SR 18 crosses Taylor Creek on the east side of town, as the road to the Converse Cemetery, and to Mier (pronounced "mere", for physical reasons, but mostly because we're just stupid. Like everyone who insists on pronouncing Favre "farve") splits to the north.

On a wire north, set back because of the intersection, sat a male red tail, who I've seen in and around since summer. Oh, sure, how can I tell? Well, never in my lifetime, but they are territorial, and there's been one in this territory for about eight months, and counting.

His plumage was resplendent, gorgeous, a healthy glow as we emerge from over three weeks in an icebox. The door opened today, with temps above freezing, but not enough to lift much snow, as the sunshine was was just above the low clouds.

You have wintered well to date, lovely friend.

We were up the road to Pearson's Mill.

Into the SRA, the road goes downhill to the south, then turns abruptly on the dolomite cliff, 15 - 25 feet above the lake, and follows along it west to the boat launch area. (Dolomite is much the same as limestone. The difference is the major element - mineral - in limestone is calcite, and dolomite features magnesium. Yellow to brown, while limestone is grey.) The road west hasn't been plowed, and I've been parking at the bottom of the county road and walking back to the launch area, then back and up the grade to the entrance sign, a very good exercise, with the elevation changes.

Walking in today I came on a clester of grey birds, dozens, working and swarming the trees ten, twenty and thirty feet uphill. Dancing in the trees.

They had those beautiful orange breasts.

Last summer I got hung up on a little grey bird with an orange breast for several days, then saw it fly down a swale.

Eastern Bluebird.

It is confusing, as females can display this grey coloration. But the larger consideration is the angle of observation (you are officially spared the term "incidence", which means so many things, and I lack the energy to describe this usage), and like the decidedly blue bird I finally saw last summer, they all hid blue except for the occasional minute flash, which I couldn't believe.

What gave these hidden beauties, all three or so dozen, away wasn't a break in the clouds, but those little lilly-white butts.

Only a naturenut can appreciate a bird for its butt.

Even stashed under three inches of crusted snow, my puppy managed to find stinking rotted fish, which infuses everything near it with a godawful stench, doesn't wash out, and makes the trip home in a little truck cab unbearable.

And there were two deer carcasses the dogs found, left by fuckheaded slaughter assholes who field strip the animals and leave the carcass in a ditch.

Hunter-gatherers began to be displaced about 8000 years ago by farmers. The few extant today are found in the most remote areas of the tropics, where an abundance of vegetation and wildlife can support them. Ain't much of that. Ain't many of them.

And the myth of the American hunter is truly a myth. Lewis & Clark's fabled expedition was nearly starved to failure because the hunters they hired flat couldn't hunt.

The people who denuded our prairies, here in Indiana and west, cleared land and plowed and planted. Most didn't own a gun. The forest and grassland they levelled held no game, anyway.

Check it: there are more whitetail deer in Indiana now than in 1830.

Which presents wildlife managers with a dilemma: how accommodate the five million people using land available only to wildlife 180 years ago?

Uhm, kill the the animals.

This is the only answer found acceptable by IDNR managers, who choose to allow slaughter in Indiana State Parks, supposed sanctuaries for all of natural Indiana, because they can't manage the herds they created.

And that perpetuates the fuckskulls who throw carcasses in ditches.

And walking brain-disease breeding laboratories who don't track the animals they shoot. I find dead deer, see them, or my dogs come up with parts all winter.

Seriously, what are these stains on humanity about?

There are many, many people who hunt responsibly, who view a day outdoors as time well spent. But what about the "people" Robert Twigger writes of in The Extinction Club? Those who spend tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot endangered species, and more, much more, in hope of killing the last of the species?

Hunting is a dying fetish in this country, and should be. There are better ways to manage wildlife than just fucking kill it.

Hunting will outlive me. So I'll always have decaying animal matter to enjoy.

How do you like yours?