilkesBarre businessman Bill Sordoni. Smokey
cemented a deep friendship between
Sordoni and Alexander, and eventually led
to their partnering to take the kennel into
the 21st century.
Together, during the mid-1990s, they
built an unparalleled 20,000-square-foot
kennel, devoted to the health and happiness of the setters, with enough space for
the breeding program to perpetuate the
FEBRUARY 2010
line. By the late 1990s, the DeCoverly
setter came into its own. Alexander’s
work on canine health paid off in tight
hips, strong healthy dogs mirroring
Ryman’s original 1907 standard. Also,
Sordoni’s son, “Young” Bill, became
the kennel’s business manager, leading the kennel into the future with an
award-winning website, a custom
records database and other innovations.
Today, the Ryman-type English setter, at more than 100 years old, is the
oldest continually-bred line of gun dog
in North America, exceeding by 30
years even Bob Wehle’s famous Elhew
pointers — arguably America’s most
recognized gun dog product. Most gun
dog kennels, including the commercial variety, experience problems in
just a few years. This represents the
revolution part of this story.
Discussing the line’s 100th anniversary, Alexander and both Sordonis
pointed out how there are no shortcuts, how time improves the kennel.
Of the 20,000 English setters the
Ryman line has produced since 1907,
Alexander has been part of nearly
6,000 — a tremendous body of knowledge. DeCoverly maintains the largest pool of direct Ryman blood, and
its adherence to Ryman’s breeding
practices and standards cannot be diminished. Alexander has improved
the line, especially by returning it to
Ryman’s original breeding pattern.
Today, as in George Ryman’s time,
the Ryman setter remains the grouse
hunter’s gold standard, one of a very
few lines of English setters to retain
bloodlines that incorporate both form
and function. These dogs are exquisite examples of what an English setter
should be — beautiful, bird-savvy,
brown-eyed souls who enrich the lives
of those they touch a thousand-fold
with tears and laughter. George
Ryman would be proud.
23
Once the king of the forest, up until the early 20th
century, the American chestnut was, and still is, a
prized wood for all sorts of projects.
In Honor of the
American Chestnut
By Ron Virden
I
’M IMPRESSED by the
hundreds of American
chestnut trees I see year after
year in the eastern Pennsylvania woods that I frequent. They
continue to emerge from root
systems that refuse to die. Most
of these trees never reach a
height of ten feet or so, but
some reach well beyond that.
Wanting to confirm whether
these were really the ancient
monarch of our eastern woods,
I sent a sample from a 25-foot
tree to the American Chestnut
Foundation (www.acf.org). They
confirmed that it was, indeed, the
real thing.
One particularly nice 30-foot
tree, shown here, still had lots of
burrs in mid-January of 2002. By fall,
the tree was dead. A subsequent
24
check showed that the tree was approximately 40 years old when it died.
For many years I have gathered prize
wood from some of the chestnut trees
that have given up the fight against the
blight that swept through our eastern
forests early in the 20th century. Usable
sections of trunks were taken to my
basement workshop. After a few
passes through a radial arm saw,
the boards were stacked to dry, in
anticipation of projects worthy
of such fine material.
The first and simplest
project to come along was a
handle for a knife to carry on
the strap of my homemade
possibles bag while hunting
during the winter flintlock season.
Some whittling and sanding turned
GAME NEWS
out a knife that has served me well and
has great sentimental value, to boot.
Next came a set of walking sticks
whittled from 1- x 1-inch boards. These
provide stability to compensate for a bum
leg. A bit more challenging was a set of
custom grips for my 22-caliber Colt
revolver. The plastic originals were
used to get the general dimensions.
After shaping and sanding, the end
product was rubbed with linseed oil
to bring out the beautiful grain.
Late one evening I was reading an
article by Bob Sopchick in the February, 2002, Game News. I was intrigued by
the reference to a man who made turkey
box calls. A quick internet search
produced a link, http://
www.customcalls.com/
makeaturkeyboxcall.htm, where I
found plans for a box call.
Although already very late
in the evening, I nonetheless
went to the basement and
dusted off a piece of chestnut.
The band saw provided some
1/8-inch thick boards for the
sides and 1/4-inch thick pieces
for the bottom and top. The
project was underway —
cutting pieces to size, grooving
the bottom, shaping the
rounded top, sanding and
more sanding. By the wee
hours of the morning,
when I finally turned
in, the glues on a
brand new
box call
were drying.
What a delight
to hear the sweet sound
produced by scraping chestnut on chestnut! Many a Pennsylvania wild turkey has concurred.
The call is a pleasure to carry, partly
because of the history of this grand
species of tree.
Trapper’s Tips…
By Dan Lynch
Doubling your odds with two traps
Once you find an ideal location for your fox or coyote sets, why not increase
your odds of catching more animals by putting two trap sets at each location?
If you are confident that the set is a good one, then having two critters waiting
for you in the morning is better than just one. Many times two foxes or coyotes
are traveling together. Because of this, take the time to place two sets within 15
to 20 feet of each other. Sometimes a skunk or opossum may end up visiting
your set first and if the fox or coyote shows up later then he cannot get caught
if you don’t have a second set in place.
FEBRUARY 2010
25
The Warren
County Warden
By James H. Ferguson
Butler County Deputy, Retired
artwork by carrie andraychak
D
AVID R. TITUS was born September 30, 1910, in Barnes,
Warren County. In 1935 he applied
for and was accepted in the first class
to attend the Game Commission’s
Ross Leffler School of Conservation
at Brockway in Jefferson County. He
was one of 35 successful candidates of
the 2,235 who had applied. On February 28, 1937, after nine months of
training, Dave and his 26 remaining
classmates graduated, and he was commissioned as a district game protector.
Dave was first assigned to Huntington County, where he remained until
26
he entered the service in 1942. After his
discharge in 1946, he returned to the Game
Commission and eventually was assigned
to his home county of Warren, which seldom happened back then.
I first met Dave on December 12, 1966,
the first day of the antlerless deer season.
It was cool, in the mid-30s, and very little,
if any, snow was on the ground. I was hunting with my father and we left our camp
on Utah Road near Barnes around 5:45
a.m. I made sure I had my antlerless license
attached to the back of my coat, just below my general license, and we began our
40-minute walk up the hollow by way of a
GAME NEWS
grown-over logging road that we had used
for years. The old road still had some decaying hemlock bark left over from the
lumbering days. My dad went to his
usual spot near the head of a hollow
that we called “The Seat.” I climbed
the ridge behind him to hunt on
top for a change.
On our walk in I had
gotten the lecture
about being careful not
to shoot one of the several spike bucks that
were in the area. I was a
little upset about getting
such a lecture, because I had been
hunting for five years and, in my mind, I
was a seasoned hunter. Little did I know
that in a few short hours I would be proven
wrong.
I left Dad at 6:25 and reached my spot
just as legal hunting time arrived. I loaded
my .300 Savage Model 99 with peep sights
(a scope was a luxury that we couldn’t afford at the time) and settled in.
About 45 minutes later I heard crunching leaves, but when I looked I couldn’t
see anything. The noise stopped but then,
at 8:15, I heard it again. This time I spotted movement and the outline of a deer
appeared. The doe stopped 60 yards away
and looked right at me. I took aim at the
white spot on the neck and pulled the trigger. The deer went right down. I approached slowly, and when I got to the
downed deer, my heart sank. My “doe” was
a spike.
I thought about what I should do, and
after awhile I did the only thing I could
do — I went to get my dad. I went halfway
down the hill and whistled for him, and in
a few minutes he came up the trail. “Did
you get one?” he asked.
I told him I did and explained about my
perfect shot, but when we got to within 10
yards of the deer I stopped and told him
that it was a spike. “Well, let’s take a look
at it,” he said.
After examining the deer, Dad said he
FEBRUARY 2010
couldn’t tell if either of the spikes were
three inches. He mentioned that he
had heard that a cigarette is three
inches. I smoked at the time, so I
pulled a cigarette from my pack and
handed it to Dad. Dad didn’t know
that his 17-year-old son smoked, so at
this point I knew my day wasn’t going
to get any better.
Dad decided that I should tag the
deer, field-dress it and take it back to
camp. We would then take it to Dick
Curtin in Barnes, who was a Game
Commission deputy. Mrs. Curtin told
us that Dick was on patrol, but she
would contact him and have him come
over to our camp.
At camp I waited outside, pacing
back and forth until I noticed a green
and white International Scout coming down the lane. As the vehicle was
about to go by I noticed a green uniform and Stetson, so I waved the driver
over. Out stepped Dave Titus. Dave
was a tall, slender man, but with that
Stetson he seemed seven feet tall. I
explained my dilemma and he said,
“Well, son, let’s take a look at it.” After examining the deer he said, “I’m
sorry, son, but it’s not a legal antlerless
deer.” I remember thinking, I shot the
deer and Dave was apologizing to me.
“Let me get some paperwork and
27
we’ll go inside and finish this up,” Dave
said.
After Dave filled out an affidavit
for a mistake kill, he gave me a replacement tag. I handed him $25 of my
dad’s hard-earned money. Dave explained that I wasn’t being fined, but
rather paying a restitution fee. After
Dave loaded the deer onto his vehicle
he sat down and talked to me about
hunting and the outdoors. During one
of his busiest days of the year he talked
with me for about an hour before his
radio crackled and he had to go. Before he left, though, he said, “I’m very
proud of you for turning in the mistake kill. You could have very easily
just walked away.”
I thanked him and said, “You could
have just completed your paperwork and
left. You didn’t have to spend time talking
with me.” He just smiled and drove off.
I saw Dave a dozen or so times before
he retired in 1972. When we were at camp
and he was in the area he always stopped
in to say hello. From 1985 to 1996 I had
the privilege to wear the green uniform.
With every hunter I approached, every case
I worked, and every young hunter I came
in contact with, I hope I handled the situation as Dave would have.
David Titus passed away on May 18,
2008. Of his 36 years with the Game Commission, most of those were spent in his
beloved home county. To many of us who
live here he will always be known as the
Warren County warden.
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28
GAME NEWS
The Ledges
By Ben Moyer
artwork by doug pifer
I
F YOU SPEND much time outdoors
where I live you will, at some point, be
drawn to the ledges. Sight any straight line
across a hollow or gorge and they intercept
the eye. From a canoe on the river they
frame the horizon. On any hike across the
tops they hem you in, and being near the
ledges leaves behind all traces of an engineered environment. They are a link to a
time before the notion of time.
In geological lingo they are sedimentary
sandstone of the Pottsville Group, hard and
resistant, formed from sea bottom silt a
third of a billion years ago. Here, on the
western flank of the Alleghenies, ledges are
not the signature of radical buckling and
upward thrust as are outcrops farther east.
Their whole strata was lifted less violently,
and then tilted a little from its seabed berth,
and everything else washed away around
them. Look down the slope from their bases
and you can see the carnage — broken, litFEBRUARY 2010
tered casualties of a war with climate
and time; boulders as big as houses and
cars.
To the human eye they hold a kind
of beauty, if, that is, you like your
beauty unruly and rough. They are
rugged but modest in scale as ledges
go around the world; most are 20 to
40 feet high. But I know places where
they tempt you to guess their height
at 80 or 90 feet as you crane your neck
and hold onto a laurel snag for support. Sometimes when I have done
this I’ve seen a water drop leach out
of the overhang and plummet toward
me, a bejeweled sphere veering slightly
off plumb with the breeze. If I try long
enough I can catch one of these jewels in my mouth, and taste the chill
briny essence of ancient stone.
Their faces, mostly bare rock, are
cracked, pocked, fissured and worn.
29
Here and there, moss, rock tripe and
ferns soften the visage in patches and
streaks. Clumps of rhododendron
sprout out of voids like tenacious hair
on an elderly man’s unshaven ears.
As opportunistic shrubs suggest,
these ledges are not without life. They
draw life unto themselves. Their overhangs and caves, their talus and voids,
offer shelter and sustenance to wild
things of the woods. Once I saw a bobcat on a ledge and momentarily
pinned it against open space. I’d been
skiing through the woods along the
contour where the ledges emerge. Imprudently, I ventured out onto open
rock for the view and surprised a bobcat at the precipice. The cat had nowhere to go. It could not retreat toward the vertical drop, and I blocked
escape into the trees. Finally, it
streaked past me, parallel to the edge,
to a place where the ledge was fractured and slumped, and disappeared in
the jumbled talus below.
