A New Hike in Pawtuxent State Park

This weekend was our first blast of nice warm weather, and we managed to spend most of it outside. 

Saturday was Zimbabwean Independence Day, and we brought dad to a celebratory picnic.











There was a lot of meaty food, which dad loved, and a lot of really nice people. We had a nice, social time, made some new Zimbabwean music friends and played some mbira music ourselves. 

After such a social day, Sunday was the perfect day to just get away somewhere with the dogs. Florian's favorite part of Pawtuxent State Park was closed all winter, so he was excited to find it open.

The park is huge and goes along the Pawtuxent River, which at this point is wide and calm, like a lake. 













Lots of really cool rocks to climb and explore, or just sit on in the sun. 

This is a popular area for fisher people, so we passed a few of them enjoying their idyllic, harmless, peaceful pastime of sticking a hook through an innocent creature's lip and yanking it into a medium in which it cannot breathe, all for sport. I also picked up long tangled masses of fishing line just waiting for wildlife to die in, along with broken beer bottles and charming plastic containers that once held bait. 

Once we passed the fisher people on our way along the river, the trail got more wild and we saw no one. Time for the pups to go off leash and get nice and wet. 

Though we've been to the Pawtuxent many times and there's nothing particularly exciting about it, this hike had a particular joy to it. The warmth, the sun, and especially the remoteness of the trail as we got away from the parking lot, and the knowledge that the dogs cold run and get wet as much as they pleased, unmolested. 

Fozzie loves to chase sticks into the water, and Dahlia usually follows him. 


There was plenty of evidence of wildlife. 



We saw a bunch of trees that had been chewed through by beavers. My spirit does a little dance of triumph whenever I see evidence of beavers, those little keystone species whose labors create habitat for other species as they build natural dams that flood the banks in some areas and create variability and diversity in the riparian ecosystem. 












Another little triumph--we saw an enormous sneeks! 

Not a triumph for Florian, who is so terrified even of the harmless black water snakes--which he refers to, in the singular, as "a sneeks"--that he screamed like a girl and then stood behind me, clutching my shoulders and jumping up and down. 

But I enjoyed watching our coiled, hissing friend scoot into the water, as I contemplated the enormous number of mosquitoes he or she is no doubt responsible for eliminating. 

Far back along the trail, the river narrowed and became rocky and even more beautiful, 

and we had to watch out even more for sneeks because according to our resident expert, they love to hide in rocky areas near the water and just wait for him, ready to spring. 

No more sneeks though, just lots of mud so we had to throw some more sticks to get the dogs to rinse off. Fozzie was happy to oblige, but Dahlia had to be coaxed in, and then scrubbed.

Why is mud so much more appealing than clean water? We'll just never know.

But eventually, both dogs were rinsed and we returned to the car and returned home, everyone contented and sleepy.

This felt like a perfect way to spend Earth Day weekend, peacefully enjoying nature, getting muddy, and celebrating beavers. And running away from a sneeks! How did YOU celebrate Earth Day? 

Your tax dollars support wildlife slaughter

Today's post is dedicated to a little-known office in the U.S. Department of Agriculture that has been in the news lately due to some ill-advised Facebook posturing by one of its agents. Borrowing from my friend Jodi's practice on her excellent blog Heart Like a Dog, today I can't suppress a great big WTF about a Wyoming coyote trapper employed by the federal government who posted photos of his dogs torturing and killing a trapped coyote.

I wont post the photos here but you can see them at the links to the news coverage below. They reveal not just an indifference to suffering but a gleeful enjoyment of it that is nurtured by a certain element of American culture that would be right at home at a medieval spectacle of drawing and quartering. 

Have we evolved at all since then?

Any instance of animal suffering is intolerable but coyotes are just wild cousins of the dogs we love and I cannot fathom how it is that a large sector of the U.S. population--including a taxpayer funded federal office, "Wildlife Services," formerly known by the less euphemistic name Animal Damage Control--wants to exterminate them and even see them suffer.

Image courtesy of Predator Defense http://www.predatordefense.org/gallery.htm#thumb

When I worked for WildEarth Guardians in New Mexico I investigated this agency as part of my work to reform the Western public lands livestock industry. Many of the requests Wildlife Services receives to kill wildlife-- coyotes, wolves, prairie dogs--come from ranchers who see wild creatures as nothing more than competition to their stock. Using our tax dollars, Wildlife Services agents then go into the field and put out poison (which can be ingested by family dogs and of course any number of nontarget wildlife species), set cruel and undiscriminating leghold traps, shoot vast numbers of wolves and coyotes from helicopters, and gas mountain lion cubs in their dens. You can learn more about the 26 million animals killed between 2004 and 2011 at an annual taxpayer cost of $100 million here. 

