Heh! Even holier-than-thou tree-hugging enviromental whackjobs retain mankind’s natural sporting instincts.

They enjoy hunting down the wily and elusive cane toad (Bufo marinus), and are just as proud as any Safari Club-member when they bag a record-book specimen. (Personally, though, I think deer, antelope, and sheep all look much better mounted in one’s trophy room.)

AP reports:

An environmental group said Tuesday it had captured a “monster” toad the size of a small dog.

With a body the size of a football and weighing nearly 2 pounds, the toad is among the largest specimens ever captured in Australia, according to Frogwatch coordinator Graeme Sawyer.

“It’s huge, to put it mildly,” he said. “The biggest toads are usually females but this one was a rampant male … I would hate to meet his big sister.”

Frogwatch, which is dedicated to wiping out a toxic toad species that has killed countless Australian animals, picked up the 15-inch-long cane toad during a raid on a pond outside the northern city of Darwin late Monday.

Cane toads were imported from South America during the 1930s in a failed attempt to control beetles on Australia’s northern sugar cane plantations. The poisonous toads have proven fatal to Australia’s delicate ecosystems, killing millions of native animals from snakes to the small crocodiles that eat them.

As part of its so-called “Toad Buster” project, Frogwatch conducts regular raids on local water holes, blinding the toads with bright lights then scooping them up by the dozen.

“We kill them with carbon dioxide gas, stockpile them in a big freezer and then put them through a liquid fertilizer process” that renders the toads nontoxic, Sawyer said.

“It turns out to be sensational fertilizer,” he added.

Did you catch the line about “Australia’s delicate ecosystems”?

Australia has about seven out of ten of the top-ranking venomous critters on the planet. Its plants generally come equipped with an array of spikes and thorns a Sonoran cactus might envy. Even the cuddly platypus can poison you with a spur on its hind foot. “Delicate?” I’d hate to run into whatever lives in the ecosystem these people would describe as robust.

Aiden Lassell Ripley, Woodcock Shooting

Antiques and the Arts announces a request for submissions of privately-owned works by the American sporting artist Aiden Lassell Ripley (1896-1969) for a major new book to be published next year.

Stephen B. O’Brien Jr Fine Arts, LLC is planning to publish the most comprehensive book to date on sporting artist Aiden Lassell Ripley (American, 1896–1969) and is seeking submissions. The book, which will be released in conjunction with the Aiden Lassell Ripley exhibition scheduled at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, Mass., in August 2008, will showcase the painter’s large body of work in a hardbound volume comprising more than 160 pages and with more than 125 color illustrations.

Ripley is perhaps best known for his skill at capturing outdoor sporting scenes. He spent much of his career traveling to plantations to paint commissioned shooting scenes. Vanderbilt, Mellon, Marshall Field and Carnegie are among the prestigious names of families who commissioned Ripley’s work.

In this new survey of Ripley’s oeuvre, the authors will include watercolors, oils, drawings, magazine covers, portraits, commissions and public murals. Subject matter will cover not just the sporting paintings, but the artist’s wide range of talents — from early impressionistic landscapes of Europe and New England to later realist works depicting the outdoor life in places from the Deep South to Cape Cod.

Read the whole thing.

Aiden Lassell Ripley, Early Woodcock, etching

Paolo Uccello. The Hunt in the Forest. c. 1465-70. Oil on canvas. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK.

(above) 15th century Italian gentlemen hunting the roebuck.

Like the blade of grass pushing through the concrete sidewalk, natural human instincts, well known and understood in the past, continue to assert themselves even in today’s deracinated urban sprawl.

In contemporary Glasgow, for instance, young men are secretly breeding and training dogs (lurcher and greyhound crosses), and going out early in the morning in organized groups, just as their ancestors once did, to hunt the roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), who, long unhunted, have adapted to life in modern suburbs and grown numerous and bold.

Being deprived of the right to own and carry more useful and practical arms, they have nothing beyond airguns, pocket knives, and their boots and hands to use to kill a deer. And being unschooled in venery or sportsmanship, these covert hunters dispatch their quarry crudely when it is brought to bay.

Regrettably as well, they evidently have not learned how to unmake the deer and how to prepare him for the table. Nor, I fear, has anyone taught them to reward the hounds, as William Twiti advised, with “bowellis and fete” (bowels and feet).

As one might expect, the organized do-gooder organizations are howling, and the British Press, e.g., the Telegraph and the BBC, is suitably outraged and alarmed by the discovery of sporting activity by British youths.

