It's the season for getting mad and finding targets. The lack of warm sunshine, like the lack of oxygen, tends to give the brain the "bends", often resulting in kicking the dog, kicking someone closer than the dog, or hunting something down.
One year the relatively new city councilwoman, Verna Lawrence , arrived at the foot of my desk, leaned over, and proceeded to chew on me, loudly. I said later we should have sold tickets. To her credit, Verna came back two weeks later, apologized, and explained the theory of cabin fever.
Councilwoman Lawrence now finds herself the target of a recall effort, and perhaps should re visit her theory for some comfort.
Besides the annual anger at a few human beings, I've noticed an upswing in non-human targets.. varmints.
By the time this reaches the press, trappers will have attempted to chew off the leg of a well-intentioned lady who has asked the county board to ban trapping. She might consider watching her step for a few weeks.
At the same time the Michigan Department of Natural Resources found a wolf radio collar in the Monuscong River, sans wolf. The female wolf likely did not survive the separation from her collar. Wolves in the St. Mary's corridor have returned and they are being quietly killed by residents. A strange kind of code has developed in Pickford and Rudyard that allows locals to tell each other about kills and near-kills, but little, until the collar showed up, has spread to the DNR.
Wolves kill coyotes. Wolves kill mice. They kill a lot in between, including deer, but the rap they take for controlling the deer population in the Eastern U.P. is just mathematically impossible. If you didn't get a deer this year, likely a wolf is not your culprit. I can't prove it. Neither can you.
But my favorite varmint hunt is still the cormorant. Recently the Michigan DNR announced a "stepped up" effort to manage cormorants. I don't particularly like the birds, but I particularly dislike the blame they get for poor fishing. Cormorants had the political stupidity to arrive at the same time game fish, which are feeder fish, declined. Perch all but disappeared as black birds suddenly appeared. Ergo...
For some reason the blame guys didn't look into the water to figure out what happened to the fish. They looked up, in trees, and in the air, and found their target. One cormorant can't hope to match the appetite and hunting ability of one salmon. The salmon, also newcomers, have eaten their way through Lake Huron and most of the way through Lake Michigan. Smelt and alewives have all but disappeared, which was what salmon were supposed to do. Does a salmon differentiate between a perch and a smelt at 50 feet? Or what caused the perch to suddenly quit regenerating? Why have they started back up in places like Green Bay, full of cormorants, and not Munoscong Bay? Is it in the water? No. It sits in trees.
The cormorants will get their eggs smashed this June and everyone will be happy. Even if the fishing doesn't change. Makes you feel like you did something.
This year, I'll side with the varmints, at the risk of becoming one.
Pat Egan is the former publisher of the Sault Evening News. He is a recipient of the William Allen White award for editorial writing. He and his wife Debra live at Salt Point.