Years later, toward the end of deer
season, a day of cold rain followed a
span of snows. I had picked a stand on
a boulder on the slope below the
ledges. When the rain grew intense I
gathered my gear and slogged uphill
to seek shelter beneath an overhang
of rock along the ledge. As I neared
the spot I’d had in mind, a broadshouldered bear ambled across the top
of the ledge directly above my dry haven, as if it had roused uneasily from
the early throes of sleep. My mind concocting unlikely encounters, I decided
to endure the rain elsewhere.
Another day, from that same place
where a bear walked over my rain refuge, I watched a coyote beneath the
ledge. It trotted through the woods
below me, right to left from my perspective, around rocks and over logs
at a steady unwavering pace. Its eyes
assessed everything, side to side, but
its legs were intent only on travel.
30
Every spring the ledges serve as a front
row seat to the surge of warblers, vireos and
other forest songbirds that invade the
canopy during their trip north. Early in
May, about the same time that morel mushrooms appear in the mountains, I dress in
camouflage, climb the ledges with binoculars and bird guide and take a stony seat
where I can see into the treetops. This position offers an advantage when watching
these fast moving small birds. It is, of
course, possible to see these birds from the
ground, but doing so juxtaposes them
against the sky, smearing plumage of gold,
green and black into featureless silhouette.
Climbing atop the rock puts the birds at
eye level, with forest behind them and the
sky lighting up their hues. Hit the migration right and it’s a spectacle of action,
color and song.
From rock perches I’ve watched black
and white warblers scale up and down
trunks, like nuthatches, in search of food,
and I’ve seen cerulean warblers pluck
threadlike green caterpillars from clustered
oak flowers. I am most pleased, though,
when I see the black-throated green,
golden-winged, magnolia, Blackburnian or
black-throated blue warblers. All these are
birds of the mountains. They shun valleys,
farmlands and towns, and their presence
along the ledges confirms that these belts
of rock are the wildest haunts in the region. At least once each spring a male
black-throated blue will perch nearby, fling
back his head and send out his slurred buzz
of song while I watch. Normally, my ear
does not distinguish bird songs well, but
that combination of sight and sound is so
dramatic, so indelible, that I recognize
notes from a black-throated blue whenever
I am lucky enough to hear them.
Other, bigger birds live near the ledges
and not just in spring. Years ago, when the
ascent was less daunting, every autumn I
climbed straight up from the river to one
of the most hard-to-reach ledges in the
hills, shotgun in one hand while the other
clutched at saplings and roots. Along the
GAME NEWS
base of this long ledge is a level
bench, about as wide as a
church aisle, laced with wild
grape, greenbriar and mountain laurel tangles. Threading
along this bench I once flushed
a dozen ruffed grouse in the
course of a few seconds. One
of those grouse I killed and it
fluttered for a long moment
right at the brink. Had it
tipped over I would have faced
a long hard climb down and
back to continue the hunt.
Sometimes, visits to the
ledges are graced by ravens,
perched, perhaps, stately and
smug atop a snag, croaking out
an occasional note. Other
times I’ve seen them rapt in
aerial jousting, pairs of them
wrestling, it seemed, in midair,
then plummeting and tumbling toward earth. In summer, pods of
stern vultures hold out their pinions to the
sun in early morning, then soar and tilt as
the rays striking the ledges lift the air beneath their wings.
Movement, song and grace in the air
are in balance here with stillness, stealth
and silence among the rocks themselves.
Timber rattlesnakes, yellow and blackbanded coils of keel-scaled muscle, lie in
the morning sun against rocks where they
can retreat to blueberry shade in the heat
of the day. Your eye can learn to see them
after a few encounters.
In my adolescence, friends and I
climbed here looking for rattlers in what
we perceived as adventure. To our credit
we didn’t harm them even then, not to our
knowing, but we did keep them captive
long enough to impress those with a different impression of venomous reptiles, then
released them on the rocks. More scientifically motivated searchers have since
learned that catch-and-release can be a
death sentence for rattlesnakes, which can
become disoriented and fail to find the
FEBRUARY 2010
winter den, or fail to ingest enough nutrition as autumn approaches. Tragically, the ones you see, sunning on
open ledges, are the older gravid females, carrying the future within them.
They need eight summers to mature,
mate and give live birth. The sunning
time is critical. It supports the demanding metabolism to gestate and
deliver a litter. But the sun of early
summer is seasonal and fleeting. The
rattlers need it when they can get it,
and they don’t need the interference
of adventurers. I don’t bother them
anymore.
A salamander is said to live here in
these ledges, too; the only known outpost for its kind in the state. I have
never seen one, but that only adds to
the lure of coming here. Green salamanders, according to herpetologists,
make their central stronghold farther
south, in the high misty mountains of
east Tennessee and the west Carolinas. I feel a gratitude to those who
have searched hard enough to know
31
for all of us that the species ranges
north to this very latitude, and that it
does so because of moist microclimates
among these rocks. That knowledge
adds much to being here. I like to
think of these ledges as the edge of
something, the extreme, in this case
the outer limit of tolerable range of an
inconspicuous amphibian. Green salamanders help you to think of land
without seeing boundaries, they blur
the borders of states and manmade
municipalities. They enforce an awareness of natural constraints and commonality.
I saw another of the state’s rare
creatures here but once, by flashlight
beam at night, its big round eyes and
half circle ears peering out from a cleft
in the rock. But unlike the green salamander, whose range here meets a
natural end, Allegheny woodrats (no
32
relative of the feral Norway rat)
were once common across the
highlands from the Allegheny to
the Delaware rivers. They’ve been
beaten back now, biologists say, to
these last rock ledge haunts, where
they still leave the same signs of
their presence as always, proof that
they harbor no sense of their own
species’ retreat. Far back under the
rock ceilings and among the fallen
shards are the scuttled pathways in
dust and sand. Here and there are
loose mounds of acorn caps, strewn
clumps of ten thousand wild cherry
pits gnawed and halved, scraps of
“pack rat” collectibles, a cigarette
wrapper, scraps of foil, a spent shotgun shell.
Not every venture to the ledges
reveals some captivating wild
thing. Often it is just the rocks, the
quiet and the wind, which is just
as well. Visiting the ledges is a way
to substitute for travel to exotic
locations far away. This is because
they become different places themselves with the change of seasons. In summer they are mysterious hidden enclaves,
shrouded in boughs, softened upon the
land. Only suggestive glimpses of face and
crevice reveal themselves. In winter, they
could be part of a different continent, even
a different planet. Then they are stark, austere and sometimes forbidding. In winter
they stand streaked in snow and hung with
ice like a glacier’s face, exposed and vulnerable to the elements, but enduring.
They are indeed “bed rock,” standing
off eons of rain, wind, root, the squeeze of
freeze and the yawning of thaw. They bear
the scars of valor, yet extend benevolent
niches to waves of newcomer life. In winter it is most clear that these ledges are the
skeleton of the land where you live. Their
underground shoulders hold up the entire
tent of the earth. They define place with
their presence, their mute voice reveals
much beneath the sigh of the wind.
GAME NEWS
Halcyon Days for
Southeast Goose
Hunters
by Tom Tatum
W
HEN I BOUGHT my first Pennsylvania hunting license, back in
1972, abundant ring-necked pheasants
served as my primary incentive. I enjoyed
great times afield back in the day, but now,
some 37 years later, with the decline of the
wild pheasant, the disappearance of quail,
and precious little grouse habitat, upland
game hunting here in the southeast has
crashed and burned, and diehard hunters
are limited to the occasional woodcock and
stocked pheasant. While wild turkeys are
starting to get a foothold here, courtesy of
the Game Commission’s trap and transfer
efforts, they’re still far and few between.
And although cottontail rabbits remain a
viable option, as do mourning doves, many
southeastern wingshooters have recently
discovered that the hunting horn of plenty,
which overflowed with cackling cockbirds
yesterday, is being amply filled by honking
Canada geese today.
Among the many older hunters who
have made that conversion is Tim Skiles,
FEBRUARY 2010
who, upon arriving at a southeast
goose hunting hotspot one frosty winter morning, puffed out a mouthful of
air and checked the wind. His breath
formed a cloud of vapor in the predawn chill and drifted upstream. “Out
of the west/northwest,” he declared
and pointed in that direction. “That
means our decoys should be facing that
way,” he said. As daylight crept over
the eastern horizon, we got to work
arranging our decoy spread in hopes
of outwitting just a few of the Canada
geese whose huge flocks so often carpet fields, pastures and lawns of southeastern Pennsylvania.
I accompanied Skiles and his
nephew Todd on this late season goose
hunting expedition along the banks of
the West Branch of the Brandywine
Creek. Both men have connections in
Chestertown, Maryland, where they’re
privy to some of the most seasoned
goose hunting expertise anywhere.
33
After gunning for waterfowl along
Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where goose
hunting for both snow and Canada
geese is a way of life, and having spent
considerable time in the blinds with
Mason-Dixon goose hunting fanatics,
Uncle Tim has become well-schooled
in some tricks of the trade.
At Tim’s supervision, we arranged
our four and a half dozen decoys in a
horseshoe pattern with our three individual “coffin” blinds filling the crest
of the shoe and the decoys stretching
out from either side like a pair of embracing arms. Once the pattern was
set, Skiles examined it with a critical
Eastern-Shore eye.
“It needs to be wider,” he judged.
“The idea is to have the geese land
right here in front of the blinds and
we have to give them room to do that.”
We adjusted the spread but Tim wasn’t
quite satisfied. “That end is pinching
in a little too much and some of those
decoys are facing the wrong way.”
With the sounds of geese honking
in distant skies and dawn giving way
to daylight, we made a few more quick
adjustments as Tim placed one oversized magnum decoy in the center of
the shoe to give incoming geese a
“landing target.” Our blinds faced upwind and, because geese prefer to land
into the wind, any Canadas we managed to lure into our decoys would find
themselves squarely in our shotgun
sights.
Tim had one more trick up his
goose-hunting sleeve — Mr. Flap — a
silhouette decoy (aka Wing Waver)
fitted with a pair of arching plastic
wings that are connected to a string
of line that, when tugged, imparts a
frantic flapping motion to the decoy
wings. Tim ran the other end of the
line into his blind where he would
serve as the designated flapper.
Dedicated goose hunters understand that such motion helps to get
34
the flock’s attention and provides a measure of confidence as the geese approach,
encouraging them to set their wings and
toll out of the sky. The most common application of this technique is flagging,
where a hunter, hidden in his blind, merely
waves a black flag back and forth.
One strong advocate of flagging is professional goose hunter Sean Mann of
Easton, Maryland, a world champion caller
who manufactures his own line of goose
calls.
I attended a goose hunting seminar
hosted by Mann where he preached the
virtues of flagging and the advantages of
silhouette decoys. While every goose
hunter has his favorite methods, Mann
advises setting up decoys in the shape of a
large X with the hunters’ blinds placed facing into the wind at the intersection. Mann
adds that it doesn’t matter which way the
decoys are facing and often places them
pointing in all different directions.
Of course the primary tried and true
technique for tricking geese is the old reliable goose call. Calling was my responsibility on this hunt and I could only hope
my trusty Glynn Scobey call would hit all
the right notes. We all hunkered down in
our individual blinds and awaited the first
action of the morning. And, depending on
how you define the word “action,” it didn’t
take long. The skies overhead were filled
with flocks of geese winging their way all
over the Brandywine Valley and in every
direction. Some were small flocks headed
to local feeding grounds. Others were high
flyers assembled in classic V formations as
they sailed on to more distant destinations.
We had set up in a stretch of grassy
floodplain that served as a popular feeding
and staging area for both local and migrating flocks, as evidenced by the plentiful
tracks and ubiquitous goose droppings
blighting the area at nearly toxic levels. Yet,
despite Tim’s flapping and my calling, the
flocks, for the most part, completely ignored us. Every now and again a group
would come in low, circle once or twice,
GAME NEWS
set their wings, change their minds, and
take off in the other direction as if they
had just seen a goose ghost.
After a half-dozen times being slighted,
we became less goose hunters and more
goose psychologists, wildly speculating
what the problem might be. What were the
geese thinking? What was wrong with our
decoy spread? Our flapping? Our calling?
What was going on in those goosey little
brains? From somewhere downstream we
heard a barrage of shots. Apparently other
goose hunters were doing something right,
something we clearly were not doing. What
could it be?
A few more flocks flew over, circled low,
checked us out, then suddenly flared off to
parts unknown. What could be spooking
them? Without a goose whisperer among
us, we could only guess. “They’re seeing
something down here they don’t like,” said
nephew Todd, a master of the obvious. A
lengthy debate ensued. Maybe we needed
more decoys. Maybe the wind had changed.