All this is ironically occurring at the same time in which an excess population of rural red deer is leading British academics, environmentalists, and journalists to loudly advocate the reintroduction of the wolf (!) to curb their numbers.

Deer poaching, in defiance of authority, has a long and famous tradition in Britain, including not only Robin Hood but even Shakespeare himself.

Long may Glasgow’s Geordies divert themselves by the manly pursuit of the swift and ingenious roebuck, say I. Over time, it is likely that with greater experience there will evolve among the more skillful sportsmen the same sort of better practices and aesthetic code which naturally evolved among their predecessors.

Unfortunately, better sportsmanship is far more likely to evolve in circumstances in which sport is openly and proudly pursued, rather than in those in which sport is inevitably stigmatised and equated by bigots and Puritans with crime.

Renowned rod-builder, angler, and bon vivant Hoagy Bix Carmichael (son of the famous songwriter) has fished for salmon on the Grand Cascapedia, perhaps the greatest of North America’s salmon rivers, for decades.

Hoagy is a Cascapedia fanatic, and he felt keenly the absence of a definitive history of the Cascapedia sport fishery, the personalities who fished there, and the great river’s record catches. Hoagy is also a writer of distinction. He personally codified Everett Garrison’s techniques into the definitive manual for building the split cane fly rod, and thereby single-handedly produced a split-cane renaissance. In the midst of his recovery from a dangerous illness a few years ago, Hoagy courageously undertook the formidable task of producing a history of fishing on the Grand Cascapedia, applying to his research the same painstaking perfectionism for which he is renowned. After five years work, the first of what will be two volumes appeared last spring.

Hoagy was interviewed this week for the Living on Earth radio program.

RealAudio interview

The book.

Neil Everley of the Quorn with Golden Eagle/Steppe Eagle cross

As we noted last December, the infamous February 2005 Hunt Ban, enacted by Britain’s Labour Party as a gesture of class animosity and urban spite, banned hunting par force du chien (i.e., the traditional pursuit and reduction to possession of the quarry by a pack of hounds), but included certain loopholes: drag hunts (i.e., hunts in which the pack hunts an artificially created line of scent) are lawful; and hounds can be used to follow a scent and to flush out a fox, which may then be pursued by no more than two dogs, and ultimately shot or taken by means of falconry.

The strange consequence of this vile legislation has been a curious revival of falconry employing large raptors by several enterprising hunts. Last year, the Cheshire Hunt was seen taking to the field accompanied by a European Eagle Owl (Bubo bubo).

This year, the illustrious Quorn is training a huge Eurasian Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos chrysaetos) and Steppe Eagle (Aquila nipalensis) cross.

Melton Today

Hat tip to Steve Bodio. I’m less pessimistic than Steve’s correspondent Patrick, who evidently accompanied the link he sent Steve with prognostications of havoc.

Let’s see — amped up hounds, lots of people, a couple hundred horses, a panicked fox, and someone in a coat and tie handling a massive Golden Eagle cross in the middle of it all. Madness on stilts if you ask me! When the eagle is injured or killed, it will be described as an “accident” rather than planned stupidity.”

I’m sure some very interesting misadventures (and ones worth writing about!) will inevitably occur, but it’s all part of the game in the sporting field. And I’m rather pleased myself at the irony of the same detestable English Puritanism which nearly extinguished the ancient sport of falconry in the British Isles in the 17th century, inadvertently ushering it back in in the 21th century, and in a particularly colorful and grandiose form to boot.

The Telegraph reports:

George David Garforth-Bles was born on October 5 1909 at Knutsford, Cheshire. He was the grandson of Sir William Garforth, the inventor of the coal-cutter and a safety lamp and breathing apparatus for miners. David was educated at Rugby, where he played for the first XV and the hockey IX and was Master of the Rugby Rat Hounds (ferrets).

After going up to Jesus College, Cambridge, to read Military Studies and German, he served with The Guides Cavalry (10th Queen Victoria’s Own Frontier Force) on the North West Frontier Force from 1931 to 1939; in the latter year, he played in the regimental polo team which won the last Indian Cavalry Polo Tournament.

In the Second World War Garforth-Bles commanded the 4th Battalion, 3rd Madras Regiment, in fierce fighting against the Japanese in Burma. He was mentioned in dispatches.

In 1948 he retired from the Army and emigrated to Canada, where he took up the post of secretary at the Eglinton Hunt Club in Toronto.

