FU NPS

Wild Horse living at Assateague Island, MD

   If you've read enough of my posts you know I've been to a few national parks. I love public lands especially the parks. I've fallen in love with every national park I've been to whether it be Acadia in Maine or my dream park as a child: Yellowstone. As you would expect, I have great respect for the National Park System and the Department of the Interior. I envy park rangers that get to go to work every morning at some of the most beautiful places in the world.

   While talking to rangers is enjoyable and amazing scenery has been ingrained in my memory, what I most enjoy seeing are the animals. There really is nothing like being stuck in a bear jam. When a bear is near the road in Yellowstone, you can bet traffic is backed up. likewise, I've been stuck in the middle of the road more than once because a herd of bison were crossing at their own pace.

   I have been so lucky to have seen so many big animals from Grizzlies, wolves, and elk to mule deer and alligators all in national parks. While I may not get as excited about a porcupine as I would a grizz, seeing one in Acadia National Park was still the highlight of the trip.

  One species I have yet to see out west are wild horses. Technically, I did see wild horses At Assateague Island in Maryland. The horses are wild. They have to deal with summer heat, winter cold, and biting insects. I purposely went to Assateague to see the horses. I loved seeing them and got great pictures as they  fed in the campground. However, I did not cross wild horses off of my bucket lisy.

  I still want to see wild horses roaming freely in the west. While it was cool to see the horses on the beach (they actually will swim in the ocean) I want to see mustangs on the prairie or herds roaming the sage brush.  

Which leads me to my gripe and the title of this post. While I normally support the National Park Service (NPS, I'm guessing you can figure out what the FU stands for in the title) I am devastated by one of their new mandates.

   Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota has a herd of wild horses. They were there when the park was created. The park service did not put them there. The herd lives in the southern part of the South Unit of the park fairly close to Interstate I-94. In 1970 the horses were designated under the title of "part of the historical setting". 

Recently, as in over the winter of 2022-23, the park changed the designation of the horses from part of the historical setting to "Livestock". Because of this, they want to remove ALL wild horses from Theodore Roosevelt NP. On average, before this change, the park wanted to keep the size of the herd at about fifty animals. However, since horses don't have any predators, that number has skyrocketed to over 200. 

   I fully understand there are too many horses on the landscape and some should be removed. Usually the normal way to remove them is to see if any Indian Reservations want them. After that, they can be sold at action. There have been ways to try to control the population such as contraceptives to the mares. Controls like this have worked with limited success.

   As I said, it saddens me that the Park Service wants to get rid of the entire herd. They say that native plants will benefit from the horse removal. Well, the horses have been there a hundred years, I think the grass has adjusted. I also believe that they are part of our national heritage, and specifically to North Dakota's heritage.

   Over the winter the park introduced three different plans ranging from giving contraceptives to ALL the mares and have the population slowly die out to a more radical approach of rounding up ALL the horses within two years. 

   This breaks my heart. I had planned on going to Theodore Roosevelt NP this summer. The plan was to go to Custer State Park and Wind Cave then take the six hour drive to Theo. I want to see the landscape and the park does have Bison and Bighorn Sheep but I am really only going there to see the horses. Custer has a ton of wildlife as do the Badlands and Wind Cave, but none of those places have wild horses. Theodore Roosevelt is the closest western place in the US to see wild horses, and they are taking that away.

   The people that are fighting to keep the horses say the horses draw visitors to the park. The park service disagrees saying enough people go to see the bison and sheep. I can tell you from a personal point of view, the park service is wrong. The only reason for me to drive to Theo is to see the horses. The horses will still be there this summer but I do not want to give my money to a park that is actively trying to remove them so I may not be going after all. 

   Pretty much the  only people that want t get rid of the horses are the National Park Service. The governor, the state legislature, and all the local businesses want to keep the horses. The governor can request the park keep the horses but he doesn't have jurisdiction. Though the park is in North Dakota, the park is run by the Dept of the Interior, so the Feds have the final say. During public hearings they made it clear they do not want the horses despite public outcry to keep them.

