Rich Landers: Let’s not talk turkey

I‘m giving up making conversation about my turkey hunting adventures.

I mentioned my recent unsuccessful close encounters to three different friends and they all had exactly the same reply:

“Oh, you should have come to our yard – hah, hah.”

There’s good eating in store for a turkey hunter but little glory.

The masses think turkey hunters are wimps. They can’t imagine there’s any skill involved in dispatching a bird that’s pooping on driveways and roosting on decks in the Spokane city limits.

I informed one of my friends that since her house is in a no-shooting zone, I couldn’t intervene in the issues she’s having with turkey droppings on her deck.

“You can kill them with my broom,” she said.

OK, I quit. Not turkey hunting, of course. I love turkey hunting.

But I’m not telling anybody about it.

Learning curve: I hold no hard feelings toward the hunter who walked in on my stand Saturday morning just as I was getting two stubborn gobblers into shooting range.

The man and his young boys didn’t know I was there.

Neither did the two hens – one just 12 yards away – that had found comfort in my calls and decoy.

But I’m wondering what turkey hunting book that hunter read or what video he watched that advised using a slate call while walking upright and in the open into a group of hens and gobblers.

He kept calling and walking even as the turkeys lined out and walked away up the distant hillside.

The man and his boys all were wearing camouflage but no PETA banners that I could see.

Four-wheel madness: Hunters are likely to be the big losers in the wake of the destruction off-road vehicle drivers are inflicting on the landscape.

I won’t be surprised to see a locked gate on a road I’ve used for 15 years to access forest land managed now by Forest Capital, formerly owned by Boise-Cascade.

For 10 years, I shared the logged-over lands with a few other hunters, friends and strangers alike, coming and going quietly, parking our rigs, walking the grown-over skid trails, hearing a shot now and then and knowing that someone had just filled a turkey tag.

Unfortunately, ATVers discovered the area five years ago. They began by opening the old skid trails, which soon became high-speed runways devoid of even a blade of grass.

Bored with that, they began testing their manliness by running their machines up and down the loose, sandy soil of steep hillsides through the forest, creating more routes, more loops, more bare earth, more erosion, more weeds.

Last weekend, dipsticks in four-wheel-drive pickups with mud splattered over their cabs were taking to these unauthorized ATV routes, widening them out and doubling the disaster.

Where on earth did people detour into thinking they could treat someone else’s land as though it was a construction zone?

Timber companies are sick of this.

Everyone, especially hunters, will pay for it one way or another.

Out of control: It’s dawning on some leaders within off-roading communities that they need to get a grip.

Starting next month, a huge swath of the Sonoran Desert National Monument, one of the Arizona’s most prized parcels of public land, will be closed to off-road enthusiasts for at least three years.

The federal Bureau of Land Management is banning all vehicular traffic, including motorcycles and ATVs, from 55,000 acres of the popular desert wilderness because of extensive environmental damage, according to a report in the Arizona Republic.

News of the coming ban was not a surprise to off-road enthusiasts, the paper reported. Don Hood, vice president of the Arizona Off-Highway Vehicle Coalition, said his organization recognized the damage ORVs have done to the land.

Hood’s observations were insightful:

“The explosion of off-highway vehicles has led to an increase of people out there who think this is just a game,” he told the reporter. “They don’t know the rules, they don’t know where to go, they don’t know right from wrong, because no one has ever taught them.”