What We Have Here Is a Failure to . . .
By Angus Phillips
Sunday, November 26, 2006; Page E06
With Thanksgiving behind us, deer hunting season is in full swing in Maryland and Virginia. That means everybody without a gun better get out of the woods.
Okay, it's not quite that bad, but sometimes you wonder. Mike Dreisbach called from Savage River Lodge in Western Maryland, which he built to accommodate guests who come from the big city to take in the fresh air, hike, fish, bird-watch or cross-country ski on 640 acres of state forest that surrounds his 45 acres. During the two-week deer season, Dreisbach says he hands out orange vests for hikers so they won't get mistaken for a buck and cautions guests to keep their dogs on a leash, never stray off the trails and make plenty of noise as they wander along.
He called to describe a battle he's having with locals over his efforts to expand a no-hunting, no-weapons safety zone on state land around the lodge, along the road leading to it and on hiking paths. He thinks the situation is getting dangerous as trails get more popular and deer hunters with rifles and hikers with binoculars increasingly cross tracks. The locals don't buy his solution, saying they've been hunting there for years and shouldn't have to change their ways for some tree-hugging newbies. The state Department of Natural Resources has been waffling, solving nothing.
Meantime, on the opposite side of the state in Deale, Frank Vollmerhausen is fed up with a boat-load of duck hunters waking the neighborhood at 6 a.m. on Saturdays, spraying rooftops with spent steel pellets as they beat and bang on local "popcorn ducks" -- plump mallards that many of his neighbors feed.
The problem in both cases is conflicting uses. As our little corner of the world gets more crowded, bird-watchers and bird hunters, hikers and deer hunters, JetSkiers and kayakers find themselves staring angrily across a yawning cultural void, each wishing the other would go away. Neither side seems inclined to back down.
Disputes like these can end up ugly if the partisans are intractable. There isn't much common ground to explore if you put People for Ethical Treatment of Animals in their plastic belts and plastic shoes in a room full of tobacco-chewing, beer-swilling deer poachers. But reasonable people should be able to work things out, which is why the stories of Dreisbach and Vollmerhausen are worth exploring.
Dreisbach spent last Monday on a mountain in West Virginia, enjoying opening day of deer season at a hunt club he's been in for years. He hiked a mile and a half uphill through the woods to get to his stand before dawn and by 9:30 a.m. he'd watched four bucks, several does, a flock of wild turkeys and a black bear pass close enough for a shot. He passed up two small bucks, had no clear shot at a big eight-pointer and finally took a six-pointer, field-dressed it and dragged it two and half hours down the mountain and back to camp.
"It was a beautiful day," said Dreisbach, who has hunted for 44 years, since he was 12.
Likewise, Vollmerhausen, who works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is no rabid anti-hunter. He grew up on a dairy farm in Howard County, tagged along as a boy when his dad hunted and fished, worked a year as a guide on a hunting preserve, did a tour in Vietnam with the Army, keeps pistols and rifles around for target shooting and says he has nothing against hunting, though he doesn't hunt himself.
Vollmerhausen moved from Laurel to a tidy house on Carrs Creek in 1999 to get away from urban life, and enjoyed the peace and quiet until two weeks ago, when the neighborhood was rousted from slumber on opening day of duck season. It turned out a new neighbor had registered a stake-blind site across the creek, and he and his buddies were pounding away from a camouflaged boat at mallards, buffleheads and Canada geese.
"About 15 people went down to the community pier and started yelling. Some people were still in their pajamas," Vollmerhausen said. "I shouted, 'Stop shooting our ducks!' One of the guys shouted back, "Thanks for feeding them, they're nice and fat."
Natural Resources Police were called in. They took measurements and pronounced the blind site legal -- barely. By law, shooting is not permitted within 150 yards of a dwelling in Maryland. A laser gadget NRP uses to measure such things set the distance to the nearest house at 156 yards, Vollmerhausen said.
So it looks like the community is stuck with noisy weekend waterfowling this season, though next fall, on advice from helpful state officials, waterfront landowners plan to register their own blind sites, effectively blocking the stake-blind crowd from coming back.
Meantime, up in Western Maryland, Dreisbach will push the new O'Malley administration to approve a bigger safety zone around his cabins, access road and trails, in hopes a change in personnel in Annapolis will help his case.
As a keen deer and duck hunter myself, it makes me sad to hear this sort of thing. One thing we still have plenty of in Maryland and Virginia is open land to hunt on, for anyone willing to get off his duff. Garrett County, where Dreisbach's place is, has 55,000 acres of wide open state forest for people to hunt on. Duck hunting places on the Chesapeake's Western Shore are harder to come by, but across the Bay Bridge are marshes and farm fields galore, full of wild ducks and geese -- deer, too, for that matter.
"The problem is slob hunters," says Dreisbach, "guys that want to hunt along the road so they don't have to walk." Likewise in Deale, it's a lot easier to blast popcorn ducks in people's back yards than to chase after wary, wild ones in the marsh.
The state tries to legislate these matters but no matter how they word the rules, somebody's going to find a loophole. In the end, it comes down to common sense. Shooting half-tame popcorn ducks in a quiet neighborhood at 6 a.m. on a Saturday isn't duck hunting, and waiting with a rifle to shoot a deer crossing a road or a trail that people use isn't deer hunting. "They call it common sense, but it ain't that common," as the famous fly-fisherman Lefty Kreh says.
"Just because it's legal doesn't make it right," adds Vollmerhausen.
Can I get an amen?
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