No hunting in my county on Sundays, so off to the mountains and its trout streams we went. Have you paid attention to your land and how it is affected by drought and/or monsoon thruout this year? Have you reached down and felt the earth with your hands, dug beneath its thatch, smelled the dirt? Have you watched nature in its actions to grow her food plots whether in dry or whether in wet? Did you think thru how you can apply this to your own land, to your forests, to your creeks, to your plots, to conserve or control moisture as she does? Have you seen how she responds to her own failings thru actions of the land? Can you apply it to your own future management? If not, while waiting on that buck, think these things, and devise a plan to mimic her.
Here lies headwaters of a massive watershed at the Eastern Continental Divide. Do the ferns as they enter into their autumn gold serve a purpose? Why now, do they shut down their life? Did they build soil this year? Are they still building such? Are they the preemptor of better food to come? Does your land have ferns?
A thick soil mass several feet deep acting as a sponge in wet or dry. A landscape that never shows bare soil, or if fire delivers such, then she quickly covers it. Does your land show bare at times? And for how long and how often? Is there a diversity in your forests, your creek bottoms, your plots? Or do you fight nature for that picture of monoculture , and wonder its shortcomings, and costs, and sweat equity.?
Does your ground absorb or repel water? Are their mosses thriving on you land? Is water retention more than building a pond? How can you change the habitat to allow nature do her thing?
Does the beaver cry when drought comes? Does he pout when monsoons soak him? Or does he prepare for each, and ready to survive the curve balls of weather? Does he prepare for the good and the bad, the bounty and the famine?
How does nature preserve its moisture? How does she survive and return in all her glory just months after inundated by waters that roared 20 feet deep in this stream? Can your soils look the same after such an attack? How can you make them achieve such? Is it by cutting, or planting, or manipulating, or doing nothing? Which is best? Have you looked close at your land and thot these thots?
What path will you choose? What path should you choose? Where will you be tomorrow? Where will your land be tomorrow? Will it mimic nature long after you are gone, or will it be struggling to recover the results of you actions?
Just some thots for you to ponder as you hunt this season. Put away your phone, look, listen, smell, feel what she teaches. Not all the answers are on the internet. Enjoy. Peace.
"The government tells us we need flood control and comes to straighten the creek in our pasture. The engineer on the job tells us the creek is now able to carry off more flood water, but in the process we have lost our old willows where the owl hooted on a winter night and under which the cows switched flies in the noon shade. We lost the little marshy spot where our fringed gentians bloomed." ----Aldo Leopold
