thenorphletpaperboy: Americans

thenorphletpaperboy: Americans:                             Americans Last Wednesday Vertis and I took a five and a half hour drive to Houston, where I attended a t...

Americans

                            Americans

Last Wednesday Vertis and I took a five and a half hour drive to Houston, where I attended a trade show, and as I drove south, I was reminded that Texas has better roads than Arkansas and especially Louisiana. If Louisiana doesn’t spend some money on Interstate 20 going into Shreveport, you’re going to see cars bounce off the road as they get close to downtown.

            We had our trip planned to where we would pull into the parking lot of Ninfa’s on Navigation at 11:45. If you have ever lived in south central Texas or in Houston, you know about Ninfa’s. It may not be the best Mexican food around, but a whole lot of folks including yours truly think it is. Well, it was crowded, and as I sat there almost rubbing shoulders with a wide variety of Americans, I was reminded that we Americans are a diverse bunch of folks, and Ninfa’s customers sure confirmed that.  We were in a room with white collar bankers and oilmen, blue collar workers, and plenty of no collar individuals. When you are in Ninfa’s money, rank, and education are incidental and are ignored by staff and customers.

             If you go to lunch on a Friday as we did, be sure to try and get in the main old section of the restaurant with its rustic tile floor, and don’t expect to carry on a conversation unless yelling across the table fits your bill, but that room, to me, has a special flavor that makes a trip to Ninfa’s a little more special.

            As we sat there, a group of eight soldiers in fatigues took a nearby table, and as those men and women laughed and enjoyed lunch it made me consider Americans in general. I think we Americans are a different breed of cats, and I mean that in the most positive way possible. We may be a mix of dozens of nationalities, and a quick glance at the customers and wait-staff would sure confirm that, but there’s something special about just saying “I’m an American”. It brought to mind a time when Vertis and I proudly stood up as an American. I still remember that incident that happen several decades ago. Vertis and I had just finished up our two year assignment in Libya, and were heading back to the states. We had built up a lot of vacation time, and were spending some of it in Europe, and we were on a tight budget.

            We arrived in Munich, West Germany, checked into a small hotel, and started looking for a place to have dinner. We shied away from the fancy restaurants, and ended up on a side street, and after a little looking, found a strictly local beerhall where you could smell the sausage from out on the sidewalk, and hear an oomph band.

            “Richard, there’s only local people in there. What if the menu is in German?”

            “Well, I had ten hours of German in college, so I can get us by.”

            “Don’t give me that. You couldn't’ read the German menu on the train coming in.”

            “Come on...I’m starving, and we’ll just point.”

            I was more than a little hesitant as we slipped through the door, and as we stood there looking for a table, I could see we were getting more than a little glance from the other customers.  Most of the tables were long, family style tables. We finally picked one and took a couple of seats at the end of the table. There were about 8 others seated at the table, all locals, and they smiled and nodded as we sat down. We exchanged smiles as a stout waitress carrying 8 steins of beer served the rest of the table. She stopped to take our order, and I managed to say “Bratwurst and beer.” She nodded and we settled down to enjoy a simple but very tasty dinner, when the band conductor announced the next number. I didn’t catch the title, but I did hear “Americans”, which caught my attention. We turned back to finish our bratwurst when the band started to play, and then I sat straight up almost immediately.

            “Vertis! They’re playing Stars and Stripes Forever! For us!... Stand up!”

            We jumped to our feet and stood as the band played, and as it finished to a roar of applause, I raised my stein of beer and shouted in German, “Nach Deutschland!” Which means, “To Germany.” A bit of German I remembered from college, and we immediately had 150 new friends. I have never been prouder to be an American. That memories has stayed with us for decades.

            We continued our vacation for another two weeks, and when we boarded our flight to New York I could hardly contain my excitement when the Capitan announced, “Our flight to New York JFK Airport will take seven hours and forty-six minutes......”

We we’re finally heading home after two years in Benghazi, Libya. We had scheduled an extra couple of days of vacation to take in the New York’s World’s Fair. I was squeezing Vertis’s hand as we landed. My pay check had been substantially increased because we were working in a third world country, and since you really couldn’t spend much, especially when I was in the desert, we saved almost all my salary, and managed to pay off all our college debt. It was a great feeling.

            As we went through customs and immigration at the airport, I glanced at my passport. It had been stamped numerous times noting entry into most European and North African countries, but the most obvious stamps were the numerous entry stamps into and out of Libya. It was pretty obvious we were Americans who had been working overseas.

            I handed my passport to the Passport Officer, he looked at it as he stamped our entry, and then said “Welcome home.” You will never know that feeling unless you have lived away from America, and that brought a smile of pride from us as we walked away.

            The next day we took a subway out to the New York World’s Fair. It was crowded, but we had already purchased tickets, so in minutes we were walking down the main avenue of the fair. We had only been there less than thirty minutes when we heard a marching band start their cadence from a side street. We stepped back to the curb because they were about to turn the street corner and head straight toward us. As the drum-major leading the band turned the corner and blew his whistle, the band roared out with the Michigan State Fight song. There was something so American in the marching band and the music that I can’t explain it, and we were so overcome with the reality of being back in America, that the joy and pride that the band brought out, sent us  down on the curb as tears ran down our cheeks.