    The final decision has not been made yet but things look bleak. I can only hope that the park gives in to the will of the people and allows a small herd to represent the past to live in the park. There is no doubt that Theodore Rooosevelt himself would have wanted horses to live in a park named after him. Unless a decision is made that allows wild horses to roam freely in the park the Park System can go F themselves!

  

Wild Horses living on a sanctuary in South Dakota
They had been captured, abused, and lucky
enough to make it back to this sanctuary

On the Schneid

    My morning started with my friend Tiffany tagging me on Facebook with the photo to the left. To be funny I wrote back that I don't need to pretend to catch big fish. I also sent photos of two stripers in the thirty pound range to prove my point...Bad Karma

   After I ate breakfast I went trout fishing at a recently stocked pond in Seekonk. There were two guys fishing near the dam. I've fished this pond multiple times and this is the area the trout usually hang out because of the current. I didn't intrude on them and fished off to the right. I was close enough to hear they were getting hits on their lures but the fish weren't taking them.

   Eventually, one of the guys moved closer to his buddy, so I moved within casting distance of the current. Soon enough one of the guys hooked a brook trout, then another. The other guy hooked a really good size brookie roughly fifteen inches. This went on for a little over an hour. At this point they started talking to me so I fished close enough to chat with them. All three of us were casting in the same spot and they were catching trout and I was not. I got three hits, but nothing to show for it. They  ended up with seven trout. I got the proverbial skunk.

   Today was the third time I've gone trout fishing in the last week. I've yet to catch a fish. The first time I went, last Tuesday, there were about six guys fishing and no one caught a fish. Its's easier to take a blank when everyone else is too. Either the fish aren't biting or more likely the fish aren't in front of you. Today, that was not the case, it would have been humiliating if it weren't so funny. I've been on the other side of the equation where I've had fish right in front of me and I was the only one catching. Today, that role was reversed. I may as well have watched a fishing show without a rod in my hand, because either way I watched fish being caught while I had a goose egg to show.

   On my ride home I could hear Chris Berman (from ESPN Sunday Night Primetime doing highlights) talking about teams on losing streaks being "on the schneid" Usually it would be the Jets or Colts on a five game losing streak being on the schneid. So for better or worse, my fishing season is starting off like the Jets with Zach Wilson! 

Black Headed Gulls

 Just a quick post about a bird I saw yesterday. 

   Before I went to the Ocean State Bird Club event "Birds and Beer" last night at Whalers I did some quick birding. It was brutally windy and (surprise) I was wearing shorts. I stopped at Scarborough Beach in Narragansett to see if any of the four reported Black Headed Gulls were around. I saw three of them. Two of them were molted and had their full black head. The other one still had some feathers that needed to grow in. Black Headed Gulls though rare in the United States are a regular winter visitor at Scarborough Beach because they are attracted to sewer treatment plants. There is one such plant next to the south end of the beach by the Sheep's pen.

Robbins Museum of Archeology and Ethnology

This arrowhead may be the oldest
manmade thing I have ever seen. 
The oldest thing I can remember 
seeing before this is a vessel from 
Mesopotamia from 5000 BC 

    On Saturday Laurie and went to a place I had only found out about on Friday. It is an archeology museum in Middleboro, MA. I was just trying to find something to do on Saturday when I stumbled upon this small museum. It is just a short distance off of I-495 in Middleboro. I told Laurie about it on Saturday morning and she was game. Since I'd never heard of this museum and it was in Middleboro and not in Boston, Providence, or Worcester, I didn't have high expectations.

   The museum was easy to find following along with my GPS. Parking was also easy because there was a lot directly across the street. The admission was five dollars. When we walked into the main door, we were greeted by a very nice cashier and also an extremely enthusiastic docent.  Though the walk through the museum is self-guided, the docent went into the first room with us and explained a bunch  of stuff about artifacts. The docent, a retired teacher, was happy to tell us about some of the stone tools in cases. It didn't take us long to realize that this woman was going to teach us a lot more than if we just walked around ourselves.