On his return to England, he ran a small family business. In retirement, at Farnham, Surrey, he enjoyed fishing and gardening. He was co-author of Now or Never (1946), an account of his regiment’s experiences in the Burma Campaign.

David Garforth-Bles died on September 27. He married first (dissolved), in 1939, Susan Muir-Mackenzie. He married secondly, in 1948, Ann Deshon. She predeceased him, and he is survived by a son and a daughter from his first marriage and by three sons from his second

His sporting career in India provides one of the most remarkable pig-sticking stories:

Lieutenant-Colonel David Garforth-Bles, who has died aged 96, served in the Indian Cavalry on the North West Frontier and was the central figure in an episode which must rank highly even in the bizarre chronicles of oriental field sports.

In 1937 Garforth-Bles, a young officer in The Guides Cavalry, was attending a course at the Army Equitation School, Saugor, Central India, when he went pig-sticking with a colleague, Denis Voelker. As he wrote shortly afterwards to his parents: “A sounder [herd] of pig broke between us and the heat on the right.

There were three rideable boar amongst them and Denis and I were on the largest. Everyone else was chasing the other two and we were quite by ourselves. Denis had a very fast horse and was about ten yards in front of me and just going to spear the pig. Suddenly the pig and Denis and his horse vanished completely.”

Garforth-Bles at first assumed that his friend and his quarry had descended into a deep nullah (gully), but he could find no evidence of one. He turned his pony round, and came across a well, which was overgrown with long grass.

“I had a nasty moment wondering what I should find at the bottom,” he continued in his letter home, “as most of the wells here are very deep indeed, and some are dry at the bottom. Luckily this was a very wide well and the water was very deep and only about twenty-five feet down from the top, and there were large flat stones sticking out to form steps down to the water.”

When he peered down into the gloom Garforth-Bles made out Denis Voelker hanging on to the bottom step; his horse was plunging about in the water, while the pig was swimming round and round, occasionally rushing at the horse and at Voelker and trying to get on to the step.

Garforth-Bles descended into the well to find that his friend had broken his left arm and had a six-inch cut down to the bone of his elbow. He helped the injured man up the steps, then got hold of the horse’s bridle, trying to keep the animal’s head above water.

Garforth-Bles wrote: “It was rather difficult, as he was terrified of the pig, which kept swimming at him and trying to bite him. Then the horse would rear up in the water, beating with his fore legs, and turn over backwards and sink. I thought that he was certain to be drowned.

“By this time several village people had come up and one of them held the horse’s bridle, while I speared the pig several times until it sank. We then got a rope with a stone on the end and lowered it down one side of the horse and brought it up on the other side underneath its belly. I had to dive under the horse to get hold of the rope. We could now keep it from sinking, and there was nothing to do until the others came up. They had killed the two other pigs and arrived at last, seeing the village people round the well.”

While Voelker was taken to hospital, Garforth-Bles asked the nearby veterinary hospital to provide one of the slings used for supporting lame horses; when this arrived he returned to the water, and fitted it to his friend’s distressed horse.

“It was quite tricky work, as I had to dive underneath it several times and it plunged about a bit. However, in the end, the village people, directed by Griffiths, a Sapper officer on the course, got a strong beam across the top of the well, and hauled the horse out. It came out remarkably easily and was not much scratched, though very exhausted and cold, but recovered in the sun and walked home.”

Garforth-Bles added: “General Wardrop, the ultimate authority on pig-sticking, says that it has never been known for pig, horse and rider to fall down a well. Far from spoiling their drinking water, the villagers were delighted. They fished out the pig and ate it!”

Lady Thompson in horse trough

In 1999, the (no longer young) members of the Rylstone Women’s Institute in North Yorkshire posed for a nude calendar as a fund-raising device to benefit a leukemia charity, producing an unexpected hit which raised more than a £1 million. The calendar was talked about around the world, and subsequently became the basis for a feature film, Calendar Girls (2003), starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters. Not altogether surprisingly, nude calendars, featuring femmes d’un certain âge, their assets artistically concealed, have become a charity staple in Britain and elsewhere.

The Telegraph reports that the latest beneficiary is to be the hound pack of Britain’s Oakley Hunt, whose country lies in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire.

They must basically like doing it, and are just looking for excuses, don’t you think?

It looked like curtains for the venerable Ithaca Gun Company last December, when the company’s equipment was auctioned in a going-out-of-business sale. But a number of Ithaca models, like the 37 Featherweight Shotgun, retained a strong following, and (as some predicted at the time) the Ithaca Gun Company was not simply allowed to die.