Maybe I had hit a few sour notes on my
Glynn Scobey.
Uncle Tim got up and checked the wind
again and tinkered with the spread,
moving a decoy here a few inches to
the left, another there a few inches to
the right like a fussy cosmetologist. “I
think it could be because these decoys
don’t have any feet,” he mulled.
“They’re all just lying flat against the
ground. The spreads we have down
around Chestertown all have feet.”
“Maybe they’re seeing the shine
from your shotgun barrel sticking out
of your blind,” I offered.
“Maybe you’re flapping too much,”
added Todd.
“Maybe Todd’s blind is too shiny,”
I said. “Maybe he should slather it with
mud and lace it with dead weeds to
dull it like ours.”
“Maybe we’re talking too much,”
mumbled Tim. “If those geese can hear
us calling they can probably hear us
talking.”
Whatever the reason for our lack
of success, these geese had been well
educated to the ways of hunters and
blinds over months of being decoyed,
called to, and shot at. The ones who
BLINDS face into the wind as hunters await the flock’s approach.
FEBRUARY 2010
35
hadn’t wised up quick enough had already been culled from the flock with
a load of steel shot. By now their wariness levels were at all-time highs, and
it would take a flawless decoy/calling
effort, or some still-clueless geese to
bring them within shotgun range.
In our case, I suspect it was a few
clueless geese. One passing flock
circled low and set their wings, then
changed their minds and flapped away.
But two of their party missed the
memo and, to our astonishment,
peeled off from the others and pitched
toward us, settling on the ground just
beyond our decoys. Tim, charged with
the responsibility of giving the signal
to shoot, hesitated in hopes that the
other geese would follow their clueless
cousins into range, but it soon became
clear that wasn’t going to happen.
Since I had my smallish 20-gauge,
I let Tim and Todd’s 12-gauges do the
talking. The uncle/nephew team
popped out of their blinds just as the
two startled geese lifted off. Both fired
a volley of shots but failed to raise so
much as a feather, and the two lucky
honkers’ frantically churning wings
returned them to the azure sky well
beyond shotgun range.
“My gun jammed!” groaned Todd.
“That’s the problem with these
geese,” noted Tim. “They’re so darn big
you think they’re closer than they really are.”
In fairness to Todd and Tim, I shall
confess to my share of misses that day
as well. But I would have plenty more
chances to match wits with the wily
Branta canadensis.
That’s because while most of our
hunting seasons are winding down,
southeastern goose hunters are still
going strong. The extended season is
a time when flocks of resident Canada
geese (joined by a few migrants) still
blanket lawns, fields and golf courses.
The nuisance factor of legions of geese
36
fouling local lakes, ponds and lawns has
prompted many goose-weary owners of traditionally posted property to open their
doors to waterfowl hunters.
Like Tim Skiles and his nephew, local
waterfowlers Tony Congialdi and Bob
Truskey are more than happy to help with
this downy dilemma. They joined me on
the final day of the season on another quest
for the not-so-elusive Canada goose. We
set up our portable blinds and decoys in a
likely location bordering the Brandywine,
our dozens of decoys facing into the wind
in a fishhook pattern, in hopes of luring
geese to land in the loop of the hook, just
a few yards in front of our blinds.
But, as Robert Burns once pointed out,
the best laid plans often go awry. We settled
into our blinds just after sunup as flocks of
honking geese almost immediately began
to crisscross the skies. The key to successful goose hunting, of course, is in luring
flights of birds to within effective shotgun
range — around 40 yards or less. So, in
order to lure the flocks into reasonable
range, goose hunters rely on the basic tools
of their trade. The first of these, quite logically, is the goose blind for concealment.
The second is a spread of decoys strategically placed around the blind. Third is an
effective goose call or two.
Early season geese, especially birds of the
year, can be duped by the most basic setup, just a few decoys, casual concealment
behind a fencerow, and off-key calling. As
the season wears on and the remaining
geese wise up, goose hunting becomes more
difficult.
To be successful in the late season, savvy
hunters raise their game by using blinds
that provide total concealment, investing
in more realistic decoys, setting out greater
numbers of decoys, and polishing their calling techniques and, as noted earlier, including motion. Although neither Skiles nor
Mr. Flap was on hand this day, we did have
another secret weapon — Robo-Goose, an
invention by Truskey that takes this notion of motion to another level.
GAME NEWS
In fashioning his creation, Truskey wedded a light-weight, full-bodied decoy to a
toy Tonka Truck chassis with large plastic
wheels. The result was a goose decoy able
to “waddle” among the stationary decoys.
In order to provide a power source for
Robo-Goose, Truskey attached a length of
elastic cord to the front end and a length
of clothesline to the back. He anchored the
far end of the elastic cord to a metal stake
set out among the decoy spread. He then
ran the length of clothesline back to his
goose blind and reeled it in until the elastic cord went taut. This action pulled
Robo-Goose backwards about 20 feet to his
“set” position.
When a flock of geese passed overhead,
Truskey simply relaxed his grip on the
clothesline. Powered by the contracting
elastic cord, Robo-Goose waddled unsteadily among the decoys. The set-up allowed the device to cover a distance of
about 20 feet before the elastic cord went
slack. Once the flock of geese had passed,
Truskey reeled the wheeled wonder back
to its original position, stretching the elastic cord taut again. The sheer genius of this
push/pull design permitted Truskey to reset Robo-Goose and repeat the process
over and over without ever leaving the
concealment of his blind.
Of course, like any new invention,
Truskey’s Robo-Goose still has a few
glitches, including an occasional tendency
to keel over onto its side on uneven ground.
Despite those problems a limit of fat geese
eventually would fall victim to RoboGoose’s charms that day.
The first few flocks drifted in from due
east, but the glare of the bright morning
sun made it tough to get an accurate bead
on the birds. The flocks also insisted on
landing behind us, so we had to twist
around in a contorted shooting position
that did not bode well for our accuracy.
We wasted a lot of shells with errant
shots, but the honking Canadas finally began to follow our script and land in the
designated area. By 10 o’clock, Truskey and
FEBRUARY 2010
I had both filled our daily limit and
Congialdi was one bird short. Around
10:15 we lured a flock of four into the
heart of our decoy spread. They locked
their wings and were about to touch
down when Congialdi popped up and
deftly dusted the closest one, a feat of
marksmanship that completed our
limit. We celebrated our success with
high fives all around — a suiting finish to the day and the season as well.
Unlike Tim Skiles and me,
Congialdi and Truskey are young men
in their 20s who never lived through
Pennsylvania’s pheasant heyday. They
can’t miss something they never knew,
but I’ll always look back nostalgically
on a past that was thick with pheasants in hopes that someday the longtailed bird can stage a comeback. But
in the meantime, whenever I’m in the
mood to burn some shotgun powder,
I’ll have plenty of tolling Canada geese
to keep me occupied.
BOB TRUSKEY displays his Robo-Goose.
37
It was the Thought that Counted
Can’t be Good at Everything
CHESTER — On the first Saturday of the
Junior Pheasant Hunt, Deputy Tom
Clifford came across a gentleman at a game
lands parking lot with a pointer, but no
young boy or girl in sight. The man explained that he came out just to see if any
youngster showed up who might want to
experience hunting over a dog and have a
better chance at a pheasant. Tom didn’t
get the man’s name, but whoever you are,
thank you for your efforts in providing a
positive image of our hunting tradition.
— WCO SCOTT FREDERICK, SADSBURYVILLE
YORK — I was at the Hopewell Fish and
Game monthly meeting when the club
president congratulated me on my shooting abilities. I asked what he was talking
about and Charlie Reid referred to the
November Game News and the article by
my teammate LMO Steve Bernardi. I confessed that we were a little slow in getting
that article to Game News, as it was about
the 2008 National Police Shooting Championship, and we had just returned from
the 2009 championship shoot. Charlie
mentioned something about us being fast
shooters but slow writers.
— WCO GUY HANSEN, RED LION
Good Sign
The program to introduce wild pheasants captured in Montana and released in
Somerset County is still in the early stages.
Early results, however, are promising, as numerous broods of chicks were sighted last
summer.
— LMO DAN YAHNER, EVERETT
Fresh As Can Be
Would Make a Good One
ELK — Last fall, Deputy Beeler and I
were parked in a remote area where we
could watch a field that frequently attracted both spotlighters and poachers.
About one o’clock in the morning we heard
an engine running and wondered what it
could be. We tracked it down to a guy wearing a headlamp who was just finishing
mowing his lawn. What was even more
surprising was when he began trimming
with a weed whacker. I guess he just
couldn’t sleep and was making good use of
his time. I should try to recruit the guy as a
deputy.
— WCO DICK BODENHORN, RIDGWAY
38
LANCASTER — A person who hit a deer
placed it in the back of his van to get it
home, before calling in to get his permit
number. The deer wasn’t dead, however,
and began thrashing around. The man
pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store
and called for help. As Deputy Haines
Henry was assessing the situation, a woman
came out of the store and asked if anyone
was going to take the deer, because if not,
she would like to put in an order to receive
it. The deer was humanely dispatched at a
safe location, and a permit number was issued to the shopper. We are always pleased
when we can get the edible meat to someone, but in this case, it really was “fresh
meat” for the grocery store shopper.
— WCO DENNIS R. WARFEL, HOLTWOOD
GAME NEWS
Started Something
No Texting While . . .
GREENE — It’s common to have eager
grade school students tell their parents after a WCO has visited their school that
the animal teacher, or some other innovative name, was there. This happened to me
recently, and I was all smiles when a young
girl told her mother I was the “animal guy.”
Mom shook her head and said, “So you’re
the reason we have to watch Animal Planet
every night now?”
— WCO ROD BURNS, ROGERSVILLE
SCHUYLKILL — Ture Harvey told me that
during bear season he had just climbed
down from his treestand and was walking
back to his vehicle when he received a text
message from his wife. While texting back,
he looked up and spotted a bear about 60
yards away. Needless to say, the bear did
not stick around.
— DEPUTY WILLIAM SINGLEY, NUREMBURG
Couldn’t Resist
During the summer, my Food and Cover
crew was showing me a spot on our State
Game Lands where they frequently observe
rattlesnakes. As we approached a rock pile,
the lead guy said he could see one underneath a rock. We all quietly walked around
and observed a yellow phase rattler curled
underneath a rock ledge. Walking back to
the trucks, I noticed that we were all walking a little more cautiously through the
high grass. I couldn’t help myself and made
a hissing sound, and the guy in front of me
did a vertical 4-inch leap. He was a good
sport, but I know payback is in my future,
especially because I shared his reaction
with the other two guys, and now, to the
world in Game News. It was worth it.
— LMO DENISE H. MITCHELTREE, RENOVO
What Are the Odds?
MIFFLIN — WCOs assist other agencies
with search warrants all the time, and in
September I assisted the Mifflin County
Regional Police with a search warrant that
I’ll never forget. The police, serving a
search warrant as part of a burglary investigation, discovered that a deer had been
butchered in the basement of the house.
They contacted me and while looking at
the evidence in the basement I noticed a
pile of traps. The welding on the trap jaws
looked familiar, and a closer inspection
showed that all 57 traps were mine. Two
individuals were charged with burglary, and
the deer poaching investigation continues.
— WCO JEFFREY G. MOCK, LEWISTOWN
FEBRUARY 2010
Moving South
When I started with the Game Commission 30 years ago you almost never saw
porcupines in Butler County. Last winter I
saw one tree on SGL 304 with four porcupines in it. I also see porcupines hit on the
road almost every week. Hopefully, we’ll
get some fishers in this area to prey on
them.
— LMO DALE E. HOCKENBERRY,
EAST BUTLER
Welcome Back
After Game News was recently put back
into public and school libraries I attended
the Tri-Valley School District’s
Mahantango Elementary School 50th year
anniversary, and there Mrs. Umholtz, the
librarian, said how much the kids enjoyed
reading Game News. As with most readers, she mentioned that the students turn
to the Field Note section first. So this Field
Note is dedicated to all the kids at the
Mahantango Elementary School who love
the great outdoors.
— LMO MATTHEW D. BELDING, PITMAN
39
Will Be Missed
CLARION — Sportsmen recently lost a
good friend when former Commissioner
Bob Gilford passed away. His vast experience in hunting, trapping and conservation in Penn’s Woods will be gravely
missed.
