Bike Trails are a great way to see Connecticut

Pedal Pushers

A cyclist bikes through the Airline Bike Path in Colchester and Hebron. (TIA ANN CHAPMAN)

Like the maples and oak trees that line them, Connecticut roadways are filled in late summer and early autumn with the moving color of bicyclists. Packs of cyclists seem as plentiful as acorns as they amble along secondary highways and back roads, their yellow, green and red jerseys and helmets both brightening up the landscape.
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Hunters are the new endangered species in Florida

Frank Pickett came of age when a fishing pole, a bow and arrow, a couple of buddies and the great outdoors provided a young man with all the entertainment he could want.

Nature was the focal point of life, Pickett said. It’s just how he was raised.

“When you use the outdoors, you respect them,” he said.

The values of his upbringing even led him to transform hunting from a hobby to his career as co-owner of Pickett Weaponry, the local hunting supply headquarters in downtown Newberry, he said.

But Pickett fears his type is a dying breed.

“You think kids today want to get up at 4 a.m. to sit around and swat away mosquitoes and wait for something they’re not even guaranteed to catch?” he asked. “Nope, not when there’s a TV right at home.”

He said he can’t even convince his own nieces and nephews to peel themselves away from the computer or TV long enough to join him on a hunting trip.
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Sighting in that favorite Deer Rifle

Sighting In

It is absolutely necessary to sight in your deer rifle before you go hunting. You owe it to the deer to make certain your rifle shoots where you point it. Even if you just bought a rifle and the store bore-sighted the gun with a collimator, you still need to shoot it and fine-tune the point of impact. Bore-sighting can be precise and can make a rifle shoot close enough to hit a paper target at 25 yards, but it’s not meant to be a substitute for sighting in the rifle on a range.

Twenty-five yards is where you should start shooting when you take a new rifle to the range. You can get a friend to sight in your rifle for you, but I do not recommend doing so. You need to know how to make adjustments to your sights, no matter if you shoot a scope or open sights.

If your sights get knocked off while you’re hunting, you’ll have to resight the rifle yourself, and you need to know how it works. Besides, the more you shoot your rifle at targets, the more likely you are to make an accurate shot on a deer.

Take your rifle to a range where you have a solid bench to shoot from. Use sand bags to create a solid rifle rest.

Most popular deer rifles that shoot slightly low at 25 yards will be about 2 inches high at 100 yards. Hunters who take shots out to 200 or 300 yards usually sight in a little high at 100 yards. If you never take a shot beyond 100 yards, sight in to be dead on at that distance.

Any time you put a rifle on an airplane, you should shoot it at a target before you hunt. For that matter, you should fire at a target every now and then throughout the hunting season.

Once sighted in, most hunting rifles are very reliable, but even the most accurate rifle can be “off” if it’s knocked around enough.

–Jackie Bushman

For deer hunting, board bans high-powered rifles

Change in Hunting Rules sought:

CHARLES CITY — The county Board of Supervisors voted 2-1 last night to prohibit deer hunting with high-powered rifles, drawing anger and raised voices from some in the audience.

“We’re going to get you out next term,” said Bill Johnson, addressing the board members.

Also last night, the three-member board unanimously adopted a $22.4 million county budget for fiscal 2009, which begins July 1. That is a nearly 4 percent decrease from the spending plan for the current fiscal year.

The county’s real estate tax rate is being raised by 7 cents to 82 cents per $100 of assessed value.

More than 100 people packed the auditorium at the Government and School Board Administration Building during last night’s public hearing on the rifle issue.

About 15 people spoke, with some in favor of hunting deer with high-powered rifles and others expressing safety concerns.

Several of those in favor suggested it was their right to hunt deer with rifles, or that the current practice of shooting from tree stands was relatively safe. A National Rifle Association representative said deer hunting was essential to controlling the deer population.

Vince Brackett said hunting with rifles is a tradition and it claims far fewer lives than boating in Virginia. “Boating’s far more dangerous,” he said.

Opponents of rifle hunting expressed concerns about stray bullets. One suggested that some hunters would be unable to resist shooting a deer even if they were on the ground and not in a tree stand.

Elbert Parker held a piece of inch-thick wood above his head to demonstrate the ease with which a bullet could go through someone’s wall.