   The museum is full of artifacts from Native Americans that lived in southeastern MA from right after the Ice Age up until settlers wiped them out. There are only three or four rooms so it wouldn't take too long to see everything. However, we were pleasantly intrigued and interested in the stuff we were seeing. There were plenty of arrowheads, axes, and spears on display. There was also Native American pottery from stone to clay. There were interesting things such as stones to weigh down cast nets and clam shells used as utensils. There is a model of a Native settlement that was found in MA. The settlement was excavated and the model is to scale of what it would have looked like.

   The docent came back to one of the rooms and found us. She asked us if we minded her "annoying" us, to which I told her she can annoy us all she wants. We were really enjoying her talking to us. It is one thing to see an ax but quite another to have her tell you it isn't just an ax. She pointed to a dark spot on the stone that was discolored. The discoloration was tree sap. A Native during King Philips War poured sap on the stone, lit it on fire, and threw it into a house as the original Molotov Cocktail. If she wouldn't have been in the room, we would have had no idea that particular ax was used to light up a settler's home during the bloodiest war ( by percentage of the population) in American history.

   The coolest thing in the museum is a Mastodon tusk  found by a fisherman in Mt Hope Bay. I have to say, the museum, though small is really interesting. 

Come on, I had to take a photo of this guys 
name, especially after the title of my last post.

   However, what I think the coolest thing about the museum is that real archeologists are in the museum. We talked to one archeologist for thirty plus minutes. He knew so much and had been on multiple digs. Somehow we got talking about Vikings, which turned out to be his area of expertise. We talked about sites in Greenland, Iceland, and Newfoundland. We ( I asked questions and he answered them) discussed Eric the Red and Leif Ericson. He showed pictures on his phone of sites he had been to in those countries. I could have talked (listened) to him for hours. We did find out from him that the museum holds talks the first Friday of each month. It is pretty special to have a one on one conversation with someone with so much knowledge.

Mastodon Tusk

   If you get a chance I highly recommend you visit it. It is well worth five dollars. It is only open on Saturdays from 10-2.  You would probably only need an hour to see everything. If you have any questions, why not talk to the archeologist that are there? It is pretty rare to talk to someone that studied these things all of their life. They've been to the digs and understand how native people truly lived.

https://www.massarchaeology.org/

This is the ax used as a Molotov Cocktail

A dug out canoe

Does Size Matter (when it comes to fishing rods)

 

One of my trout rods. 
6 foot ML Shimano Clarus 
Shimano Sedona Reel
6 pound Trilene  XL
 

         The following is a true story.

   I was at Bass Pro Shops in Foxboro for the Grand Opening. Before they let customers in, Bob Kraft and Bass Pro founder Johnny Morris gave speeches as did Tom Brady. Multiple Bass Pros such as Jimmy Houston and Roland Martin were there to sign autographs. There were also lesser know fishing pros there. 

   One of the pros was there the whole following week, though I can not remember his name. I decided I was in the market for a new rod to catch largemouth bass. There were two different rods I liked so I decided to ask this pro for advice between the two. Both of the rods were seven foot medium heavy rods of different brands, one was slightly cheaper than the other. 

   I walked up to the pro after rehearsing my questions in my head so as not to studder. I have a tendency to studder when words in my head move faster than my mouth. I asked my questions and he answered them. The pro was about the same size as me. We looked each other in the eyes straight across from each other. After he answered my questions, he got a little closer and said " You and I aren't the tallest guys in the world. Are you sure you'd be comfortable with a seven foot rod?

  Okay, I'm going to start a whole new paragraph before I tell you what I said. I own a lot of rods for a lot of different types of fishing. My two carp rods are really eight foot surf rods made to catch stripers. My actual striper rod at the time was a ten foot Fenwick matched  with a Shimano Spheros 12000 reel. The reel weighs 28 ounces. After casting that set up for an hour you know you've worked out. I already owned multiple six foot-six inch and seven foot freshwater rods. So yeah, I said "I'll be just fine casting a seven foot rod".