— WCO RODNEY E. BIMBER, LUCINDA
No Pain, No Gain
CUMBERLAND — The weather was pretty
warm most of small game season, and I
checked a lot of hunters who had shed most
of their heavier clothes by afternoon. One
hunter, though, went a step further by wearing just a T-shirt and shorts, and I saw him
fighting his way through briars that would
rip up an average pair of brush pants.
— WCO JOHN FETCHKAN, NEWVILLE
Cheap Shot
N ORTHAMPTON — At an HTE class,
deputies Tom Harrington and Kevin
Halbfoerster were demonstrating the effectiveness of fluorescent orange by holding a
branch with leaves behind Kevin’s head
while he was wearing a solid orange hat
and stating, “This is what you might see
looking through a scope at a hundred
yards.” They then removed both the
branch and orange hat and asked the class
what it looked like. One of the students
said it sort of resembled a groundhog, and
Tom was quick to say, “Yep, a groundhog
with mange.” Some of us are a little thinner on top than others.
— WCO BRADLEY D. KREIDER, CHERRYVILLE
40
Keeping Under Control
With help from the Susquehanna River
Waterfowlers and the Shade Mountain
Chapter of the NWTF, we have been actively attacking certain noxious weeds on
State Game Lands here. That pretty purple
flowering plant you see in the Susquehanna
River is purple loosestrife, an exotic, noxious weed that has displaced valuable native plants used by wildlife. The crew that
maintains the Game Commission islands
from Harrisburg to Sunbury, annually uses
herbicides to control this weed. On SGL
107 in Mifflin and Juniata counties, another crew is attacking hay-scented ferns
and Japanese stiltgrass. Hay-scented fern
is a native plant that has become aggressive due to the lack of competing vegetation removed mostly by deer. This fern carpets vast acreages of woodlands, competing for space and prohibiting regeneration
of other plants. Japanese stiltgrass is an invasive grass that covers large areas of disturbed woodland and access roads. We are
having some success in controlling these
plants, but it requires constant vigilance
and expensive herbicides.
— LMO STEVEN BERNARDI, PENNS CREEK
More History
PERRY — A recent article in Game News
by Wes Bower highlighted some of the historical sites located on various State Game
Lands. Due to the efforts of the Food and
Cover crews in Juniata County, a cemetery
dating back to 1792 has been found. According to information provided by the
Juniata Historical Society, Andrew Ferrier,
who operated a small grist mill on the property, contracted yellow fever while attending court in Lewistown, when he slept in a
bed, the clothing of which the tavern
keeper had purchased at auction in Philadelphia. Ferrier and several others in the
vicinity took the fever and died. The cemetery contains graves of at least five adults
and two children. The cemetery can be
reached by taking a 1-mile hike from the
parking area at SGL 215.
— WCO JIM BROWN, LOYSVILLE
GAME NEWS
Dated or Outdated?
BERKS — I was discussing a law enforcement case with a fellow officer when I mentioned how nice it was to have a cell phone
instead of the old days when we had to find
a pay phone. WCO Ray Madden, one of
our younger officers, was among the group
and looked at me puzzled and then asked,
“What do you mean before cell phones?”
Thanks, Ray, I wasn’t feeling that old, until then.
— WCO DAVE BROCKMEIER, MOHNTON
Oops!
LANCASTER — I was recently corrected
by a young couple I stopped for late spotlighting when they informed me they still
had half an hour left. I was a little confused, until I realized I had forgotten to turn
the clock back in my vehicle. I apologized
and told them to continue. I’m sure they
laughed about that one the whole way
home.
— WCO DEREK A. DALY, NEWMANSTOWN
Fish Out of Water
SNYDER — Juniata County resident Curt
Gutshall, after walking up through his yard
and into his house, was greeted by his wife
who told him there was a fish in the yard.
He assured her it wasn’t a fish but, rather,
a leaf. After she said leaves don’t flop
around, Curt went outside to check and,
sure enough, he found a 10-inch bass. An
eagle or osprey must have grabbed it from
the river and then dropped it.
— WCO HAROLD J. MALEHORN,
SELINGSGROVE
Way to Go
HUNTINGDON — On the opening day of
the youth squirrel and pheasant season I
checked a group of six youngsters who had
harvested their limit of pheasants in the
Raystown Lake mitigation area.
— WCO RICHARD O. DANLEY, JR.,
SHIRLEYSBURG
Moved Pretty Well
Surprise
SCHUYLKILL — Deputy Woodward was
watching a deer decoy that we had operating where some roadhunting had been going on. It was a dark night and at one point
he heard an intruder approaching. He
turned on his light to see the visitor only
to be face to face with a bear. Later, when
asked about the size of the bear, Woodward
said, “I don’t know; all I saw was black fur
with teeth.
— WCO KEVIN CLOUSER, ASHLAND
FEBRUARY 2010
While I was searching for a radio collar
that had fallen off one of our research deer,
four deer crested a hill about 40 yards away
and stopped. I remained motionless to observe their behavior. After a few minutes
they all ran right at me, one doe passing by
me at six feet. Behind her was a 5-point
buck with only three legs. He was coming
straight at me, and when he was 10 feet
away I waved my arms at him. For a 3legged buck he sure stopped fast. He darted
around me and ran down the hill.
— PGC WILDLIFE BIOLOGIST AIDE JIM
STICKLES, MONTROSE
41
Of Course
ERIE — A hunter told me that the day
before the firearms deer season he climbed
into his treestand to measure distances with
a rangefinder. Much to his surprise, in the
field in front he spotted an 8-point buck.
He was able to harvest a doe on the following day, but saw no sign of the buck.
— PGC WILDLIFE BIOLOGIST TIMOTHY T.
HOPPE, ERIE
Tedious Task
Smarter Than the Average Bear
CRAWFORD — A beekeeper showed me
a photo of some bear damage to his hives
and I remarked about his unique bear deterrent electric fence. It was made from dog
kennel chain link sections coupled together, and the whole thing was hooked
up to an electric charger. For ground insulation he had it sitting on plastic milk
crates. A bear definitely wouldn’t climb it,
but, unfortunately, a bear was able to reach
under the fence, hook the edge of a close
beehive and pull it over. The bear then
pulled out some frames with the bee brood
and honey. It did all of this without touching the electric fence. Not to be outdone
by this persistent bruin, the beekeeper then
cut the plastic crates so that the whole
fence was close to the ground. All was fine
until the electric went off one night, and
the bear, apparently able to sense when the
electric was on or off, lifted the fence and
crawled under. You can guess the damage
done to the hives. Surprisingly, the beekeeper wasn’t too angry about all of this.
He was just disappointed that he never saw
the bear’s antics. I hope the bear doesn’t
figure out the location of the electric
breaker box.
— WCO JOHN A. MCKELLOP, GUYS MILLS
Future Hotspots
SUSQUEHANNA — During bear season
SGLs 35 and 70 received a lot of hunting
pressure, and quite a few bears were taken.
— WCO MICHAEL WEBB, NEW MILFORD
42
We grow a lot of native tree seedlings
for use on game lands, cooperator properties, and for sale to the public. Gathering
the seed by hand is a monumental task. A
big thank you goes to Mike Heckathorn
from Mercer County. He gathered five
5-gallon pails of white oak acorns and donated them to the Game Commission.
— LMO JAMES J. DONATELLI, MERCER
Bump & Run
W ESTMO RELAND — As a hunter was
leaving a Sheetz gas station on Route 8 in
Butler County, a deer with a big rack ran
from between the gas pumps and into the
side of his truck, then ran away. The deer
probably stopped off for a Sheetz’s sandwich and was just leaving in a hurry.
— WCO RODNEY ANSELL, MT. PLEASANT
One Good Deed Deserves . . .
PERRY — Neighboring officer Jim Brown
called one morning to say that his truck
was in the garage and that he had received
a call about a dead deer being found on a
property at the western end of the county.
After agreeing to help, I located the deer
about 150 yards behind a home, and after
gaining permission to drive closer to
shorten the drag, I left the driveway and
started down a field. Two hours later, my
4-wheel-drive vehicle, with the deer, was
being pulled out of the field by a friendly
neighbor with a large tractor. Thanks to
homeowners Jeff and Cindy for being so
understanding, and to their neighbor for
the extraction. Oh, yeah, Jim can get his
own deer from now on.
— WCO STEVE HOWER, ICKESBURG
GAME NEWS
Conservation News
www.pgc.state.pa.us
Preliminary bear harvest ranks
second
P
RELIMINARY harvest reports indicate hunters took 3,499 bears in
2009, making it the second highest
harvest ever. These results show that
114 were taken during the 2-day archery season; 3,043 during the 3-day
statewide season; and 342 during the
season held concurrent with the regular firearms deer season.
Official harvest figures will be available after a detailed review of all harvest reports is completed.
In the 2005 season, hunters harvested a record 4,164 bears. Other recent bear harvests include: 2,598 in
1998; 1,740 in 1999; 3,075 in 2000;
3,063 in 2001; 2,686 in 2002; 3,000
in 2003; 2,977 in 2004; 3,124 in 2006;
2,362 in 2007; and 3,460 in 2008.
According to preliminary reports,
the top 10 legal bears weighed more
than 610 pounds, and 38 exceeded
500. Edward L. Bechtel of Lykens,
Dauphin County, harvested the largest bear, a male with an estimated live
weight of 668 pounds. The bear was
taken in Dauphin County, at 3:50 p.m.
on Dec. 3.
Other large bears included: a 655pound male (estimated live weight)
taken in Jim Thorpe, Carbon County,
by David S. Kohnow of Morrisville, at
4:15 p.m. on Nov. 24; a 654-pound
male (actual live weight) taken in
Penn Forest Township, Carbon
DENNIS SHOMPER of Tower City found
this 559-pound trophy in Clark’s Valley
on the second day of the regular
season. The bear had been captured
and tagged in 2002, and was almost
10 years old when taken.
County, by Terence J. Burkhardt of Jim
Thorpe, at 4:35 p.m., on Nov. 23; a
654-pound male (estimated live
weight) also taken in Penn Forest
Township, Carbon County, by
Michael J. Wimmer Jr. of Jim Thorpe,
at 3:30 p.m. on Nov. 23; a 644-pound
male (actual live weight) taken in
Todd Township, Fulton County, by
Travis L. Crouse of Chambersburg, at
9:06 a.m. on Nov. 23; a 644-pound
male (estimated live weight) taken in
Todd Township, Huntingdon County,
Pennsylvania Game Commission: Managing wild birds, wild
mammals and their habitats for current and future generations.
FEBRUARY 2010
43
With monies from a grant
received from the PA Dept of
Community and Economic
Development, the Honey Hole
Longbeard Chapter of the NWTF
was able to obtain for the Game
Commission two turkey decoys
for use to combat roadhunting.
Pictured here are Northeast
Region Law Enforcement
Supervisor Dan Figured and
Mark Ferdinand, President of the
Honey Hole Longbeard Chapter,
Luzerne County.
by Max L. Hess of Huntingdon, at 1
p.m. on Nov. 23; a 640-pound male
(estimated live weight) taken in
Barrett Township, Monroe County, by
Howard G. Dietsch III of Greentown,
at 2 p.m. on Nov. 25; a 621-pound
male (estimated live weight) taken in
Lackawaxen Township, Pike County,
by Albert G. Beisel, of Lackawaxen,
at 11:25 a.m. on Nov. 25; a 612-pound
male (estimated live weight) taken in
Brown Township, Lycoming County,
by Lawrence T. Jagielski, of Reading,
at 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 24; and a 610pound male (actual live weight) taken
in Middle Paxton Township, Dauphin
County, by David T. Frey, of Harrisburg, at 8:30 a.m. on Nov. 23.
Wilkes-Barre man charged with
killing large bear over bait
Charles W. Olsen Jr. of Wilkes-Barre
has been charged with killing a bear
with an estimated live weight of 707
pounds over bait. A week before the
statewide bear season, Luzerne County
WCO Cory Bentzoni happened to see
a truck loaded with pastries along
Route 309 in Dallas.
“As we were about one week away
from the opening of bear season, I
thought something illegal might be
underway,” Bentzoni said. “Seeing
someone drive by with such an unusual
amount of pastries, so close to bear
season, was like watching an individual go down a row of parked vehicles testing each handle to see if any
were open. Something just didn’t seem
right.”
Bentzoni wrote down the license
plate number of the truck and found
that it was registered to Olsen. He
then instructed PGC personnel operating bear check stations to notify him
if Olsen brought a bear into any one
of the check stations.
