Game Games

We see a lot of wildlife in Kennydale these days, much more of most species than when I was growing up here. Deer regularly "visit" our garden and fruit trees; neighbors have semi-serious problems with raccoons; Stellars Jays and Eastern Grey Squirrels wage warfare over the unripe filberts in August. If sheer numbers were the metric, of course, Starlings, English Sparrows and Crows would, all by themselves, win the comparison many times over. In things biological, though, numbers aren't the only thing. What you want to have is diversity - sustainable populations of a lot of different kinds of critters to fill all the niches. I believe we had that in the 40's, 50's and 60's but it was hard to tell for sure because no more would some animal show its face than it would likely get shot at.

In those days there weren't any hard and fast rules about shooting. Some folks hunted deer in the May Creek Valley and we got an occasional ring neck pheasant in the back field. Pa would shoot robins with his .22 and hang them in the strawberry patch (along with twirling strips of tin foil) to discourage their illegal harvest. The .22 got a further workout on rats in the barn. Most kids had, or wanted to have BB guns - perhaps a future post topic, but my own experience with one is almost too painful and humiliating, still, to bring to mind long enough to write of it. So, in mid-century Kennydale, between the guns and the free-ranging dogs (another future post, maybe) any species was an endangered species! That certainly isn't true today. Our guns are registered, the dogs leashed and mellowed. Wild animals now are protected and they know it!