Floyd and Craig Marshall, who own and operate a state-of-the-art tool manufacturing company in Ohio, came forward and purchased from Ithaca’s investors the company name and the rights to Ithaca’s designs. Production of some Model 37s is currently underway in Sanduskey, and Craig Marshall talks about eventually building Knickerbocker doubles. I’d bet they could sell a few Magnum 10s as well. The US military could do worse than to buy a few of those Model 37s.

New Ithaca Gun Company web-site

Craig Marshall was interviewed on a rural conservative radio network I’ve never heard of (but more power to them, they like guns and vote Republican, I always say).

Craig Marshall’s Interview with Jerry Hughes on the Accent Radio Network

Introduction

Part 1

Part 2

One correction, guys: John James Audubon died January 27, 1851. The Ithaca Gun Company was founded in 1883. The famous bird painter was a really lively corpse if he owned an Ithaca, as current copy claims.

Hat tip to Skookumchuk from YARGB.

Field & Stream has an interesting photo essay on the 6 catch-and-release of a large mako shark on a fly rod (8 foot 6 inch rod for a

16 weight line

).

They’ve got so many record salmon in the Restigouche (where they all have to be released), that I place no reliance in any estimated weights or lengths myself.

Steve Bodio quotes the Norman chaplain Gace de la Buigne (from Roman des deduis written c.1359-1377):

De chiens, d’oyseaux, d’armes, d’amours,

Pour une joye, cent doulours.

[With hunting dogs, falcons, wars, and women

For every joy, a hundred pains.]

and a Randy Newman parody reflecting the fact that the same hierarchy of status of hunting hawks tends to prevail today as in Gace’s time.

Joseph Whiting Lincoln (1859-1938), of Accord, Massachusetts, sanding a decoy in front of his workshop, 1926
(Leslie R. Jones photo)

Wildfowl decoys hand-carved by self-taught craftsmen working in the classic American waterfowl shooting regions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been recognized as a highly evocative and peculiarly American form of folk art. Decoys have been avidly studied and collected within the sporting community for decades, and examples from the most renowned makers bring high prices at auction.

The work of few makers is more admired than that of Joseph W. Lincoln of Accord, Massachusetts. Joe Lincoln’s birds combine a certain abstract monumentality with an effectively lifelike impressionism. They worked particularly well in their day, because their maker took deliberate care to produce well-fed and contented looking birds.

One can never see enough Joe Lincoln decoys, and I recently discovered that a privately-printed, limited edition (1000 copies) book on Lincoln appeared in 2002.

Copies are still available at the original price of $98 from the author (I paid more on Ebay for mine):

Cap Vinal
c/o New England Tackle
41 Sharp Street
Hingham, MA 02043

Mr. Vinal can be contacted via email at Capvinal@verizon.net.

Joseph Pearce identifies the real issue underlying Britain’s hunt ban.

The urban proletariat and its Labour Party representatives perceived hunting as a preserve of the rich and as an archaic throwback to the days of feudalism and privilege. In fact, hunting is enjoyed by all social classes in rural England and is an expression of the community spirit that still survives in the countryside, even as it has long since become extinct in the cities. This fact was made glaringly obvious by the sheer enormity of the size of the pro-hunt demonstration by the Countryside Alliance before the ban became law. The rural rich and poor descended on London expressing the unity of the countryfolk of England against the stripping of their ancestral rights by an urban tyranny alienated by the very notion of cultural roots and traditional notions of communitas.

The central issue is not, however, merely a question of tradition versus modernity, though this is doubtless a key and important factor in the tension between town and country. The central issue is connected to what the Catholic Church has termed “subsidiarity.” The principal objection to the banning of hunting is that the urban proletariat had no right to override the wishes of the majority of people in the countryside to pursue their ancient traditions unmolested. No foxes are hunted in Hampstead or in Birmingham. No stags are pursued through the streets of Liverpool or Manchester. What right, therefore, do the people of these areas have to dictate what the people of Much Wenlock or Moreton-in-the-Marsh can or can’t do in the fields surrounding their villages? Why should the tradition-oriented folk of the English shires be forced to conform to the conventions of what Evelyn Waugh described “as our own deplorable epoch”? Why should the civilized remnant of England be forced to practice the new barbarism of our modern cities? These, as I say, are the key questions raised by the banning of hunting.

We have the same thing here already with respect to gun ownership, and our traditional forms of field sport will sooner or later inevitably also face threats of legal prohibition inspired by urban intolerance.

—————————-

Hat tip to Steve Bodio.