Sure enough, on Nov. 25, Olsen
brought a bear with an estimated live
weight of 707 pounds into the Northeast Region Office check station.
Wyoming County WCO Vic Rosa was
immediately contacted, because Olsen
reported harvesting the bear in Rosa’s
district.
Northeast Region Land Management Supervisor Peter Sussenbach,
who knew of WCO Bentzoni’s suspicions, approached Olsen and said
PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES who require special assistance at Game Commission
public functions should contact the telephone number listed with the announcement, the appropriate region office or the Harrisburg headquarters. Phone numbers
for each region are listed in Game News; the Harrisburg number is 717-787-4250.
44
GAME NEWS
“There might be a problem with this
bear.” At that point, Olsen confessed
to killing the bear over a bait pile.
“What is most unfortunate is that
law-abiding hunters in the area were
robbed of the opportunity to harvest
such a truly trophy bear,” said Northeast Region Law Enforcement Supervisor Dan Figured. “It was the quick
thinking of an observant WCO, and
some basic investigative work, that
helped resolve this case.”
Olsen faces fines and penalties of
between $500 and $1,500, as well as
the loss of hunting/trapping privileges
for at least three years. In addition to
criminal fines, the Game Commission
intends to ask the judge for restitution
for this trophy-class bear, which could
amount to $5,000. The enhanced restitution was adopted into regulations
by the Board of Game Commissioners in 2008, as another tool to further
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enter your 12-digit subscriber
number (the number above your
name on the address label) and
then the password, which can be
found on the login page.
deter those who would steal
Pennsylvania’s wildlife.
Seedlings for Schools
THROUGH the Game Commission’s
Seedlings for Schools program, tree seedlings from the agency’s Howard Nursery are again being made available to
Pennsylvania schools for students to
use for planting at their homes, school
grounds or in their communities, all
while learning about the vital role of
trees in our environment.
There is no charge to participate.
Teacher guides with background information and activities, along with in-
CONTACTING
Northwest — 814-432-3187
Southwest — 724-238-9523
Northcentral — 570-398-4744
THE
formation on how to plant the seedlings, will be shipped with the seedlings — enough for each student to get
one — from Howard Nursery.
Elementary schools may receive
seedlings for a classroom or one grade
level, although the program is designed primarily for third grade students. Seedling choices this year are
silky dogwood and white pine. Orders
will be taken through April 1.
Middle schools and high schools
REGION OFFICES
Southcentral — 814-643-1831
Northeast — 570-675-1143
Southeast — 610-926-3136
TIP Hotline: 1-888-PGC-8001. This number is ONLY for calls concerning
illegal killing of endangered species or multiple big game animals. All
other calls should be made to the appropriate region number above.
FEBRUARY 2010
45
may receive seedlings to develop habitat. A variety of seedlings is available
to students interested in planting seedlings on school or community grounds
to improve habitat, plant along a
stream, develop a tree nursery, or create an environmental area. Orders for
seedlings to be planted for habitat will
be taken between February 26 and
April 1, 2010.
Visit www.pgc.state.pa.us and click
on the Seedlings for Schools icon to obtain order forms. To preview the
teacher guide, contact Theresa
Alberici at [email protected] or
717-787-4250.
Wounded Warrior connects at
Medical Center for a day out of their
Letterkenny
ON MAY 22, 2008, SSG Jason
Letterman, a 16-year Army infantryman on his third tour in Iraq, was on
patrol when an IED (improvised explosive device) exploded. One soldier
was killed while Letterman and two
others were severely wounded. He
later woke to find both of his legs gone.
One year and 7 months later, it’s a cold
December 12, 2009, and Jason is arranging with a taxidermist to have a
trophy 8-point deer mounted.
Letterman of Marshfield, Missouri, was
one of seven soldiers who hunted deer
at Letterkenny Army Depot in
Franklin County, thanks to the
Wounded Warriors program.
The Wounded Warriors program,
in this case, allowed Letterman and his
comrades to be brought to
Letterkenny from Walter Reed Army
hospital environment into the fields
of Pennsylvania.
According to Letterkenny’s Natural Resources Manager Craig Kindlin,
this was the depot’s fourth year in the
Wounded Warrior program. Special
blinds and assistant guides are provided for physically-challenged hunters. Assisting Letterman was Bill
Kline, a retired soldier employed at the
Cumberland County Sheriff Dept.
To control the deer population on
the military installation, Letterkenny
conducts annual hunts for the general
public through a lottery system.
Kindlin said they hope future hunts
will be expanded to accommodate
additional Wounded Warriors. The
hunts are quite therapeutic for both
the young soldiers and guides as they
share huge smiles and tell the stories
of their hunts.
Letterman began hunting
at age 8 and went on his first
deer hunt at 13. He said, “I’d
like to come back next year
and bring my son. He’s mad
because he didn’t get to go this
time around.” — WCO Barry
Leonard, Franklin County
Bill Kline, left, and Scott
Yeager, right, flank SSG JASON
LETTERMAN and the trophy 8point he got thanks to the
Wounded Warriors program.
(The deer, of course, should
have been tagged in the ear.)
46
GAME NEWS
Hunters reminded to submit report
cards
WITH THE 2009-10 deer seasons
closing in January, all hunters who
harvested a deer (or turkey) should, if
they have not already done so, report
their harvests. Those who obtained
Deer Management Assistance
Program (DMAP) licenses are
reminded that they must complete
and submit their DMAP report cards
whether or not they took a deer. This
is so the Game Commission can
measure the effectiveness of the
program.
Hunters may still mail in a harvest
report card, found in the center of the
current digest, but are encouraged to
file their reports online, through the
Game Commission website. To report
a harvest online, go to the Game
Commission’s website, click on
“Report Your Harvest” in the “Quick
Clicks” box in the right-hand column,
then select “Harvest Reporting,” then
click on the “Start Here” button at
the bottom of the page, choose the
method of validating license
information, and click on the
checkbox for the harvest tag being
reported. A series of options will appear
for a hunter to report a harvest. After
filling in the harvest information, click
on the “Continue” button to review
the report and then hit the “Submit”
button to complete the report. Failing
to hit the “Submit” button will result
in a harvest report not being
completed. Responses to all harvest
questions are required.
AT THE Somerset County
Sportsmen’s League
banquet in October, the
Game
Commission
presented the league
with two certificates of
appreciation. One was
for the league’s donation
of several decoys and a
video
surveillance
camera system for law
enforcement use. The
other was for the
league’s donations of
lime, seed and fertilizer
over the years for use on
SGLs and other areas of
the county, and for apple
trees used for a memorial orchard on SGL 82 in southern Somerset County in
honor of deceased WCO Stanley Norris. Pictured, l to r, are: Travis Anderson,
Somerset County WCO; Scott Tomlinson, Southwest Region Law Enforcement
Supervisor (and former Somerset County land manager and WCO); Walt Smith,
league secretary; Rich Berkley, league president; Wayne Miller, league vice
president; Bob Shuck, league treasurer; and Brian Witherite, Somerset County
WCO.
FEBRUARY 2010
47
Maryland
Hunters harvested a record 100,437
deer in 2008-09, a nine percent
increase over the 92,208 taken in
2007-08. The harvest was comprised
of 34,725 antlered deer and 65,712
antlerless deer. The antlerless harvest
included 55,019 does and 10,693
button bucks.
Antler Restrictions
In 2008, 22 states had some sort of antler
restrictions for whitetail bucks. Six states
have statewide restrictions for at least one
buck and include: Alabama, Delaware,
Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and
Vermont.
India
A rehabilitation center was established to cope with thousands of rogue macaque
monkeys that have moved into urban areas of Punjab state in the northern part of the
country because their traditional wild habitat is being developed and colonized by
humans. As the monkeys move into population centers in search of food, they often
create havoc by chasing and attacking humans while attempting to snatch their
belongings. Once the center is fully functional in the city of Patiala, forest officials in
Punjab will be able to catch monkeys from residential areas and, it’s hoped, teach them
to live socially with humans.
African Elephant Ivory Smuggling
Six defendants were arrested in 2008 for conspiring to smuggle African
elephant ivory from Cameroon, the Ivory Coast and Uganda into the United
States. The arrests took place in New York, New Jersey, Virginia and Texas.
To avoid detection, the ivory was shipped in parcels labeled as containing
wooden snakes, guitars and statues. The complaint alleges that the
defendants paid one trafficker $15,000 to courier a shipment of ivory from
Cameroon into the U.S. However, most of the ivory was sent via parcel
through JFK International Airport, accompanied by fraudulent shipping and
customs documents. The maximum term of imprisonment for any defendant
convicted of smuggling is 20 years.
British Columbia, Canada
In Princeton, in the southcentral part of the province, three cougars that were stalking
people were shot. The first cat was prowling around a campsite in June. A little later, a
16-month-old cougar was shot as it was stalking two children swimming in a river. The
following day, a cougar was shot as it skulked around Princeton Memorial Park, where
hundreds of people were gathered. On the evening of June 16, in Squamish, on the
B.C. south coast, a cougar attacked a 3-year-old girl who was with her mother in a local
park. The cat was driven off and the girl was hospitalized with non-life threatening
injuries. In the town of Quesnel, in central B.C., on July 4, a woman and her two small
sons were attacked and one of the boys was hospitalized from a serious mauling.
48
GAME NEWS
Another View
By Linda Steiner
We’d all like to see more deer, and
there are several techniques to
achieve that goal.
See More Deer
T
HAT’S WHAT WE’D all like to do.
Especially the second week of deer
season, when we still have tags to fill. But
how do we see more deer? Here are some
tips that have worked for me and my hunting group.
One way to see more is to change your
hunting strategy. If you are a treestand sitter, get down onto the ground. Treestands
are excellent places from which to shoot
deer, but if whitetails are not moving
through your hunting area during daylight
hours, you should recognize that and do
something about it. Maybe deer are not
Bob Steiner
appearing because hunting pressure has
them holding tight to cover during the day
and feeding after dark. Or they are not passing through your stand’s field of view because they are active somewhere else. For
example, if the ridge you’re on or the woods
patch you’re in didn’t produce acorns, deer
will be feeding where there is something
to eat, not where the cupboard is bare. Go
find out where the good food spot is.
Conversely, if you are a ground hunter
and deer are eluding you, take to the trees.
My favorite way to enjoy a hunting day is
to be on the ground, still-hunting. I like to
walk a little and sit a little. But unless I’m
on top of my game watchful, spotting deer
before they spot me, my walking movement
spooks the whitetails. And I don’t get a
shot.
From time to time I’ve relented and
spent some hours in a treestand. In the
treestand, I can’t easily succumb to the itch
to go for a stroll. Plus, any movement I
make in a treestand is not as likely to be
seen by the deer. I am well above their
normal vision height. My scent is aloft, too,
and less likely to be detected by the game.
SOMETIMES changing your hunting
strategy is necessary to see more deer.
Obviously, the more deer you see the
greater the opportunity to harvest one.
FEBRUARY 2010
49
MAYBE YOU usually hunt deer by stillhunting, but if you’re not seeing deer it
might pay to take to the trees.
I can also raise the gun or draw the bow
without a nearby deer spotting me and taking off. Someone once said, “You hunt from
the ground; you kill from a tree,” and that
is often true.
If you’re a solo hunter and you’re not
seeing enough deer, get in a group. I prefer
to hunt alone, because I like the pleasant
solitude of the woods. But I know that isn’t
always the best game-getting strategy. If the
deer aren’t moving on their own, and if I’m
not sufficiently stealthy as a still-hunter,
I’ll see fewer deer than I’d like to. That’s
why I cooperate with friends and relatives
who hunt to put on pushes.
Sometimes these pushes are organized
drives through specific patches of thick
cover. Other times, a “push” just means
dropping off the hunters at several points
and hunting randomly toward each other
or toward an agreed upon location. In either case, I see deer that I otherwise
wouldn’t.
If you don’t want to join a hunting
group, if you’re a loner but still want to see
more deer, hunt where there are other
hunters moving about. I learned this very
early in my hunting career, when I hunted
the full second week of buck season (before the concurrent seasons) and scarcely
saw another hunter, or a deer. On the final
Saturday I stopped to hunt where other cars
were parked and other hunters were in the
woods. I saw no legal bucks that day, but I
did see lots of does.
Another way to see more deer is to learn
more about deer. What are they doing at
the time of year you’re hunting, and what
particular habitats are they frequenting?
Fall deer hunting seasons include the
whitetail mating period in Pennsylvania.
