The Courier
News Christmas Means Carnage!
One of my all time favorite movies is BABE. Adapted from Dick King-Smith’s book - The Sheep-Pig - it is the story of an orphaned piglet named Babe who is chosen for a “guess the weight” contest at a county fair. The winning farmer, Arthur Hoggett, brings him home where Babe becomes friends with all the farm animals - including a duck named Ferdinand. At Christmas, Babe is almost chosen for dinner but he’s not quite big enough. Instead, Ferdinand’s girlfriend is chosen as the main dish for the holiday meal. All of this leads Ferdinand to put two and two together. “Christmas means dinner, and dinner means death. Death means carnage... Christmas means carnage!” If we step back for a moment and look at what we do during this winter-time holiday (especially just after the gifts have been opened or dinner has been completed), that’s exactly what Christmas is for many of us... CARNAGE! Even for the poorest of families, Christmas has become an excuse to throw caution to the wind. We spend money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need. We eat till we can’t eat any more and feel proud about it. We go around declaring to all our friends and family, “Merry Christmas” with no thought of the real meaning of those words. Setting aside the frivolous arguments about pagan influences on this holiday and/or the actual date of Christ’s birth, Christmas is first and foremost the day set aside to celebrate the moment that God became flesh and came to dwell among us humans. Regardless of whether you believe this event is true, Christmas is a religious holiday that has been celebrated for over 2000 years. It is an event that has shaped our measurement of time - before Christ (BC) and anno Domini (AD) which is Medieval Latin meaning “in the year of our Lord”. It is also an event that was merely a pre-curser to an event that took place 33 years later - the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ... Easter. Strangely, many of us are offended by the true meaning of these holidays and some people go to great efforts in trying to deny the historical basis for Christmas. They wish to replace it, instead, with a generic and insipid celebration of... well... nothing.
Merry Christmas!
News from the Heart of Idaho Camas • Lincoln • Gooding
December 25, 2019
Vol 43 Num 52
Here’s Where Idaho’s Ducks Come From
by Brian Pearson, Conservation Public Information Specialist
When temperatures fall in December and January, duck hunting in Idaho - particularly in the southwest part of the state - often heats up with the arrival of “northern birds.” But exactly where in the north are these birds coming from? Generally speaking, the likeliest answer for Idaho hunters is Alberta. In a 2017 study, researchers at the University of Minnesota and the California Department of Water Resources shed some additional light on where dabbling ducks harvested in the Pacific Flyway originated. Using abundance, banding and harvest data from throughout the Pacific Flyway, as well as other important source areas in the neighboring Central Flyway, researchers were able to estimate where ducks came from and where they were harvested over the course of about 50 years, from 1966 to 2013. Over that time, 38 percent of the most common dabbling ducks harvested in Idaho, which include green-winged teal, wigeon, pintails, mallard, gadwall and wood ducks, came from Alberta, followed by Idaho (17 percent) and Montana and the Dakotas (13 percent). More than three-quarters of all dabbling ducks harvested in Idaho are mallards, and Alberta is Idaho’s largest source for the species. Alberta is also Idaho’s largest source of gadwall, but when it comes to the other species that end up on Idaho duck hunters’ straps, the province isn’t leading the pack. It plays second fiddle to the Yukon and Northwest Territories as Idaho’s largest source continued on page 6...