   That memory still makes me laugh. Up until that moment, I'd never thought about the size of a fishing pole versus the size of me. I needed a big rod for big fish, and smaller rods for little fish (like trout), and medium rods for medium fish like largemouth bass, schoolies, and pickerel. Where fish live matters too. You need a stronger rod for largemouth bass so you can pull them out of weeds than you do for smallmouth bass which live in much more open water. I can get away with a much lighter rod fishing from my kayak in a salt pond for striped bass than I can at Point Judith from shore. In the salt pond, a thirty five inch striper can pull me around until it gets tired, where as that same fish at Point Judith is going to rub the line against rocks and use the waves to its advantage.

   I was reminded of the above story when I was at the Springfield Sportsmen Show with my friend Dave Pickering. He did a seminar about carp. After the seminar Dave was asked what size rods he uses to catch trophy carp. He told them he uses twelve foot rods specifically made for carp. This is true, I've seen him use those rods dozens of times. As I've said above, my carp rods are eight foot saltwater rods. The reason Dave uses the twelve footers is because he can get leverage on a big fish. They also cast a method ball and sinker more than half way across a football field. 

  I use my eight footers simply because they work for me and I see no reason to buy specialty carp rods. Now, I have to admit, my biggest carp is just over twenty eight pounds, while Dave has caught multiple fish over forty pounds and scores over thirty. However, I am quite confident that if I hook into a huge carp, if I lose it, it won't be because my rod is too short. Both of us use twenty pound test Big Game line, so the chance of the line breaking is the same for both of us. Which really isn't much of a chance anyway if the drag is set where it should be on the reel. 

   On the other end of the fishing spectrum, some guys love fishing with ultra-light rods for trout. Many guys use 4'6" rods and five foot rods that are ultra light. They like the feeling of a fish bending the rod. I use heavier rods. My trout rods are six foot medium light action. They are a foot and a half taller than what some guys use and two actions heavier than ultra-light.

    My medium-light action rods can cast a country mile further than those little rods. They can cast heavier lures much easier also. Another benefit is I can reel in a fourteen inch trout much quicker. The ultra- light guys consider it sporting to catch the fish on lighter line and a lighter rod. However, I think its more more sporting to get the fish in quicker instead of fighting to exhaustion if you are going to release it. My favorite method to catch trout with spinning gear is with a casting bubble and fly. The bubble when filled with water weighs quite a bit. My medium light rods can cast it a very long distance. You would have a tough time casting a bubble/fly with a small ultra light. Sure you could do it, but it wouldn't be a lot of fun.

   When it comes to rods, it is about preference within reason. You wouldn't want to fish for bluegills with a big surf rod. It wouldn't be any fun catching nine inch fish on it. Conversely, you wouldn't want your every day rod to catch stripers and bluefish to be fitted with four pound breaking strengths line. So does size matter? Well you really don't want it too small, and you probably don't want it too big. What you are looking for is a rod that is the right fit for your needs. Sound about right?

    

Photo Upgrade #1 for 2023. Hopefully one of many

 

Cackling Goose

 I had a fairly good day planned for this afternoon. I had to run an errand and go to Boost Mobile in Woonsocket because my phone was acting up. After that I was going to the Foxboro YMCA for a swim. Once done with my swim, I was going to Bass Pro Shops to get the one lure I actually need, Yellow Coachdog Roostertails. 

   As I was getting back in my car with a phone that now works in Woonsocket I got a rare bird alert. A Cackling Goose was at a ballfield in Ryan Park in North Kingstown. I've seen Cackling Geese before and I've gotten photos of them. None of the photos are very good. My best was at a pond in Middletown where these geese were pretty far away. I figured geese in a Little League field should be much closer.

  Woonsocket to North Kingstown seems like a long distance, but once I got on Rt 99, GPS told me that it was only a 24 minute drive. I may have gone over the speed limit, but so was everyone else on Route 295 and Rt  4.