The particular photos at issue were posted on Facebook by Jamie Olson, a Wildlife Services trapper from Wyoming who says he was only trying to impress his father with how well trained his dog was (to rip apart a coyote who was held immobile in a leghold trap). Fortunately, activists found the photos and demanded an investigation, and the Sacramento Bee is continuing its extraordinary ongoing expose on Wildlife Services with coverage of the incident. 

Image from Project Coyote http://www.projectcoyote.org/

To me it is absolutely irrelevant whether Olson was working for Wildlife Services when he took the photos, and it is irrelevant that Wildlife Services' official yarn is that it does not condone torture and all wildlife killing should be "humane." According to Gary Strader, a former Wildlife Services agent who turned into a whistleblower, such antics are commonplace among the people who work for this institution, and such an institution has no place among the entities we support with our tax dollars.

The fact is that the vast majority of American people love wildlife, and Wildlife Services still exists only because most people don't know about it. I have wished since I first found out about this office for some way to get the word out about what it does and generate a vast tide of public sentiment toward its reform. Perhaps these photos, and what they reveal about the depravity of an agency that hires the sort of person who tortures for sport, will generate that long-overdue momentum. 

And now that I have a blog and can post about it, and get all five of my readers to take action, well by jiminy change may be just around the corner!

I urge everyone to learn more and join efforts to defund and eliminate, or at least radically reform, this retrograde government subsidy to those who wish to destroy our natural heritage. WildEarth Guardians has a petition here and there is a Causes.com petition here, and the websites of WildEarth Guardians and Predator Defense offer more resources for getting involved.

Lessons from a trip to Guatemala

This heat wave and the power outages have reminded me of the time I spent in 2005 in Guatemala, volunteering at ARCAS, a wildlife rehabilitation center in the jungle of the Peten region in the north of Guatemala.

In many parts of the world, where heat and no easy way to regulate it are a part of life, people adapt their lifestyles. 
















In Guatemala it was hot, and we definitely felt the heat and the discomfort, but we adjusted the way we lived. We ate lots of fruit, napped or relaxed in the afternoon, swam in the lake often. 
 




I'm sure the animals were uncomfortable too, but that was what they knew and it was just how they lived, with no complaints.


 


The stray dogs who hung around the wildlife rehabilitation center were covered with ticks, but they were full of vitality and they enjoyed hanging out with all the volunteers, who loved animals and gave them food scraps. 









Don't get me wrong, life is not easy for stray dogs in Guatemala, or anywhere. Most of them are hungry and poorly regarded by the humans around them. 














It was difficult to see this suffering and feel so powerless to alleviate it. In spite of that though, there was something so magical about that trip.

There was a feeling of spontaneity, of freedom from the thousand responsibilities of our regular lives that make it so impossible to just say yes! to potentially life-changing opportunities as they arise. 







Of being fully in the moment, so if I wanted to take a little street dog with me back to my hotel, knowing I would find some way to do right by her but not knowing how, I would do it.















On that trip, I was somehow free from the usual anxiety and sense of responsibility and the 1000 buts that generally get in the way of just following my heart.

 









With the result that in addition to volunteering at ARCAS, I learned to SCUBA dive in Honduras, disregarded warnings about shootouts near the border and in Guatemala city and traveled all over, alone, via bus, saw the incredible ruins at Tikal and climbed to the top of an ancient Mayan temple to watch the sunrise, 





cooked a vegan meal for a bunch of musicians in Antigua, volunteered at AWARE, Guatemala's no kill animal sanctuary, and rescued my god-dog Zula. 











Maybe a lack of the routine comforts we are used to puts us in a more spontaneous, risk-taking frame of mind. 

Maybe when we are away from the security blankets we normally cling to, we are forced to jump into the abyss and see what is there. Maybe the comforts of civilization and the familiar hold us back from our true potential, and every now and then we need to separate ourselves from the structures we are used to, in order to discover what we are capable of. 





Maybe--and excuse me as I give free reign for a moment to my inner apocalyptic wing nut--as the comforts of the familiar begin to break down with the advent of peak oil and widespread climate change, we will discover a forgotten spark of spontaneity that animates our relationships and restores our vitality and creativity. 

And more than any capacity for technological innovation, it is this potential that gives me hope. 

Surviving the apocalypse

When we returned home from the Apocalyptic birthday party last weekend, we were preparing for a hot night spent reading by candlelight until we could somehow feel comfortable enough to get some fitful sleep. 

As it turned out, the power was restored in our house by the time we got home, though there was such incredible damage near my sister's house it took longer for her. 






We were so happy to have our air conditioning and our refrigerator back, but I couldn't help thinking, won't be long before it happens again. And a time after that, and a time at some point where blackouts are pretty common because we've extracted all the oil and natural gas we can easily get to, and the rest is being rationed, or is so expensive that we can only use it sparingly.










