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Here’s what’s worth reading today, Friday, January 22, 2021:
Small Texas lakes are hidden gems in big bass fishing pursuits
Bigfoot hunting season: Legislative stunt or tourism promotion?
An Oklahoma lawmaker has filed a bill to create a hunting season for Bigfoot. But plenty of Oklahomans are already out scouring the woods for the creature, hunting season or not.
D.W. Lee of the Mid-America Bigfoot Research Center doesn’t use the name Bigfoot. He prefers “the creature.” Lee has been studying and hunting the creature for decades.
“A mix between an orangutan and a human,” he said. “I’ve had 26 encounters that I can say was actually a Bigfoot.”
But when Lee heard about state Rep. Justin Humphrey’s bill to create an official Bigfoot hunting season, he was anything but thrilled.
“The efforts of the people out there actually being serious about this – it really hampers us,” Lee said.
Biden administration targets hunters with regulations on Day One
In a fact sheet released to the heads of relevant agencies, titled “President-elect Biden’s Day One Executive Actions Deliver Relief for Families Across America Amid Converging Crises,” the administration pledged to examine or instate changes regarding union jobs, advancing environmental justice and combatting climate change.
“These actions are rooted in the rightful recognition of the fact that our planet, our lands, our air, our water, and our communities do not belong to corporations, lobbyists, or government institutions–they belong to us, the people, and protecting them is essential,” Sierra Club Legislative Director Melinda Pierce said Wednesday.
“President-elect Biden is taking historic action on day one to advance his agenda — including signing 15 executive actions and asking agencies to take steps in an additional two areas,” incoming White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki wrote in a statement. “This compares to two day one executive actions from Biden’s four predecessors in the White House combined.”
Among the list of agency actions to be looked at are two controversial rules that loosened restrictions for America’s hunters and farmers — one removing the gray wolf from the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and the other removing 2015 regulatory provisions that prohibited certain sport hunting practices “otherwise permitted by the State of Alaska” in its 10 national preserves.
Though legal under state law, critics and conservationists said the revised June 2020 “Alaska; Hunting and Trapping in National Preserves” rule was cruel to wildlife.
Hunter cited $10K, charged over illegally harvested 12-point buck in Illinois
A man has been fined and charged following an investigation by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources Conservation Police. Officials say on January 12 they finished an investigation on a hunter from Wonder Lake.
The hunter, who isn’t being identified, illegally harvested a 12-point buck whitetail deer 42 minutes after legal shooting time according to officials.
The hunter was issued a $10,000 civil penalty per statue for the assessed value and charged with unlawful take of whitetail deer, deer hunting by the aid of bait, unlawfully hunting between 1/2 hour after sunset and 1/2 hour before sunrise, hunting on lands without permission of owner, unlawfully archery hunting within 100 yards of an inhabited dwelling(s), destroy real property of another while hunting, failure to tag deer immediately upon kill, no valid deer permit (permit only valid on property where permission to hunt has been obtained) and unlawful feeding/baiting of wildlife.
Officials say this is the fourth time this hunter has been cited for similar wildlife and trespassing violations by the IDNR Conservation Police. The most recent for hunting with the aid of bait on a different property in December according to police.
How Texas hunting went exotic
The main entrance to the Ox Ranch, about two hours west of San Antonio, has the look and feel of many entryways to grand Texas spreads. There’s a coyote fence made of cedar posts, a big metal gate controlled by a keypad, and, atop the arch you pass under, a black-steel tableau of wildlife, including two bucks with impressive racks and a wild turkey trotting by a patch of prickly pear cactus. It screams native Texas. But go beyond the gate, as I did one hot and hazy afternoon last summer, and you’ll soon come face-to-face with strange and majestic creatures transplanted from other worlds.
The first critter I spotted was a red stag, one of the planet’s largest deer species, native to Europe and Central Asia, with velvety antlers that branched toward the sky. He was contentedly chewing his cud as he lay next to a tall fence enclosing the 18,000-acre property—a jarring sight that just began to prepare me for the mile-long drive to the ranch headquarters.
From the front gate, I drove past a private airstrip and a large herd of dama gazelles, a slender kind of antelope that’s critically endangered in its native Sahara. Behind a row of guest cabins, several European fallow deer loitered beside the basketball and tennis courts. I slowed down to gawk at some especially strange-looking deer with matted fur and unusually long tails that were munching aquatic plants in a pair of shallow lakes. Called Père David’s deer, I later learned, these animals were extirpated from China more than a century ago, but the species held on in European zoos and royal menageries. The ones at the Ox Ranch seemed to be doing fine, just standing around, indifferent to my presence. When I parked my car at the palatial main lodge of limestone and wood, a kangaroo roused itself from the shade of a live oak and lazily bounded to a slightly safer distance.
“So what’s on our agenda today?” asked my assigned guide, an affable twenty-year-old named Dylan Sivells, who wore a camouflage shirt, a pair of shorts, and flip-flops. “We huntin’?”
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