On November 6, a friend in South Dakota had seen a buck in the distance with his head down. It wasn’t moving, and although she honked the car horn repeatedly, he wouldn’t raise his head. She grabbed her binoculars and looked at him, and saw that the buck’s horns were entangled with those of another one, which was dead. So she called friends and asked if they wanted an adventure — untangling them.

They were tangled in an old fence line just east of a golf course, where some railroad tracks had been. The live buck was on the high side, and the dead buck on the slope. They estimated that other buck had been dead for 2 or 3 days. The live buck had the bigger rack – a 5 x 6. The dead buck was bigger bodied and looked to be an older deer. It had more “stickers” on its rack

They attempted to break a point off the dead buck’s rack with his pliers, but couldn’t. Then they tried turning the dead buck’s head but the other one just became more frightened and started backing up. The now scared buck eventually got out of the fence, and out in the open. Terry pulled an old post out of the fence line and used it to try and pry the racks loose, but it didn’t work.

They finally decided to go to a friend’s house in order to borrow his chainsaw, but then they thought something quieter would be better, and so got a hacksaw instead. Terry sawed the main beam on the dead buck and then other one was free!

The buck didn’t realize this for probably 30 seconds or so. When he did, he started striking the dead buck in the face repeatedly. He finally raised his head a little, and then a little more. He stood there with his head held high looking at them and they wondered if he was going to try charging them! Then he turned and ran off rather wobbly. He went a short distance, lay down briefly, and then got up and took off in the direction of the Big Sioux River .

In western Mongolia, an ancient tradition of hunting with Golden Eagles is still alive. We know from history that Genghis Khan had 1,000 hunting birds – eagles, falcons and gyrfalcons – and so did Kubla Khan. There were protected areas in the steppe marked with stones where only the khans were allowed to hunt.

The Kazakhs of Mongolia train their eagles to hunt and here the bird of prey is often considered a family member. The Berkutchi is a falconer who hunts with the Golden Eagle. The training of this bird was seen as difficult and even perilous even by the experienced Synchy. the bird is never a slave of its owner, only a partner in hunting.

From ancient times, berkutchi-falconers in the nomadic herder societies had the role of preserving and stocking furs. The high social status of the berkutchi and his family was conditioned by the climate, as warm strong and durable clothing for the people during the winter seasons was a vital necessity. Best-suited for this were the pelts of wolves and foxes.

Apart from hunting, berkutchi can give spiritual support to pregnant women, who experience or may experience difficulties in childbirth. Through the owner of the bird, which in the imagination of Asian peoples is a symbol of well-being and power. According to folk wisdom, a berkutchi is the indisputable authority in the sphere of childbirth or of renewing fertility. In the cultures of many nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of Asia, it is said that a berkutchi, regardless of age, can make pregnant a woman who for a long time had not had children.

Holiday Gift List   

              Bulls & Beavers Best of the Best 2009                 

Its that time of the year when we are all looking to find that special gift for our family, friends and loved ones. Weve put together the best new hunting, fishing and outdoors-related gifts for the 2009-10 holiday season. 

• Gift Card to Cabelas: My personal favorite. If you have not been to a Cabelas lately just picture stepping into a theme park like Disneyland but for the outdoor sportsman.  They should charge for admission.  www.cabelas.com
• Subscription to a great magazine: 
  1. Outdoor Life Magazine: Can’t go wrong with this! www.outdoorlife.com
  2. Field and Stream Magazine: A must have for all seasons.
• Snowshoes: Every outdoor enthusiast needs a pair when they venture out in the snow county. Its that time of the year to break out your snow shoes.  Here is your best bet. crescentmoonsnowshoes.com
• Art, Music, Photography: Get in touch with your wild side.  Check out our artists on Bulls and Beavers  for your wildlife art, music and photos. 
  1. An original Oil Painting: by fine artist, Lori McNee.  My personal favorite painting is, “High Country Cattle. Purchase now and save 20% on the price.

  

  2. Fine Art Photography: by professional wildlife photographer, Stacey Huston.  Some of the best wildlife photos around.  

  

  3. Music: Talented and beautiful Native American singer. Great music! Check out her CD!!!!

• A New Shotgun:  The Browning Maxus Stalker. Duck season is here and with a name like ‘stalker’ you cant go wrong with.     
•  A GPS: The Garmin GPS. Choose from their many Global Positioning Satellites, but be prepared and dont get lost.  Another ‘must have product’ for any outdoor or back-country enthusiast!
• A New Bow: Matthews Bows. Proven and reliable in the field. I took my first bull elk with this bow…

How would you respond if you encountered a mountain lion? That’s a question I ponder whenever I venture alone into the wilderness.