Or we get powerful storms so regularly that being without power becomes a way of life.  

Is it just me, or does it feel like that time is coming? That a fundamental shift is occurring--in weather patterns, and also in the forms and amount of energy that are available to us--and that we are lucky to have at least a little bit of time to prepare. 


It was hard to imagine, while we had no power, a week or more without it. It has been just so bloody hot, and it's hard to think or do anything--especially the busy things we're used to doing, the social engagements the house to refinance the music to practice the writing to do--without the comforts we're used to. 





I also hate to think of the dogs being so uncomfortable, as they love to lie right in front of the fan or the AC when its like this.

But in other parts of the world, discomforts like heat and a lack of appliances with which to make it more bearable are a way of life.  

 
People live with it, because that's just the way it is. And despite the discomfort, there were certain things about the power outage that were enjoyable.











At the birthday party, people had a bemused and relaxed attitude and there was less pressure, somehow, to make it a perfect experience. 

I've gotten to spend more time with my sister, as she came over a couple of times to use my computer and cool off once my power was restored. 


















We even got to have a cookout in my sister's backyard, and Florian got a huge kick out of cooking up everything in our freezer to save it from going bad.

There were stories about food stores doing the same thing--barbecuing up all their perishables in the parking lot and feeding people for free.  

Disaster often brings out the best in us, and people--like dogs--are amazingly adaptable. 

I don't mean to sound like a survivalist wingnut with prophecies of doom and gloom. I just can't help thinking that things are going to change.

How about you? Do you and your dogs keep a basement stocked with barrels of drinking water, canned food, and firearms? Or do you think our ingenuity will get us through, no matter what?

There goes the neighborhood

When I was looking for a house 4 1/2 years ago, my dream was to find a place where I could bike to work in the heart of Washington DC but still live surrounded by trees, woods, nature, and wildlife. 

I found my house. It was bounded on the back by woods and on one side by an empty lot, which was split off from my house's property and put on the market separately by my house's previous owners.

The lot next door

My house is perfect. I've lived there all these years with my eccentric nudist Swiss dude and my succession of poorly trained, impulsive, loud foster dogs of widely varying dispositions, and no one has ever said a peep. Most of my neighbors are far enough away that they're not bothered by my menagerie, and the ones who are close are for the most part mellow, friendly animal lovers.

Among my greatest joys is the sanctuary and wildness, not to mention privacy, of my backyard, where I can garden, train dogs, sunbathe, and make noise in any state of dress or undress without fear of judgement or of imposing on neighbors who may have different values and interests. 

The property next door has been on the market all these years, and no one has bought it because it is narrow, steep, has several large trees that can't be removed per Takoma Park's tree regulations, and sports a cool asking price of $240,000.

Help!

Now, some people are looking at the property. They came over to talk to me when I was in the back with Fozzie the other day, planting an azalea and some blackberries. 

In the course of the conversation I realized that Our Worst Nightmare has a possibility of being realized in the property next door. 

No, the prospective buyer did not want to build a meth lab, a crack house, a brothel, or an adult video emporium. 


It's worse, way worse. 


The woman who spoke to me, who came with her two toddlers in tow, one of whom kept sticking her hands through my fence and ran away screaming when Fozzie barked once at the intrusion, wants to build a daycare. 

Not to be mean or to give the impression that I don't love kids, but I can't imagine anything more horrifying.

Anything more destructive to the peace and sanctuary of this little pocket of wildness, than the screams of dozens of little darlings as they scamper amok through these formerly wildlife-rich woods, or the disapproving glares of Takoma Park soccer moms every time I foster a new poorly socialized fireball, or fail to stop Fozzie from barreling into the backyard after a squirrel like a raging tornado of poor impulse control, or every time Florian steps onto the back porch for a smoke clad only in his dance belt.  


The good news is that the realtor says any proposed development of a commercial property would require special permits and hearings at which neighbors would be able to testify.



And while I welcome that opportunity, I also fear that the powers that be will not look sympathetically upon a pit bull rescuer and naked Swiss guy going up against people who are of course doing it all for the children. 


So in the hopes of obviating the need for me to testify, I'm considering various tactics for convincing the prospective buyers that they really don't want to put a daycare on that lot. Here are a few ideas:

• Explosives. Imagine Florian and his son Quentin's delight when I lift the restrictions on rockets, firecrackers, and small thermonuclear devices in the back yard. Wildlife might not like it in the short term, but they'll thank me when buyers beat a hasty retreat.
  
• Ditch the positive training, at least when people are looking at the property. Adopt a communication style with dogs and partner that relies heavily on confrontation and loud expletives.
  
• Scrap metal, and old cars, left to molder, randomly scattered on sidewalk in front of my property and one next door.
  
• More nudity.

What are YOUR favorite ideas for scaring off prospective buyers?