“Your children can be shot dead looking at TV in your house,” he said, prompting an argument among him and members of the crowd until board chairman Gilbert A. Smith tapped on a table to quiet them.

Supervisors had three possible voting options.

The first two would have allowed people to continue hunting deer with high-powered rifles during general firearms season as long as they fired from at least 10 feet off the ground. Both added additional restrictions.

Supervisors Sherri M. Bowman and Timothy W. Cotman voted for the third option, the amendment that prohibits all deer hunting with high-powered rifles. Smith voted against it.

Last night’s vote reversed a decision made less than three years ago to allow deer hunting with rifles.

For that vote in 2005, Smith and then-supervisor Michael L. Holmes voted in favor, and Cotman against.

But Bowman unseated Holmes in this past November’s election, running on a platform that, in part, sought to rescind the use of rifles for deer hunting.

Bowman said after the board meeting that most of the residents who had talked to her about the issue had expressed safety concerns.

“It’s been trying,” she said. “You try to do what’s best and what’s fair.”

By REED WILLIAMS

TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

DEP Reports “High” Forest Fire Danger Level

DEP Also Reminds Residents of Open Burning
Restrictions During Elevated Fire Conditions

The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) today reminded Connecticut residents the fire danger in the state is “high” due to the dry weather conditions Connecticut has experienced recently. Until Connecticut receives significant rainfall, forest fire danger levels will remain high to very high.
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Edgerton man gains ethical hunter honor

MADISON — A 60- to 70-yard shot last fall not only brought down a big doe for Dennis Carothers Sr. of Edgerton but also the Department of Natural Resources Ethical Hunter Award.

Carothers was hunting in southeast Dane County the day after Thanksgiving when he saw three whitetail deer on a neighbor’s land. Fifteen minutes later, he heard a shot. Awhile later, he saw three deer appear back on the land he was hunting. Carothers noticed one of the deer was limping and a brought it down with a round from his 12 gauge.
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State offers how-to on hunting deer

If you’re a big-game hunter, forget Africa or New Guinea. Go up to Williams.

The Department of Fish and Game will hold a big game huntingclinic for hunters of all skill levels at the Wilderness Unlimited RVPark in Williams, about 50 miles north of Sacramento.

“DFG is offering this course at the perfect time of year to assist hunters who are planning their big game hunts for the upcoming hunting season,” says Susan Herrgesell, the coordinator of what the department calls the Advanced Hunter Education Program.
Four instructional sessions will be conducted over a two-day period beginning Saturday, May 17 and ending Sunday, May 18. The sessions are from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on both days. Cost is $60 for the four sessions and space is limited.
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CT resident claims to have seen mountain lion

Mountain Lion’s Lair video – By News Channel 8′s Bob Wilson

By News Channel 8′s Bob Wilson
Posted April 21, 2008
11:05 PM

Wallingford (WTNH) _ Is there a mountain lion roaming the countryside in Connecticut? One Wallingford resident says yes. Environmental experts aren’t so sure. So, with this said, should people be worried?

Bob Heilnan, of Wallingford, was out working in his field when he saw an animal cross in front of him. It looked just like a mountain lion.

“It walked across the field this way, disappeared in here and that is the den. DEP was here and they say that is a den,” Heilnan noted.

But is it a mountain lion den? That is the question. Heilnan continued to describe what he saw. “About 3 and a half feet long, tan and the tail has a black tip. And, as it walks, the tail and the front legs move together.”

DEP says mountain lions are not native to Connecticut. They wanted Heilnan to get a picture of the animal. So, he called a friend who has a special wildlife camera, he mounted it next to the den in front of the animals path.

“The camera has been put in place and it’s a special camera with a motion sensor and flash so that any animal that walks in front of it will the picture of what ever animal lives in the brush.”

Beth Webb lives across from the den. She knows that everything from rabbits to wood chucks live nearby. But, a mountain lion?

“We are a little concerned to see what is out there, in the field and long as it’s nothing dangerous that’s okay,” Webb noted.

As for Heilnan, he knows what he saw and he knows that there aren’t supposed to be mountain lions in Connecticut. “This is Connecticut. I know I have deer. I know I have coyote. I know I have muskrats living in my pond. But when you stop and think about it — there is a lot of game for him and this is the perfect place for him.”