   

   Once I got to the ballfields, there weren't many geese to sort through to find it. Cackling geese look like Canada Geese. The only difference is they are much smaller and their bill is much shorter and pointy. Sometimes the back is silvery, but the color pattern is the same as Canada Geese. They can be a tough ID. The wind was brutal despite the temperature being in the high forties. 

   I found what I thought was the Cackling so I called over to the other guy with binoculars that "I think I have it". The other guy was a birder I'm friends with named Chris Veale. He thought he had it too, and we had the same bird. The Cackling made the ID and photos very easy. Most of the time it was the goose closest to us in the flock. A few other birders showed up including another friend Allison O'Conner. We watched the goose for about 15 minutes. The majority of the flock left to swim in the pond across the street. We decided we weren't going to get any better photos. All we would have done was make the geese swim away from us ruining it for birders that showed up after we left. 

   

You can see how much smaller than the 
Canada Geese

While I was heading home, I got another alert that a Snow Goose was at a field in Lincoln. That bird was right on my ride home, so I figured why the hell not. When I pulled over, the Snow Goose was right next to the road. However, there was so much brush between the road and field, I couldn't get a photo from my car. As expected, the geese walked away from the road when I got out. It got a few photos from an opening in the brush. The geese moved fifty or sixty feet from me and started feeding again.  I left them alone despite Snow Goose probably being my favorite waterfowl.

 

Snow Goose

 I was three miles from DJ's mom's house so I called her up to see if I could go over and play with her three dogs. When I got there, I was surprised with a Christmas present. It was a nice sweatshirt. I was touched, and really appreciated the gesture and love the sweatshirt!

  So needless to say, swimming will have to wait until tomorrow and the Roostertails are still at Bass Pro.  It was well worth the delay. I had a great afternoon

Swimming!

   

   Completely bored out of my mind after months of back pain one day in December I went birding at Snake Den Farm. Snake Den is a short drive from my house and the birding is along a dirt road. I took my time and watched every step so not to inflame my already injured back. 

   While I was there I ran into a birder I had never seen before. At this point, I'm surprised when I meet a new birder in Rhode Island. After all these years of birding, and birders being a small group, I seem to have met most everyone. He was much older than me with a long beard. We (he) started talking and the conversation dragged on far longer than I would have liked. My back hurts far worse standing in one spot than it does walking slowly and looking around. Finally I told him about my bad back after making obvious positions to stretch it or make it more comfortable. My hope here was for him to let me go on my way and he on his.

    Instead, he started talking about his own medical issues. He told me he was 88 years old. I never would have guess, he didn't look much over 65. He didn't walk with a hunched back or any limp. His gait at full walk was much bigger than mine. To put it plainly, for 88 years old, he was in great shape. He told me that he had back issues the year before. He said it affected his legs and the pain was so bad he was confined to a wheelchair. He thought there wasn't any hope to recover. He then told me that he started swimming at the Y. He said, believe it or not, that he went from wheelchair bound to pain free in a month. He said it multiple times how great swimming was for him.

   I put this in the back of my mind. I was happy for him and I believed him. I also thought that everyone is different and whatever was wrong with his back probably wasn't what was wrong with mine. I still hadn't been diagnosed at that point so still didn't know what the hell was wrong with me.

   Obviously I know swimming is one of the best exercises you can do because it is good cardio and doesn't put any pressure on your joints. However, I was pretty sure I had a bulging disk ( actually I have since been diagnosed with three). I was not sure if  swimming would put pressure on the disk(s) and pinch the nerves even more. I suspected that the motion could and would inflame the already inflamed muscles and joints even worse. So I thought about swimming but wasn't going to until I had a real diagnosis and I got permission from an orthopedic AND my physical therapist Ryan. Ryan has been great and I believe he knows more about backs, spines, and nerves than most doctors. But I also wanted a specialized ortho who saw the multiple MRI's and X-Rays to give me the okay too.