Knowing the animal’s reaction to these
events and what a hunter should do in response is valuable. I’m still finding out
about these intriguing aspects of the hunt
50
Bob Steiner
and expect to be a student of them as long
as I go afield.
In early bow season does can be more
difficult to find than bucks, especially with
their numbers reduced on the public lands
I hunt. Does don’t seem to get that “acting
silly” time that bucks do during the rut.
Does remain wary, but they can be approached or waylaid at food sources, such
as apple trees, edges of cornfields and, of
course, in mast-producing oak and beech
stands.
As for bucks, I see more of them during
the rut when I use strategies that reveal
their presence or draw them to me. Like
hunting in the vicinity of scrapes and rubs
and using the lure of deer calls (especially
grunts), antler rattling and scents. I also
know that to see more deer when bucks
are actively pursuing “hot” does, being on
stand over a scrape may not produce
sightings as well as frequenting an active
deer crossing that does are traveling
through.
Sometimes the reason I’m not seeing
more deer is because I simply am not seeing them. That is, the deer are there, right
in front of me, but I can’t pick them out.
GAME NEWS
TREESTANDS are excellent places from
which to shoot deer, but if whitetails are
not moving through your hunting area
during daylight hours, you should
recognize that and do something about it,
such as still-hunt.
Deer are prey animals and their coloration
has developed through the eons primarily
to hide them from predators that are
sharper eyed than people. It’s no wonder
that we “citified” humans, who have limited time to hunt, can’t spot whitetails
against the background they live in.
Although we see in color, the tan of a
deer’s coat is difficult to distinguish among
the similar browns and grays of the late fall
and winter woods. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to distinguish small variations of hues and tones — even though this
is a given, not a developed skill — and this
helps some. I’ve added to that a trial-anderror knowledge of the effect of light on a
deer’s sleek coat as opposed to the dull
roughness of surrounding tree bark and
stone. I also look for the texture of deer
hair compared to that of other woods objects.
A tried-and-true trick for spotting deer
in a forest scene is to watch for the “unnatural” horizontal line that the animal’s
back presents, especially when it’s standing broadside to the observer. A brown
“box” or lengthwise rectangle deserves a
hunter’s second look, as it may be the
blocky torso of a whitetail. The dark back
to light belly coloration of a deer can make
it appear two dimensional, adding to the
challenge of seeing it even when it’s right
in front of you.
Some parts of a deer’s body don’t blend
in. I can’t count the number of times I’ve
caught the quick flash of white that, with
continued watching in that direction, revealed itself as part of a deer. A whitetail’s
ear flicks and shows the white hairs within.
The white tail is raised in alarm, the white
rump hairs flared. Or I see the white rim
around the black eyes and muzzle, or notice the white throat patch when the deer
FEBRUARY 2010
Bob Steiner
lifts its head to sniff the air for my scent.
The inside of a deer’s upper legs are also
light colored, and sometimes that movement can be seen against a darker background. Not all deer display the same
amount of white markings, though, and all
have the ability when alerted to clamp
down their tail and rump hairs and show
little white from the rear.
A snow cover during hunting season
helps us hunters see more deer, but only
up to a point. A sunny day after a snow is
ideal, but when the day is overcast, things
seen against the white background can
appear as flat, dark silhouettes, without
texture. Shapes are important to recognize
then. Hunters should get to know what a
deer, or parts of a deer, look like from various angles.
Binoculars help in this. They are a critical component of my deer hunting gear,
necessary in addition to my rifle scope. Binoculars let me get closer to “odd” objects
that draw my attention or the place where
I thought I saw motion, without moving
and giving myself away to the game. I think
that seeing more deer requires a hunter to
be adaptable and to develop an educated — and sometimes aided — eye.
51
The Naturalist’s Eye
By Marcia Bonta
photos by Bruce Bonta
Being avid conservationists, it’s only
natural that a new house on the
Bontas’ property would be a . . .
Green House
T
O STAY OR TO GO. That was the
dilemma we faced. We weren’t getting any younger, and my husband Bruce
could no longer maintain our steep mileand-a-half mountain road, 10 miles of
trails, barn, shed, 1865 guesthouse, 1873
main house and garage by himself.
Bruce also needed help keeping our tractor and secondhand bulldozer running. In
short, he needed a jack-of-all-trades to live
on our mountain and help him as he aged.
As it turned out, he got a Jack and a Jill —
a couple from the valley below who were
eager to move here; a couple familiar with
our land because they had been hunting
here for years. Troy and Paula Scott agreed
to our idea. We would build a home for
them above the derelict house of our nowdeceased neighbor, Margaret, whose property we had bought back in 1992. There,
the Scotts could live rent-free as our caretakers.
Our son, Dave, and I, as conservationists, suggested that we build a “green”
house. Thus began a year of anticipation
and frustration, as we embarked on a new
adventure — dealing with an architect, a
building inspector, contractors, suppliers,
a well-driller, an electrician, a plumber and
a host of other people who mostly helped,
but sometimes hindered, our progress. The
goal was to get the house built before the
regular firearms deer season began. At the
time — February 2008 — it seemed to be
a reasonable goal.
We started by visiting friends of ours —
Dave and Trudy Kyler — who had built a
small, passive solar home near Huntingdon
back in the 1970s. All four of us spent a
couple hours touring their home and hearing about their own building odyssey —
their mistakes as well as their successes.
Paula took notes and Troy studied the various aspects of passive solar design. He particularly liked what the Kylers’ called a
“knee-wall” of bricks built below their large
windows to capture and retain heat.
We put much of the planning in the
hands of the Scotts. Bruce was in pain from
a benign tumor pressing on his spine and
WITH the precise direction of the energy
efficient house facing south, to obtain the
most solar heat, work began on the
basement, just one of the plan
modifications that had to be made to the
plans the Scotts had selected for the
“green” home.
52
GAME NEWS
NEGOTIATING the narrow road up to the
Bontas’ homesite was challenging for many
of the delivery and construction workers.
was facing a major operation, although he
did his best to help and advise whenever
he could. Paula searched the Internet for
house plans they could modify and finally
found one she thought was ideal, from Sun
Plans Incorporated called “Jersey Scape.”
But it was designed for the warmer South
and had no basement. We needed an architect to modify the plan, not only adding a full basement but making other design changes as well.
It took longer to change our plan than
we figured on. In the meantime, cold
month followed cold month. Would it ever
warm up? Would it ever stop raining?
While we waited, Troy lined up sub-contractors to dig the foundation and pour the
concrete basement floor after Bruce carefully calculated the precise direction the
house should face to obtain the most solar
heat. Specifically, “the south wall was to
face due true south,” according to the plans.
“The primary goals” [of an energy efficient
home] the plan continued, “are to let in
sun in winter and keep it out in summer,”
so the south side of the house has to function as a passive solar collector.
Furthermore, the land south of the
house was supposed to be cleared of trees.
Paula, however, didn’t want a single tree
cut, especially not the three huge old
spruces in Margaret’s backyard on the
southwest side of the house site. After all,
this was to be a house in the woods, not in
a cleared development. Luckily, the rest of
Margaret’s old yard was reasonably open,
and the spruces were saved.
Of course, brush and small trees had to
be cut, especially for the septic field above
the house. Getting the septic system designed and approved took several more
weeks than we anticipated. That, in fact,
became the theme of the year — nothing
ever happened as quickly as we hoped.
At last, in early June, the rain stopped,
the earth dried out, and excavation of the
FEBRUARY 2010
basement began. Bruce had had his operation in mid-May and was slowly recovering. Every day he walked the quarter mile
over to check on the progress of the house
and to take photos. Sometimes I joined
him, especially for the more interesting (to
me) aspects, such as the laying of the concrete basement floor and the delivery of
the roof trusses. The man who made the
turn on to the one-lane county bridge
across the Little Juniata River with those
trusses hanging out the back of the truck
was one impressive driver.
By then we had learned how inadequate
our road is for the delivery of large items,
such as those trusses, and for the hauling
of heavy excavating equipment. Troy and
Paula had to repair portions of the road
every time another large truck dug deep
ruts into it. Buying more and more road
gravel was just one of many expenses we
hadn’t counted on.
Slowly, sometimes painfully, housebuilding proceeded through the summer
months and into the fall. Already, it was
obvious that the house would not be finished by November, despite the help the
Scotts gave in their free time. An early
snow the last day in October sent our first
contractor home to New Jersey. Then a local contractor, Tim Shaw, who had constructed the basement, took over. Once
winter set in, he obtained tire chains for
his pickup truck. Ice and snow were not
going to keep him from finishing the house.
53
THE south-facing windows are
overhung by 24-inch eaves that shade
the house in summer and let maximum
heat in during the winter. The windows
in the back and sides of the house are
smaller and more energy-efficient than
those that are double hung.
At the beginning of March, Troy and
Paula, having worked with Tim all winter to finish the inside of the house,
moved in. I joked that they lived in a
camouflage house, with its green metal
roof and light greenish-brown “Woodland Green” siding, neither of which makes
the house strictly a true “green” house, although, as Paula points out, the roof has a
lifetime guarantee and can ultimately be
recycled.
And Bruce adds that “building a house
is a fleet of compromises,” especially a
“green” house. Neither of our contractors
had had any experience building such a
house. Neither had any of the other workers. We spent hours pouring over the plans,
and ultimately the house became what we
hoped it would be.
The south-facing windows are specially
designed to keep the house cooler in the
summer and warmer in the winter and have
casement openings that lock tightly against
weather-stripping. They are overhung by
24-inch eaves that shade the house in summer and let maximum heat in during the
winter. The windows in the back and sides
of the house are smaller, casement-type
windows, which are more energy-efficient
than those that are double hung.
The 1,500 square-foot house has three
bedrooms and two baths. The living room,
dining room and kitchen have no walls
between them for better air circulation, except for a 4-foot-high wall dividing the liv54
ing room from the dining room. The floors
in front of the south-facing windows are
tiled, and so is the dividing wall, to retain
heat during the day and give it off at night.
Otherwise, the rest of the house has hardwood floors. The furniture and the floors
in the living space are neutral colors to
prevent fading from the sun and all the
walls are painted white. On those walls are
several heads of bucks, all of which the
Scotts shot on our property. The floors
have no rugs, because they trap dust and
pollutants, another “green” recommendation from Sun Plans, Inc. Ceiling fans are
mounted in every room and can circulate
cool air when needed. Troy and Paula have
also put compact fluorescent bulbs in all
their light fixtures.
The entire house, including the basement, is heavily insulated with insulation
made by Bonded Logic, Inc. from the factory trimmings of new blue jeans. That
“keeps the factory waste from the landfill,”
Troy says. Soaked in borate, which serves
as a fire retardant, pest deterrence, and
mold and mildew preventative, this recycled denim provides a soft, non-prickly
Green Building insulation that is better
than fiberglass.
GAME NEWS
The aim of the Jersey Scape design is to
have a house that is 72 degrees Fahrenheit
in summer and 70 degrees in winter, but
the Scotts keep their home at 60 degrees
in the winter, which feels perfectly comfortable because the place is so well insulated. Nevertheless, with our mountaintop
climate, they needed another source of heat
in the winter.
After much research, we decided to pay
the extra money and install a geothermal
heating and cooling system, tapping into
the earth to provide heating, cooling and
hot water. In our case, in addition to drilling a well for water, the well-drillers also
drilled four holes, 15 feet apart, and 190
feet deep, following directions from the
local provider of the so-called
GeoExchange system.
There are six possible earth loop designs,
which transfer heat to and from the ground,
depending on the terrain. Ours is the vertical loop. Simply put, a geothermal system works something like a refrigerator
does, removing heat energy from the earth
to heat the home and removing heat energy from inside the home to cool it. Although it is more expensive to install than
a traditional natural gas or oil furnace, it
usually pays for itself in energy savings
within three to five years.
Because the ground absorbs 47 percent
of the sun’s energy that reaches the earth,
this amount of energy is 500 times more
than all of humanity would need every year.
Scientists figure that installing a geothermal system is equal, in greenhouse gas reduction, to planting an acre of trees or taking two cars off the road. In fact, a geothermal system is considered the most environmentally friendly way to heat and cool
a home, because it emits no carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide or other greenhouse
gases.