Burnsville man kills record turkey

BURNSVILLE – Jerrell Keele knew his turkey had a pretty good beard on him when he shot him last month. He could see the black hairs hanging from the gobbler’s neck when he shot him from 37 yards away.

But the 67-year-old Burnsville resident didn’t realize that the 17.28-pound turkey actually had seven beards and scored enough points to make it a state record in the nontypical division.
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Ecological disaster brought reality check

Crude oil blasted nine stories into the air on Jan. 28, 1969, from a pipeline that blew out in the Santa Barbara channel. The offshore drilling operation spewed three million gallons of thick inky blue-black oil, grounding hundreds of thousands of birds, leaving them to die a slow death. The fish were luckier. They died fast. “The animals all need our help,” Jacob Thompson, a kindergartner says while standing on tiptoe at the Ansonia Nature Center to make eye contact with a turtle in a terrarium in Connecticut after hearing a bit about Earth Day’s ecological origins. “I worry about the animals — all of them — because they can’t survive with all the garbage outside. And I’m thinking the garbage is gonna kill all the animals — especially the metal cans because they have sharp edges that’ll cut them up.” “Or maybe, something worse,” Jacob whispers, his eyes widening behind his gold-wire rimmed glasses. “Maybe all the trash will just bury the animals alive.”

When the Santa Barbara pipeline burst 39 years ago, crude oil flowed for 10 days, eventually covering an 800-mile square area with a dark sheen. The oil even silenced the tide. With the viscous oil melded to it, the waves no longer lapped at the shore. Instead, they landed with a heavy thud.

For the environmental movement, this disaster was the spark that launched Earth Day, which is observed on April 22 with volunteer litter cleanups, symposia, protests and teach-ins at schools about the environment.

Connecticut was suffering its own environmental problems on the Naugatuck River around the time of the Santa Barbara incident. Some days, the water would run red. Other days, it was tinted a bright green or yellow. It depended on the chemicals that the factories that hugged its shores were discharging that day.

Former Environmental Protection Agency Region One Administrator Julie Belaga says the televised environmental disasters in California and on the Cuyahoga River in Ohio where the “water burst into flames from all the [industrial] chemicals” being discharged shocked the public.

Belaga, of Westport, co-chairs the Connecticut League of Conservation, and serves on the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Sustainability, a group advising the MTA on ways to become “greener” by boosting energy efficiency and reducing its carbon emissions.

“We’ve made some enormous progress since (the first) Earth Day and because of the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency,” says Belaga, who co-chairs the Connecticut League of Conservation. And there is certainly more that needs to be done, especially because of global warming and climate change.” “The environment and all its problems are very large, and it’s difficult for people to appreciate all this unless they can see the damage up close for themselves,” Belaga says. “That’s what these environmental disasters in Santa Barbara and Ohio did for people. It brought the damage to their living room. It turned them into witnesses and once you’ve seen this kind of disaster you can’t forget or ignore it.

“Back in the 1970s, we were at a point where our air pollution was actually visible,” Belaga says. “You could wipe your car with your hand and feel the grit from the air pollution on it. And you didn’t always have to be in a city to see this. The winds carried this sooty, gritty pollution for miles.” Connecticut newspapers like the Bridgeport Post and Telegram, the forerunners of the Connecticut Post, published air pollution indexes that listed some of the particles and metals circulating in the atmosphere.

In Connecticut, the first Earth Day featured community litter cleanups, a beachside vigil in Westport, where young and old gathered to hold hands and show solidarity with Mother Earth.

In Hartford, a Trinity College student, Joel Houston, deposited 37 pounds of soil for “safe keeping” at Connecticut Bank & Trust, “to dramatize the value of the earth.” The soil stayed put at the bank for a year in a series of safe deposit boxes. The Santa Barbara drilling explosion represents the first televised environmental disaster in history with millions of people witnessing dying birds, dead fish and aquatic plants washing up daily on the shore.

The idea for Earth Day was the brainchild of Gaylord Nelson, a senator from Wisconsin, who observed the disaster from the plane. He looked out his window and saw the oily sheen of the crude oil cripple and kill what it touched. He vowed to bring national attention to the plight of the environment with teach-ins and demonstrations, using some of the same techniques that worked for the civil rights and anti-war movements.

“It was a gamble,” Nelson told the Milwaukee Journal years later. “But it worked.”