   I got the okay from both in late December. Ryan told me multiple times not to overdue it. He also said if I go a lot I should have at least a second stroke, again so I didn't overdue it. Laurie and I both got memberships to the Foxboro YMCA which is the closest indoor pool to her house at the end of 2022. 

   We went swimming the first day we got our membership. The pool is a standard twenty five yard (or meter) pool with six wide lanes. Sometimes the pool is used for swimming lessons, water aerobics or family time. The times are posted a week in advance on what the pool is used for. When all six lanes are open for lap swim that is when I go. Each lane is wide enough for two people. 

   The first day I went I did five laps. It took a lot out of me and I wasn't sure how my body would react. I took a couple of muscle relaxers when I went to bed because I could feel some throbbing back there. The next morning when I woke up my back felt better than it had in months. No joke, it certainly wasn't healed but most of the pain was gone.

   I was pretty happy with five laps and my goal was to inch my way up to ten. I did not want any setbacks so I wasn't going to go immediately from five to ten. Also, I planned on stopping at ten laps once I finally reached it because that seemed like enough for a workout. 

   So I kept going back to the pool as often as I could. Life gets in the way so I've been averaging two to three times a week. It works out really well that I have physical  therapy in the morning. I go from there to the pool because there are usually lap hours between 12-2:30 pm. 

   My back is feeling so much better. The pattern seems to be I'm a little sore on pool day but the next two to three days my back feels great. Sometimes it doesn't even get sore on pool day. I really enjoy the swimming and look forward to going. I also started using my snorkel in the pool. My form sucks and keeping my head head above water and breathing is something I will eventually need to work on. But for now, using the snorkel I can keep going without stopping to catch my breathe. My logic is for now it is better to work on my cardio than my swimming technique. 

   Getting up to ten laps was much easier than I expected. I went from five laps to 7 to 10 in a couple of sessions. I did fifteen laps today and when I was done I was tired. Which is a good thing. I missed exercise

   So I have to say, I'm with the old guy that told me that swimming got out of that wheelchair within a month. After a little over a month of swimming my back is feeling so much better. I've had full days sometimes consecutively where it doesn't hurt at all. I feel a lot stronger. I can feel the muscles in my abs and core which had already been getting stronger due to PT. I strongly suggest if you have a bad back to ask your doctor if swimming might help. It has done wonders for me.

    I'd been dealing with back pain for so long that when I had my first days that were pain free felt different and wrong. I could not believe the feeling of not being in pain. Really and truly, it was an odd sensation one I am grateful to have. I have been miserable for eight months now, and finally over the last month I've gotten my spark back. I am out of my funk and no longer depressed. I don't feel like I'm bringing Laurie down when I'm around her. I even made some dumb jokes this week that made her laugh. I think swimming for a month has gotten me to the point that I probably won't have any real setbacks and am on the road to healing.

   Note- For the last few months my health related problems have been dominating my life. As I said above, I've been miserable. Because my back, diabetes, and neuropathy have been all I've thought about it gets mentioned in my blog posts quite often. From my point of view anything I've done since June has had to be planned out either because of my diet or my back. My one camping trip this summer required planning on when to take my muscle relaxers. lying in the back seat of Laurie's car to ease the length of the ride, among other precautions. And I'm sure you are sick of me starting every post with a mention of my back. Trust me, it is as tiresome for me to write as it is for you to read. I know I have a long way to go until I'm fully healed even though I am mostly pain free. Ryan told me today that one of the muscles in my back is going to take a long time to "heal" and "relax" because it was literally spasming  for months without rest.   All that being said, as long as I'm going in the right direction, I want to put that part of my life behind me. I'm stuck with the diabetes, but honestly it wasn't hard to change my diet. So.. from this point forward, I'm hoping to start making memories again, and there will by very little mention of my back or my health. I seem to be in very little pain when I drive so I'm going to start doing the things that I thought of over the winter... Let the games begin!!!!!!!!!!!