And of course if you're a farmer when one of those beautiful and endangered ospreys or bald eagles are feasting on your chickens, you're going to shoot first and play dumb if anyone asks questions.

and don't kill jays or mockingbirds

gov: or, get a federal grant to make your chicken farm into an eagle habitat, and charge admission :)

A couple of years ago, I almost hit a mountain lion with a rental car.

A couple of years ago, I almost hit a mountain lion with a rental car.

Keep practicing: you'll get it eventually.

Governor,
Since the vast majority of chickens being farmed nowadays are never outside, I'd love to see the eagle or osprey that's able to prey on them. Or have they figured out how to open doors?

Then there's Pale Male, the red-tail hawk who moved into the posh digs overlooking Central Park. He and his mates and offspring found the rats, squirrels, and especially pigeons of New York to be pretty good hunting.

OJ -

You would not believe the number of raptors out here in the Pacific NW. I live in an exurb of Portland and rarely venture out of the house w/o spotting one. Seriously. Everything from kestrels to bald eagles. The red-tails are into their mating spirals now. Heavenly.

We have tons and turkey buzzards out the wazoo.

Ugly critters up close, ain't they? But my how they can soar.

Our next door neighbor raises racing pigeons. Last year She Who Must be Obeyed was taking the garbage out & came up face-to-face with a goshawk ( four-foot wingspan, blood-red eyes ) snacking down a fresh kill atop the composter. Only thing left of the pigeon when he was done was the leg with the band on it. It's nature's revenge, I'm telling you.

There's a grove of trees in a neighborhood on the west side of town that the local buzzard population has taken to calling its own each evening. Not quite the swallows returning to Capestrano, but not as bad as the Mexican free-tail bats returning to Carlsbad Caverns or the Congress Street bridge in Austin, either.

Got a turkey buzzard circling my client's high-rise in west suburban Chicago and a huge raccoon that scares the living daylights out of my (indoor) cats in downtown when it chows down on the food we leave out for the alley cats.

Y'all are for the birds:

DEER.

Kill the DAMN DEER.

I think I and my wife have bagged more deer with our cars than some have with guns...

to hell with Bambi: shoot to kill!

Thing is, we need a raptor large enough to control the deer population. Evolution missed one helluva opportunity there.

It's very easy to control the deer population. Just one word: VENISON. Some brandy, cherries, a few morels, a nice Bordeaux and voila! No more deer problem.

In addition to the growth of forests, Americans can thank hunters in the conservation movement, who have helped to make white-tail deer, wild turkeys, and fowl so abundant. Unfortunately, environmentalists cannot understand that these creatures have prospered precisely because they are so darn much fun to shoot and eat.

What kind of Frenchified sissy puts syrup on good meat?

At least two of my friends have hit deer in recent years. Unfortunately deer can also hit people.

A woman was driving in McLean (inside the Beltway) a few years ago when another driver hit a deer and sent it flying through her windshield. Both the deer and the driver were killed.

Bart;

There's so much around these parts that you can hardly give it away. The hunters I know donate most of their deer carcasses to charitable organizations to feed the hungry because everyone else has all they want of it.

Kill the rats on stilts.

My theory is that deer are cougar food and if there is enough cougar food around the cougars will show up for dinner.

I am rooting for the cougars, but we may have to carry a 9mm on a regular basis when outside.

I'm noticing a lot of wild turkeys. And they're not as dumb as we've been told. Saturday as I was driving, a turkey looked like it was going to walk in front of my car. But he walked up to the side of the road, stopped and looked. He stayed put until my car and several others passed, then he dashed across the road.

Franklin wanted the turkey to be our national bird for good reason: they are perhaps the smartest of all our native birds. At least as smart as the crow. Turkey hunting is a challenge.

Robert:

I guess that met your test that the turkey's was a life worth living.

In a triage situation, the turkey lives. The pigeon dies. The starling I kill for the sheer joy of it.

Wait for the latest eruption of gloom and doom to come from James Howard Kunstler. As previewed in
the most recent Rolling Stone; he predicts what he calls ' the long emergency'; the end of the fossil fuel based economy, the collapse of American manufacturing, the reversion to farming;making the midwest the agricultural mid west; the dissolution of the South West and South East; Krugman & Dowd, will be screeching for weeks

re: Kunstler et. al.

Back in the 70s, by now we were promised a world with dead oceans, no more large mammals, including farm animals, 20 people to an apartment, air that was unbreathable, brownouts if we were lucky, gold at $10,000 an ounce, and billions dying from famine who weren't killed by the plagues. They've never been right, so why should we start believing them now?

cat: the correct latin name of the pigeon is sky rat.

OJ,

The recipe is German, from Baden to be specific.

Are any of these idiots complaining about our running out of petroleum aware that the Germans made coal into gasoline and that we have about a millenium worth of coal just sitting around waiting to be mined at any time?

"the Germans made coal into gasoline"

Yes and the current cost to do so is about $35/bbl. Oil futures are a bubble.