Twenty million people across the country, including thousands of college students, turned out to protest the deterioration of the environment that first Earth Day. They called on the nation’s leaders to take action before it was too late to combat everything from oil spills, air pollution, toxic dumps, pesticide use, habitat and wildlife destruction.

When Earth Day debuted in 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency didn’t exist. Neither did the Clean Water Act. And neither did Connecticut’s Department of Environmental Protection. Corporations expressed no concern about the environment in the design or planning of their office parks.

Go to any zoning commission anywhere in Connecticut or most parts of the country nowadays and even the most environmentally recalcitrant developers are cognizant of the need to include trees, buffers, wetlands and habitat preservation into their projects. It’s the law.

“Ultimately, developers are finding that it’s just more cost effective and makes for a better development” when they take the environment into consideration, Fairfield’s Planning and Zoning Director Joseph Devonshuk Jr. says. “It’s just smarter to develop this way.”

A decade after the nation celebrated its first Earth Day, Fairfield was adopting new zoning regulations for mixed-use residential, retail and office complexes that went so far as to include a ratio for shade trees to parking spaces.

“It wasn’t just for aesthetics, although I do think it contributed to better-looking projects,” Devonshuk says, “it also was intended as a way of keeping cars cool” in the peak sun hours, which contributes obviously to using less air conditioning and lowering carbon emissions.

As Earth Day turns 38 — still young, but obviously middle aged, and while aspects of the environment have improved — thanks to recycling programs and reductions in particles released by power plants, industry and vehicles, environmentalists agree that more work needs to be done. This includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions, finding new alternative fuel sources that reduce our dependency on oil, especially foreign oil.

Concern in the 1980s centered on the final destination for the nation’s trash. Landfills were running out of space. Recycling became the law midway through the decade and 867,333 tons of newspapers, bottles and cans were being removed from Connecticut’s waste stream by 2006 as recyclables, according to the Northeast Recycling Council, which tracks recycling.

And still more of what Connecticut residents chuck out has been pulled out of the waste stream. In 1999, the Connecticut Resource Recovery Authority began recycling electronics, accepting everything from broken televisions, computers, even discarded cell phones. In its first year alone, 2.6 million pounds of electronics were recycled.

“The issue central today are reducing sources of pollution in the air, in the water and on land because of development,” Dennis Schain, spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection, says. “The bottom line is the lifestyle choices we make — about where we live, where we’ll work and how we get there have a direct bearing on our environment. It’s all interconnected.”

At the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which oversees Metro-North Commuter Railroad, efforts are under way to “green” the railroad. A 20-point list of recommendations unveiled by its Blue Ribbon Commission calls for MTA and Metro-North to derive seven percent of their energy needs by 2015 from solar, wind and other renewable sources. The proposal includes placing some solar panels at Metro-North stations in Connecticut, using wind turbines to fuel buses, and tidal energy too.

Donna Lindgren, director of the Ansonia Nature Center, believes people are more sophisticated — at times — in their environmental awareness.

In the 1970s, “there was no such issue as ‘global warming. That term wasn’t on the horizon. Now, people are aware of it,” she says.

Credit for this awareness, Lindgren says, is due to documentaries such as Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” media attention and television programs geared to the nonscientist.

Whether one believes in global warming or not, the term has seeped into mainstream conversation.

“It seems as though more people have an awareness about environmental problems and want to see more done to address them,” Lindgren says. The motivation however, does not always spring from direct concern for the environment. Rather it comes, Lindgren says, from their pocketbook. The biggest environmental problem that needs addressing, she says, “is where we get our food, where its grown and how far we have to go to get it — the farther it is, the more emissions we are putting into the atmosphere.”

For that reason, Lindgren is a big supporter of home-grown foods. From a garden in her backyard, she grows “heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, basil like there’s no tomorrow, squash and broccoli.”

There’s also been a recent push to eliminate the use of plastic bags.

In fact, Stephanie Cash, a mother who works for Shop Rite as a cashier, applauds a program that her supermarket chain launched recently to reduce plastic grocery bags in the waste stream.

“We give customers a three cent discount for every plastic bag they bring back and reuse instead of having us give them new ones,” Cash says. “I see a lot of our customers using their plastic bags over and over again. None of them mind. They think and we know that they are doing something good for the environment.”

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