During our 38 years here, we have
heated both our house and guesthouse with
oil, a system that was already in place in
the main house and one we installed in the
guesthouse. We also put woodstoves in
FEBRUARY 2010
THE aim of the Jersey Scape design is to
have a house that is 72 degrees in summer
and 70 degrees in winter, but the Scotts
keep their home at 60 degrees in the
winter, which feels perfectly comfortable
because the place is so well insulated.
both houses as supplementary heating during much of the 1970s and 1980s, until cutting wood and carrying it in to fill the
stoves became too difficult for our aging
bodies. In addition, we learned that the
kind of woodstoves we had emitted even
more air pollution than oil. But getting oil
trucks up here in winter has become more
and more difficult, especially since most of
the suppliers have switched to trucks too
large for our access road. The Scotts will
never have to worry about that. If the geothermal heating system works well for
them, we hope to invest in such a system
for our homes, too.
We also plan to “green” our old houses
in other ways. Already, Troy and Paula,
with the help of their son, Andy, have installed blue jean insulation in our attic, and
we purchased and Troy installed a new
storm door for the veranda entrance. We
may also consider solar panels and/or small
windmills on our roofs. While retrofitting
old houses with “green” technology is possible, it is easier and cheaper to build such
energy-efficient features into a new home,
as we did with the Scotts’ place.
So, there you have it. Our plan for aging in place. Instead of spending our savings on travel and other luxuries, we spent
it on building a house that should last as a
caretaker home for several generations.
55
Straight
from
Straight
from the
the Bowstring
Bowstring
The Naturalist’s
Eye
TheByNaturalist’s
Eye
By
Mike
Tom
Raykovicz
Tatum
By
By
Marcia
Bonta
ByMarcia
MarciaBonta
Bonta
Several factors affect the performance and the
price of carbon arrows and these factors are what
separate the good from the absolute best.
High Grade
Carbon Arrows
I
STOPPED into my local pro shop to
pick up a tube of fletching cement, and
as I stood before the display board, mulling over my choices, I overheard the conversation of two nearby customers. “A hundred and fifty bucks,” I heard one say.
“Who’d pay a hundred and fifty bucks for
a dozen arrows?” I turned to look at the
incredulous shoppers and noticed they
were looking at some top-of-the line carbon arrows. It was hunting season and I
was in a hurry. I got my cement, paid, and
left for home to fletch some arrows before
leaving for an afternoon hunt.
On the way home, their words ultimately sank in. Who, indeed, would spend
$150 or more for carbon arrows, and what
would they be getting for the money, I
wondered. Later that afternoon, while
standing in my favorite
tree waiting for something to happen, I
thought about their
question.
I’ve shot aluminum arrows for more
years than I can remember, and I’ve always
been satisfied with their straightness, consistent spine and penetration on game. As
good as aluminum arrows are, I couldn’t
help thinking I might be missing something
by not shooting a good carbon arrow. I continued to wonder why high quality carbon
arrows cost more than my aluminum shafts
and what made these arrows worth the
price. To find out, I spoke to the marketing managers of three popular arrow brands.
The first thing I discovered was that not
all carbon shafts are created equal. I was
told that several factors affect the performance and the price of carbon arrows and
these factors are what separate the good
from the best. Consistent weight,
straightness, durability and spine are the
THE MAXIMA HUNTER
line of premium carbon
arrows by Carbon
Express is a favorite
among hunters because
they feature a weightforward design, making
them suitable for longer
range situations.
56
GAME NEWS
criteria against which all carbon arrows are
judged. A single carbon shaft in a dozen
premium shafts typically weighs within a
grain of the other shafts making up that
dozen. Shafts with more variation in their
grain weight are still good but, because of
their slightly greater disparity in weight and
straightness, command a lower price.
Some shooters may believe shaft
straightness is the most important consideration for consistent accuracy and, given
the amount of advertising touting the
straightness of certain shafts, who could
argue? In truth, the straighter the arrow
shaft, the more inherently accurate it will
be — and the more expensive it is.
Human hair varies in thickness from
.002 to .006 of an inch, while a high quality carbon arrow shaft varies only .001 inch
from perfectly straight. What’s more, these
qualities of straightness and weight are held
to incredibly tight specifications throughout the entire dozen. Even more astounding is that some manufacturers are offering
shafts that are within .0025 of an inch of
perfectly straight. As important as consistent shaft weight and straightness are to
shooting accuracy, however, they are only
two of the contributing factors. What most
hunters fail to realize is that a third consideration, arrow spine, particularly the
spine around the shaft, is perhaps the most
important factor in achieving superior accuracy.
Arrow spine is not a difficult concept
to understand but one many shooters will
overlook because it is the most difficult to
measure without sophisticated testing
equipment. Spine is basically the amount
of bend or flex in an arrow shaft immediately after it is shot. In essence, arrows with
consistent spine fly more accurately and
ensure tighter groups. Competitive shooters understand this, but the average hunter
may not. Once again, with premium carbon arrows, spine is held to an extremely
close tolerance, and this contributes not
only to their accuracy, but also to their cost.
Aluminum arrows have a consistent
FEBRUARY 2010
weight, straightness and spine because they
are made from aluminum tubing of unfailing metallurgical composition, diameter
and wall thickness, thus making them identical throughout the dozen.
Carbon arrows, on the other hand, have
to be sorted in order to achieve this type
of consistency, and this process also adds
to their cost. Even so, carbon arrows continue to grow in popularity among
bowhunters.
Rick Kinsey, of Kinsey’s Archery Products Inc., one of the country’s largest archery distributors, located in Mt. Joy, says
carbon arrows account for about 80 percent of the company’s total arrow sales. “I
think people prefer the technology of carbon arrows. They are stronger, faster and
more durable than aluminum, and their
price doesn’t seem to be as big a factor as it
once was,” he told us.
Aluminum arrows may not be going the
way of the Edsel, but it’s clear today’s bow
hunters know that manufacturers have
solved many of the problems formerly associated with carbon arrows, which now
offer superior performance under just about
all hunting conditions. Faster, straighter
and more durable, carbon arrows are gaining market share every year. The innovations and technology that ensure such quality are getting the attention of shooters
across the country, and they are willing to
pay a little more to gain a huge advantage.
By taking a look at several brands of premium carbon arrows and how they are
made, we can see what separates premium
shafts from the run-of-the-mill variety.
Easton’s AXIS N-Fused carbon arrow
was introduced a few years ago and it has
proven to be a favorite among hunters as
well as competition shooters. In 2008,
Easton enlisted the world’s leading
nanotechnology experts to develop an epoxy material that would molecularly bond
with carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes
are extraordinarily strong and light, and
they are the key to the AXIS N-Fused arrow shafts. A nano-fused epoxy composite
57
resin called Hybtonite
holds the carbon fibers together to produce a smalldiameter, thick-walled shaft
that is almost indestructible. This arrow is so durable that folks at Easton
say the N-Fused carbon arrow is 182 times stronger
than steel.
According to Easton’s
marketing manager, Gary
Cornum, in order for the FOR THOSE not needing or wanting the high technology
that drives other carbon arrows into the high price range,
carbon nanotubes to work the Maxima arrow by Carbon Express offers shooters a high
in arrows they have to be quality arrow with weight forward technology for about
covalently strengthened $120 per dozen.
and, the Hybtonite epoxy
does this. Carbon nanotubes have the high- dozen price tag. Stephen Graham, Marketest specific strength of all known materials ing Manager at Carbon Express told us the
with diameters as small as 1/10,000 as that Aramid KV arrow shaft incorporates an
of a human hair. The length of the expensive layer of bullet-stopping Kevlar
nanotubes can reach several millimeters, fabric between the carbon fibers, making
making them act like a continuous nano- it pound for pound, five times stronger than
fiber reinforcement. Cornum said the pos- steel. “The Kevlar is lightweight and tough,
sibilities of carbon nanotubes technology giving the shaft enough strength to withis endless, but they can be utilized to full stand impacts with rocks, trees or heavy
potential in arrow shafts only with a true bone,” he said.
chemical bond like the Hybtonite epoxy.
As is the case with all of the company’s
Cornum said the unique hybrid premium arrows, Graham said Carbon ExHybtonite material outperforms regular press has incorporated weight forward techcarbon resins to create a new standard in nology into the Aramid KV shaft. For years,
carbon arrow construction. “You’d have to hunters and manufacturers alike have bebe a chemist to fully understand the tech- lieved that shifting weight to the front of
nology of carbon nanotubes, but the bot- center is the way to increase an arrow’s
tom line is that arrows made with this pro- down-range accuracy. Carbon Express put
cess yield high strength with a built-in bo- this innovative weight-forward technology
nus of vibration control, providing archers into its line of Aramid, Maxima Hunter,
with some of the best arrows available,” he 3-D Maxima premium and LineJammer
said. “In addition, the AXIS N-Fused ar- arrows. To reduce arrow oscillation out of
rows have an extremely smooth finish, the bow, the company uses an exclusive,
which makes extracting them from high- highly advanced carbon fiber called
density foam targets much easier, a feature BuffTuff Plus, which makes the back onesure to be appreciated by 3-D shooters,” third of the arrow stiffer than the front.
he added.
Since the back of the arrow is stiffer, it
Another big player in premium shaft straightens faster, resulting in dramatically
technology is Carbon Express. Ever since improved recovery.
the company introduced its Aramid KV
Tests have shown that when an arrow
arrow in 2008, sales of these shafts have flexes, it resists the spinning that the
been excellent, despite the nearly $200 a fletching is attempting to provide. In short,
58
GAME NEWS
the faster an arrow stabilizes after it is shot,
the sooner the fletching can start to turn
the shaft. Graham said this is especially
important for those who hunt elk, antelope or mule deer, where shooting distances
can be two or three times longer than the
average shot taken at a whitetail.
For those not wanting or needing the
Kevlar technology and the hefty price tag
of the Aramid line of arrows, Carbon Express offers its Maxima Hunter series of
premium hunting shafts. The Maxima
Hunter is a strong, lightweight, 100 percent carbon hunting arrow engineered like
the Aramid, with weight-forward technology for superior long-range shooting.
Broadhead-tipped arrows are better controlled at long ranges with weight-forward
technology because it ensures better balance and faster recovery after the shot. The
front two thirds of the Maxima Hunter
PREMIUM CARBON ARROWS cost more for
a reason. They are super straight and each
shaft in a dozen is selected to weigh within
one grain of the others in that dozen. In
addition, the spine is matched to the other
arrows in the same dozen, making them
extremely accurate.
FEBRUARY 2010
shaft is constructed using heavier and
stronger BuffTuff material while the rear
third consists of newly designed BuffTuff
Plus, which makes the rear third stiffer than
the front two thirds. The Maxima Hunter
shafts have a straightness tolerance of +/.0025 inch and a matched weight tolerance
of +/- 1 grain. The 250 shaft weighs 8.0
grains per inch, while the 350 shaft is
slightly heavier, at 8.9 grains per inch.
Gold Tip Arrows is a brand popular with
many hunters because its arrows are manufactured from the finest aerospace-grade
materials and, like other premium arrows,
are built to meet the most exacting weight
and straightness specifications.
According to Tom Gillingham, National Shooting Staff Manager at Gold Tip,
what sets Gold Tip arrows apart from other
brands is that the company uses only a
small amount of resin to bind the carbon
fibers in the Gold Tip shafts. Gillingham
said the lower resin content in Gold Tip
shafts provides superior shaft memory so
that the shafts remain straight. “In addition, the lower resin content gives the
shafts a superior sidewall strength as well,”
he told us.
Gold Tip’s Pro Hunter line consists of
the Pro Hunter, XT Hunter and the Expedition Hunter. Gillingham said the Pro
Hunter shafts and Pro Hunter complete
arrows are guaranteed to be among the
most consistent graphite hunting arrows
available. Each arrow is held to a
straightness tolerance of +/-.001 of an inch
and weight tolerance of one grain per
dozen.
Gillingham also noted that all of the
arrows in Gold Tip’s Pro Hunter line feature the new GT nock, which is a unique
notch design that locks positively to the
bowstring and stays locked during stalks or
waits on stand. Its extra long insert section engages more of the arrow shaft to
ensure proper alignment. To further enhance accuracy, all Gold Tip inserts are
precision machined to exacting tolerances.
All of these innovations add to the cost of
59
a dozen premium arrows, but the accuracy
they provide make them worthwhile to
many shooters.
To be sure, there are other manufacturers of carbon arrows such as: Beman, Carbon Force, Trophy Ridge, PSE and Alaska
Bow Hunting Supply. All offer a premium
line of hunting shafts, giving hunters the
option of choosing a shaft that best fits the
game they are hunting, the range of their
shots, and the hunting conditions they are
likely to encounter. Keep in mind that research, development, high cost of materials, and sorting for consistent straightness,
spine and shaft weight contribute to the
cost of these premium shafts, so shooters
should understand, they won’t be cheap,
but they will be good.
