Conservation....

I like animals, and not only between slices of bread.
I mean standing at the lobster tank in a Wal-Mart, bonding with the crustaceans.
I do have hermit crabs at my apartment, you know.
There’s a great cartoon by science buff Gary Larson of “The Far Side” fame. A grotesque woman is standing over a small, innocent, harmless snake in a terrarium and exclaiming “Egad! What a hideous creature!”
I’ve never felt that common fear and hate of snakes and have usually sided with the reptiles. Maybe when I was little I went to a petting zoo or something and all the cute, fuzzy critters were already taken, but I’ve always gotten along fine with snakes, turtles, lizards…. Maybe I should be telling this to a psychiatrist.
Anyway, at my family’s house in Wake Forest we knowingly foster the presence of a few large, non-poisonous black snakes around the yard. Every year or so we’ll run into each other and symbiotically go our separate ways.
And we never have any mice.
When I was working as a courier at a law firm in downtown Raleigh, and I had a little free time, I’d walk on over to the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. I’d usually wind up at the snake exhibit with Gary Larson (in spirit, if not body), watching the fun and thinking about conservation.
I’ve read that there are a couple major groups on the side of conservation but they just don’t always work together – folks who hunt and fish and folks who really love the outdoors, but don’t really go for hunting animals.
And I’ve read that if the two sides got together they’d be quite a force.
The hunters and fisherfolk want a healthy environment in part to preserve their lifestyle, a love of the outdoors that many of them will tell you has surprisingly little to do with the actual taking of game.
When I’m fishing, the actual “catching” part usually doesn’t even happen.
The other conservationists may see the same stream in a slightly different way. They want a clean stream too, differ in opinion on the fate of a few of the fish but have to recognize the valuable work of groups like Trout Unlimited.
Both the Audubon society and Ducks Unlimited care about wetlands preservation. Imagine their combined voting power, the number of volunteers working together….
So we’ve been through leaf season. And we’re partway through deer season. Does anybody have any good photos or stories from recent outdoor trips? Any great hunting stories – that bear/deer/mime you got this season. Another conservationist with a great mountain view from the parkway, some thoughts on recycling…?
You share a love of the outdoors, how about sharing a little space on the internet.
Send me an email, john_derrick@link.freedom.com, with a digital photo or a recounting of your trip and we’ll see what we can do about getting it up on my blog, jderrickstar.blogspot.com, for all to see. We’ll try to keep editing down to a minimum but remember this is a family paper, despite what I get away with running in this column every week.
If this gets popular enough we may go for an entire separate blog or a forum or something.
For someone interested in conservation, you can’t always have that perfect “Free Willy” moment, and this sure beats flinging live lobsters across the produce isles at a Wal-Mart.