Traditional wisdom, preached time and again by so-called animal experts and the California Department of Fish and Game, is to stand your ground, make yourself appear larger, yell and throw rocks or other items at the predator. That’s because if you run, you might prompt the beast to attack.

Now there’s a group of scientists who challenge traditional wisdom. A UC Davis study suggests a polar opposite survival strategy is the safest: Run like the dickens.

“Even though we found evidence that pumas will indeed chase, and capture, people who run, we also found that people who stand still are possibly more endangered,” said Richard Coss, a UC Davis psychology professor and the study’s lead author.

“Immobility may be interpreted by the mountain lion as a sign that you are vulnerable prey, either because you are unaware of its presence, or because you are disabled and not capable of escaping.”

Lion2_opt-1

The study, which examined 110 years of mountain lion attacks on people, concludes that running is your safest response “if you are in a situation that allows you to run in a surefooted fashion with even strides.”

Coss, an expert on predator-prey relationships, said his team reviewed personal accounts, news reports and wildlife agency reports of attacks by mountain lions — also called cougars or pumas — on 185 people in the United States from 1890 to 2000.

It remains unlikely, though, that the state Department of Fish and Game or any other state’s wildlife agency will modify its suggested guidelines for people encountering large cats, because they, too, were formulated after extensive study.

So perhaps the best advice for hikers is to simply rely on their own instincts and act depending on the situation. It might help immensely to carry a sturdy stick and keep pepper spray handy. You might even get creative and hike with your sunglasses on backward, as tiger hunters do in India, to make it seem as though you’re facing the beast even while fleeing.

The absolute best advice, though, is to hike with others, because that sharply reduces your chances of experiencing an encounter and having to decide how to respond.

LA Times Pete Thomas

Photos, from top: Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

CONCORD, Mass. ” The dozens of public works officials, municipal engineers, conservation agents and others who crowded into a meeting room here one recent morning needed help. Property in their towns was flooding, they said. Culverts were clogged. Septic tanks were being overwhelmed.

Once wiped out in Massachusetts, beavers were repopulated in the 1930s.

We have a huge problem, said David Pavlik, an engineer for the town of Lexington, where dams built by beavers have sent water flooding into the towns sanitary sewers. We trapped them, he said. We breached their dam. Nothing works. We are looking for long-term solutions.

Mary Hansen, a conservation agent from Maynard, said it starkly: There are beavers everywhere.

Laura Hajduk, a biologist with the states Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, had little to offer them. When beavers are trapped, others move in to replace them. And, she said, you can breach a beaver dam, but I guarantee you that within 24 hours if the beavers are still there it will be repaired. Beavers are the ultimate ecosystem engineers.

That was not what Mr. Pavlik was hoping to hear.

He is not alone in his dismay, and it is not just beavers. Around the nation, decades of environmental regulation, conservation efforts and changing land use have brought many species, like beavers, so far back from the brink that they are viewed as nuisances. As Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke University, put it, We are finding they are inconvenient.

In Florida, alligators were once nearly wiped out by hunters; today the state maintains a roster of trappers who remove thousands of nuisance gators each year. The pesticide DDT once left the Pelican State, Louisiana, bereft of the birds; today wildlife organizations say fishermen must guard their bait and catches from the birds. In California, warnings about marauding mountain lions are posted on hiking trails.

There were tens and maybe hundreds of millions of beavers in North America before it was settled by Europeans, whose craze for beaver hats is often cited as motivating much of the exploration of the continent. But by 1900 their numbers had been reduced to about 100,000, almost all of them in Canada. As farming faded and the forests reclaimed much of their lost ground, Castor canadensis made a spectacular comeback. Today there are believed to be 10 million to 15 million of the animals in North America, and they are regarded as pests in much of their range.

In 1999, for example, a colony moved into the Tidal Basin in Washington, where they cut down a number of cherry trees before being trapped and removed. According to the Department of Agriculture, states like Mississippi, North Carolina and Wisconsin lose tens of millions of dollars each year from beaver damage to buildings, roads, timber, crops and trout streams.

In Massachusetts, beavers had vanished by the early 19th century, killed by trappers and dispossessed by farmers who turned woods into pastures. But they have had a particularly strong comeback here as farmland has returned to woodland. The change has also brought an unwelcome abundance of coyotes, black bears, moose and other species. Wild turkeys, once extirpated, now go one-on-one with suburban pedestrians in what biologists call misguided efforts to establish their dominance in a pecking order.