            I believe all American have a deep seated pride about being an American, and even in these troubled times, we may have differences, but in all American hearts, there is no place like home, and my home is America.

The Coming Feral Hog Apocalypse

The Coming Feral Hog Apocalypse

Last year I wrote a column about feral hogs and the problems they cause. The response to that column has continued, and the areas where feral hogs are now plentiful has dramatically increased. I have had numerous emails, calls, and personal contacts with people who are seeing the damage these hogs are doing, and they understand the problem. After hearing from a large numbers of individuals, some who are now seeing feral hogs for the first time, I have become aware of how large the feral hog problem is, how fast it is growing, and how little we are doing to eliminate it.

A little research into the problem shows we aren’t alone with the feral hog problem, and most southern states have a rapidly growing population of them. Texas estimates around 2,000,000, and in Arkansas we can only guess, but from some of the aerial sighting, and responds to hog traps, I believe, and this is a conservative guess, we are in the + one million hog range and rapidly growing.

When you consider a sow will begin have 6 to 8 piglets at 7 months and have 3 litters a year, the number has grown by several hundred while I type this column. I’m sure not a math student, but studies have shown the hogs population can increase by an average 86% a year. That means the population will nearly double every year, and the numbers of hogs will grow exponentially. In five years, Arkansas could have over 10,000,000, and that’s not fake math.

However, the South sure isn’t the only place where feral hogs are a problem, nor is the United State the only country with the problem. In Australia 49 domestic hogs were brought to the country in 1788 as food for settlers. Evidently some escaped and since there is almost an absence of hog predators in the county, they expanded until in 2017 the hog population was estimated at 23,000,000. The population of humans in Australia is 21,000,000, so in the space of 225 years those 49 hogs have increased to the astounding figure listed above.

The numbers have alarmed the Australian Government because of the damage they are doing. According to their study, 40% of the newborn lambs are killed and eaten by feral hogs, and ground nesting birds have been eliminated in areas where the hog population is dense. There is a National Campaign to eliminate the hogs, but hunts that have killed thousands, find out in a few short years, the hogs have reproduced and are back to the dense population where they were before the hunting campaign began.

I wish I could write that Australia has figured out a way to control the hogs, but they haven’t. However, they have raised the awareness of the problem, and through co-operation with various game and fish groups, they are attacking the hog problem with a variety of ways. They have even tried to poison the hogs with baited corn, but too many other animals were lost while trying to control the hog population. Even with all the focus they can mount to control them, according to most studies, the best they can hope for is to keep the population from expanding even more.

Here in Arkansas, we a just coming into an awareness that maybe we do have a problem. I base that on the almost absence of any serious attempt to reduce or eliminate the problem. I know it’s open hunting season on feral hogs, and with thousands of deer hunters in the woods each fall they could reduce the hog numbers substantially. However, those hunters are not out there to hunt hogs.  They are deer hunters, and unless they want to spook every deer within a half mile by blasting away at a feral hog, they are not going to shoot one. So unless one of the hogs gets into the beer cooler at camp, very few are going to be killed by deer hunters.

The Australian study also concluded feral hogs have a huge impact on ground nesting birds, and in areas where the hogs were extremely plentiful, they eliminated the birds. Of course, here in Arkansas we have seen our quail disappear over the past 20 years until the point where we have more cougar sighting than a quail covey. Is it a coincidence that over the past 20 years we have seen the feral hog population expand exponentially as the quail population drops? Just consider this: if the studies on the population growth of feral hogs is even close, in five years we could have over 10,000,000 feral hogs roaming the woods and fields in Arkansas.  If even 5% of those hogs find one quail nest a year, we’ll never have a decent population of quail return to Arkansas, no matter how much wonderful quail habitat we have.

As any farm boy will tell you, a hog will eat almost anything, and when we consider the Arkansas wildlife in danger, it is easy to see we have a serious problem. If we view one of Australia’s major problems, which is the loss of 40% of the newly born lambs to feral hogs, it is certainly possible that here in Arkansas, while we sure don’t have lambs to be eaten by hogs, we have several hundred thousand fawns born every year. If a hungry hogs come upon a doe giving birth, that fawn going to be eaten. I think, when we reach the point where we are losing 30% to 40% of the fawns born each year, which could occur in less than five years, we will realize the enormity of the problem. If you don’t think a lean, feral hog can run down a week old fawn, you have never seen a wobbly, new born fawn.

When we reach that point, which may happen sooner than we anticipate, then the feral hog problem will be so obvious that drastic measures will be mandated to get them under control. Of course, the idea that we would have to trap or shoot every hog eliminated without any help from predators will make the job of getting the hog population under control a lot harder. Wouldn’t it be better if we had some help in controlling the hogs? Well, sure it would, and restoring the ecology of Arkansas by restocking the apex predators (wolves, mountain lions, and bears) we would have partners who would prey on feral hogs and help us get the problem under control.

 It we don’t restore these predators, we will be fighting the 86% increase of feral hogs each year. Anyone who thinks we don’t need help in feral hog control can’t do 5^th grade math. The help we could get from the introduction of significant predators into the Arkansas environment, would give us a group of animals that would work 24 hours a day 365 days a year eliminating feral hogs.

To restore these predators to the Arkansas ecosystem is the only way to eliminate the problem, and we desperately need to move forward to control the feral hog population, but we are doing very little to stem the tide.