I’ve always believed the arrows I carry
in my quiver can spell the difference between success and failure. It’s the arrow that
delivers the broadhead to the animal, and
to my way of thinking, this makes it the
most important component of my archery
tackle.
Each hunter must choose the shaft that
best meets his or her need in terms of price,
accuracy and quality and, fortunately, there
are many premium shafts from which to
choose. Given these considerations, a
growing number of hunters want an arrow
that is fast, sturdy, accurate and resistant
to the side impact damage often encountered in competition or in practice sessions.
Aluminum arrows can be dinged by another arrow or ultimately may take a bend,
so many feel shooting practically indestructible premium carbon arrows is a good investment.
Considering that a new bow outfitted
with accessories can cost a thousand dollars or more and that a pair of good hunting boots can cost close to $200, paying
that much for a dozen arrow shafts that
theoretically can last for years doesn’t seem
out of place.
There are always those who want the
best, and having the best means a willingness to pay extra. Considering how these
modern arrows perform on game or in archery competitions, it’s easy to see why
many think they are worth every penny.
Fun Game — By Connie Mertz
Everything’s Just Ducky
I am a medium size perching duck a little smaller than a mallard. The colorful male in my
species has red eyes, and the female has a white eye ring. We both have crested heads. Our
population declined in the early 20th century to near extinction, but by providing nesting
boxes for us, we have made a strong comeback. Unlike other ducks, we really don’t quack.
I am the ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
The male of my species has a yellow bill, orange legs and dark eyes. The female has a
greenish-gray bill. We both have purple-blue wing patches that are not bordered in white.
We are prized as game birds, and waterfowl hunters think us to be the most intelligent of
North America’s ducks. Unfortunately, we have been in decline for the last 30 years.
I am the ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
answers on p. 63
60
GAME NEWS
Lock, Stock & Barrel
By John McGonigle
The Model 870 is not just older; it’s better.
Going Strong
After Six Decades
I
WAS FOUR YEARS OLD in 1950
when Remington’s Model 870 slide action shotgun was introduced and, to be
honest, I didn’t notice its arrival. This year
marks the 60th birthday of the 870, and I
have since noted a lot of positive things
about it, including that it’s in better shape
and operates more smoothly than I at a
similar age. Reliability is perhaps the top
requirement for a firearm, and Remington’s
870 rests securely at the top of the reliability list.
The Model 870 is the best selling shotgun ever made. The 10 millionth came off
the Remington factory line in Ilion, New
York, in late 2009; they are still going
strong.
Remington’s timing was perfect for introducing a modern, reliable, workmanlike
shotgun, because hundreds of thousands of
World War II veterans had experience with
repeaters in the service.
While veterans were using the G.I. Bill
to attend college, and cookie cutter housing developments were springing up like
mushrooms, the average hunter could not
afford the cost of traditional side-by-side
shotguns, with their necessity for a lot of
FEBRUARY 2010
hand finishing. The Remington 870 retailed for about $70 when it was introduced
six decades ago, which was not cheap at
the time, but definitely more affordable
that the doubles.
Best selling does not necessarily mean
something is the best, although I think
Remington could make a pretty good case
for the 870 being the best pump shotgun
ever made. I’m equally sure many hunters
and shooters owning 870s, including me,
could make the same case.
Winchester’s Model 12 pump was, and
is, an outstanding shotgun, beloved by its
owners, and likely the only other serious
contender for the honor of being the best
pump shotgun ever made. Wildfowlers
loved them, including the fact that they
could be fired as fast as one could pump
the action while keeping the trigger depressed.
The Winchester 1897 was also quite a
gun, although its older technology, including an exposed hammer, knocks it out of
competition for best-in-class. Jointly, with
those two models, Winchester sold about
three million pump shotguns during their
approximately 110 years of combined pro-
61
THE POPULAR MODEL 870
is available in a variety of
configurations to handle
any shooting or hunting
situation.
duction.
I had the chance a year ago to shoot a
refinished Winchester Model 42. It’s a
wonderful, slide-action smoothbore built
specifically for the .410. I fell instantly in
love with it. I do not have enough experience with the Model 42 to place it at the
top of the pump gun heap, but it is sweet.
There were 160,000 Model 42s made. A
whole bunch of skeet shooters liked it, and
its popularity was widespread among the
hunters who tried it.
Remington’s Model 31 was super slick
and was advertised as operating with ball
bearing smoothness. The
31 was used with great success by skeet shooters, too.
Rudy Etchen used the
newly
introduced
Remington 870 at the 1950
Grand American to become the first shooter in the
U.S. to break 100 straight
doubles at trap with a pump
gun. While his accomplishment speaks first to his
shooting skill, it certainly showed the 870
was up to the task.
Researching the 870, I read again the
late Don Zutz’s Shotgunning Trends in Transition, published in 1989. Zutz was quite a
shooter, had wide wingshooting experience, and was a capable researcher and
writer.
Zutz’s book discusses many of the trends
and changes in shotguns and shotgunning
as both technology and society changed.
Much of what Zutz had to say was spot on,
but his chapter titled “The Outmoded
Pumpgun” was a bit premature. For one
ADAM BECKER received his HunterTrapper Ed card in June at the Adams
County Fish & Game Association
after passing the course. HTE
instructor Glenn Herring presented
the card to the happy youngster.
Want to become an HTE instructor?
For more information, visit the
Game Commission education page
at www.pgc.state.pa.us or call the
Game Commission Hunter-Trapper
Education Division at 717-787-7015.
62
GAME NEWS
thing, Zutz was too quick to accept British
gun writers on the topic of American shotguns. The Brits are fine, but they are not
us and vice versa; let’s keep it that way.
Secondly, Zutz said that pump shotguns
became basically obsolete when John
Browning brought out his Model A-5 semiautomatic shotgun. Zutz related that another earlier gun writer, Charles Askins Sr.
said, “An autoloading mechanism is the
ultimate fate of all pump repeaters” in his
1910 book, The American Shotgun.
Both authors, and they were both well
respected gun writers, may be right eventually, but in neither case did their prophesies come true within the time constraints
the writers alluded to. One hundred years
for Askins and 20 plus years for Zutz compel me to think they were rushing the issue. Perhaps they were both blinded by the
semi-automatic’s technology; it is impressive. Some could argue for Zutz’s and
Askins’ opinion about semis replacing
pumps, because semi-automatics have really advanced and have few, if any, real
kinks.
I have used over-unders and side-bysides for too long and too exclusively to
shoot a pump gun well. In the hands of a
practitioner, though, pump shotguns will
hold their own in most company in terms
of practical speed and reliability. Years ago
I shot clays with a couple of old-timers who
could really shuck and shoot. Their scores
with those 870s put them in the money at
a lot of shoots.
Zutz pointed out that virtually no competitive clay target shooters used pump
shotguns, and he is correct. On the other
hand, there are far more hunters and casual target shooters than there are competitive clay target shooters. Millions of hunters and casual shooters still choose to shoot
pump shotguns. Pumps offer a reliable three
shots with little possibility of jamming, in
Fun Game answers:
wood duck; black duck
FEBRUARY 2010
the hands of an experienced user. Pumps
have the single sighting plane that many
hunters and shooters prefer. Pump guns are
easy to disassemble, clean and maintain. If
one does have a problem with his 870, most
gunsmiths can solve it easily.
As long as reliable semi-autos cost from
$800 to $1800, pump guns with their $250
to $500 price tags will remain popular. Fact
is, a lot of shooters just plain like pumps.
As mentioned, moderate cost is an important factor in selecting a pump gun. Pump
shotguns, though, represent a good value
in today’s marketplace. Pumps are reliable
and long lasting.
The Remington 870 I bought used 25
years ago had a lot of miles on it then, and
it still works well. Fitted with a scope it
makes a fine slug gun for deer. Additional
versatility comes from the fact that pumps
are chambered in 10, 12, 16, 20 and 28
gauges, as well as the .410 bore. Remington
870 shotguns can be purchased in nearly
any configuration one could think of, from
a high-end model with great wood and a
fantastic bluing job to a value-priced plain
version. Camo, blued, black matte, stainless steel and nickel finishes can be had on
870s. Wood and synthetic stocks with
straight, pistol or military/law enforcement-style grips are available. Chamber
lengths from 2¾- to 3½-inches are available, as are screw-in choke tubes.
Pump shotguns were, and are, built for
sporting purposes, such as hunting and
shooting clays. The awesome firepower of
pump shotguns carrying multiple shotshells
in extended magazines also makes them
excellent choices as a military weapon for
specific, short-range objectives. Pump shotguns can also be found in a large percentage of America’s police cars, and they make
excellent home/self-defense firearms.
At 60 we humans tend to be winding
down. Remington 870s, on the other hand,
are still going strong and can successfully
meet nearly every shotgun need. For a
Remington 870 it’s just like a walk in the
park.
63
The Thin Edge of Life
O
N A MID-DECEMBER morning, a keening wind
slinging ice pellets against my numb face, I huddled
inside my wool, fleece and synthetic fiber shell, marveling at a tiny wisp of life.
A male golden-crowned kinglet, spying my fluorescent
orange jacket, had come scolding down through the pines
toward me, flashing his own bright orange warrior’s crest
to drive away this huge and clumsy rival. My wonder wasn’t
at his outsized personality, though, but the simple fact
that this mite of a bird could survive at all in such a wintry landscape. We’re amazed
that deer and turkeys can make it through a harsh winter in the Pennsylvania mountains, but this kinglet, and a handful of other micro-creatures, test the limits of what is
physically possible.
A golden-crowned kinglet is second only to the ruby-throated hummingbird as the
smallest bird in Pennsylvania, weighing roughly five grams — about as much as two
pennies. And unlike the rubythroat, which skedaddles to Central America for the winter, the kinglet stays put, filling the gray woods of February with movement and its thin,
zee-zee calls.
Physiologists have long known that big bodies (which have a lot of heat-producing
mass) allow warm-blooded animals to survive cold weather better than small bodies
(which have a much greater proportion of heat-losing surface area). That’s why the
biggest whitetails, moose, bears and many other species are found at the northern edge
of their ranges.
Kinglets, though, push the envelope about as far as it can go in a cold climate. Every
day they must eat the equivalent of nearly their weight in food — dormant insects and
other arthropods — to maintain a body temperature of about 108 degrees. Songbirds do
not add insulating layers of fat like mammals, so kinglets must use other means of keeping warm, including near-constant muscular shivering.
But nighttime — with frigid temperatures and no chance to eat — is the real test for
a warm-blooded animal. Kinglets sometimes roost in groups inside old squirrels’ nests,
and like a closely related species, the European goldcrest, they may intentionally enter
a state of hypothermia, allowing their body temperature to drop drastically at night —
turning down the thermostat, so to speak, and reducing the amount of energy they
require. Without such measures, they might literally starve to death before morning.
Nor are they alone in such metabolic miracles. Ruby-crowned kinglets, which are only
marginally bigger, somehow survive the night roosting alone, in the open, on tree
branches. The naturalist Ned Smith, contemplating such a winter kinglet, once said it
best: “I pulled up the collar on my woolen coat,
wriggled deeper inside my insulated underwear,
and walked faster. Man the superior creature?
Ha!”
64
GAME NEWS
H
UNTER Education Instructor James Daley goes above and beyond his instructor
duties and is a valuable asset to his district’s Hunter Education classes. He designed a course guideline for the instructors to follow, creates a poster listing available
classes in the county for distribution, makes framed certificates of appreciation to present
to organizations sponsoring a class, and insures that the local newspapers and radio
station know about upcoming classes. He also keeps other instructors informed of problems, changes and ideas concerning the curriculum.
His style of teaching keeps students interested and involved, and, with more than 30
years of experience as an instructor, he knows what does and doesn’t work and what
enhances the learning experience. He
shares that experience with other instructors so they can incorporate it into their
own classroom instruction, a combination
that benefits both students and instructors
alike.
Jim is involved in at least seven classes
each year and is the lead instructor for some
of those classes; he also spearheaded the
first Skills Station class in the district. Jim
is also an instructor at the Northwest region orientation class for new instructors
and a certified remedial Hunter Education
instructor.
Nominated by
Randy W. Pilarcik, WCO
Butler County
For information on becoming a volunteer
instructor, visit www.pgc.state.pa.us or call
717-787-7015.
DECEMBER 2008
1