The advice from the experts on beavers is to find a way to live with them and reduce the damage. As Ms. Hajduk said during the Concord meeting, chicken-wire fencing can keep beavers out of culverts or away from prized trees. Companies market water flow devices called beaver deceivers or beaver bafflers that can be installed in dams to lower the water level of beaver ponds. Some people even coat prized trees with paint and sand in the hope that the grit will discourage gnawing beavers. If people want to live in a more natural environment, they must adjust to animals, even inconvenient animals, Dr. Pimm said in a telephone interview. You have to accept Mother Nature as she is, he said.

John Livsey, Mr. Pavliks boss and the town engineer in Lexington, has firsthand experience with the beaver problem. The animals are building dams in wooded areas traversed by the towns sewer lines, he said, and as water rises, it seeps through manholes into the sewer pipes.

The town must pay for the treatment of this extra inflow. Though Mr. Livsey said he could not put a dollar figure on it, its a lot of money. The town periodically obtains permits to breach dams and trap and kill the animals, but destroying a beaver dam can have unintended consequences downstream, from flooding a neighbors property to destroying habitat crucial for rare amphibians or silting up streams where endangered Atlantic salmon spawn. Some people date the beavers return to Massachusetts to 1928, when beavers were observed in West Stockbridge and greeted with enthusiasm, according to the Web site of the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. By 1946, there were an estimated 300 beavers, all west of the Connecticut River.

Today, Ms. Hajduk said, there are at least 30,000 beavers, all over the state.

In her presentation in Concord, Ms. Hajduk said that beavers, which can reach 60 pounds and are the largest rodents in North America, are monogamous animals that mate for life and like to eat plants that grow underwater. They look for places to build a dam and create a pond. Their webbed feet are adapted for life in the water, and their front teeth, four giant incisors, are useful for cutting the trees they use as raw materials for their dams and lodges. (They also eat the bark, particularly in the winter.)

Typically, she said, they work at night, building a stick-and-mud lodge in the pond or at its edge, with its entrance underwater for safety. A pair of beavers typically live 10 years, producing a litter of two or more kits each spring. The kits stay with their parents until they are 2 years old, then disperse in search of their own territories.

Though the people at the meeting found it hard to believe ” or irrelevant ” the beavers have produced many benefits for the states environment, Ms. Hajduk said. She pointed to some of them after the meeting, when she and Mary B. Griffin, the states commissioner of fish and game, met at the Boxborough Station Wildlife Management Area, a state reserve northwest of here.

At first glance it hardly seemed like an ideal spot for beavers. Route 2, a major east-west highway, runs along one edge; a much-used rail line runs along another. You are really surrounded by a lot of suburbia and roadways, Ms. Hajduk said.

But trees had reclaimed the land between the ancient stone walls. Beavers have taken full advantage of the site, damming a small stream with mud and branches to impound a 45-acre pond perhaps five or six feet deep, with a lodge in the middle.

As she and Dr. Griffin neared the pond, a group of wood ducks, alarmed by their approach, went squawking into the air. It was good to see them, Dr. Griffin said ” they are among the species favored by hunters that the state is trying to encourage. She pointed to an osprey sitting on a dead tree. Ospreys were almost wiped out by DDT but are now back in Massachusetts, and this one was taking advantage of beaver-created habitat. Just then, a great blue heron glided to a landing in the pond, another guest of the beavers.

Impoundments like this one absorb water, especially in the spring, when streams swell with rain and snow runoff, Dr. Griffin said. And when the impoundment eventually silts up and the beavers move on, their dam will decay and the pond will drain, leaving unusually rich soil behind.

These beaver meadows stand out like rich little oases, Ms. Hajduk said.

Dr. Griffin said she and her colleagues emphasized these advantages in urging people to adopt tolerance and coexistence as a first line of defense.

Mr. Livsey can embrace this concept, up to a point, perhaps because he admires the animals engineering ability.

Theyre amazingly skilled creatures, actually, he said. They seem to be able to put things where they want them. I wish they worked for us.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/science/earth/09beaver.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

(CNN) — A policeman and a former corrections officer say that on Friday they will unveil evidence of what they claim is their biggest find ever: the body of Bigfoot.

The thawed body of a creature reputed to be Bigfoot reportedly weighs more than 500 pounds.