EXPLORING THE NIAGARA FRONTIER: What to get an outdoorsperson for Christmas

Trying to figure out what to get an outdoors enthusiast for Christmas can be a daunting task, especially if the shopper really isn’t an outdoorsy person. So, for the past 4 years, this column has offered some shopping ideas to the friends and families of nature lovers. With Black Friday just a week away, it’s as good a time as any to offer my suggestions.

In this year’s installment, I suggest these 4 books….

Books by Oak Duke

Being a nature columnist for All WNY News as well as an opinion columnist for 3 local daily newspapers, I’m often asked about who my favorite columnist is. Hands down, no matter the genre, it’s Oak Duke.

Oak is the retired editor and publisher of the former Wellsville Daily Reporter (now the Spectator) who for the past few decades has written an outdoors column that appears in the Sunday edition of that paper.

His writing style is impeccable, an intellectual free-flowing method that is unique to him. He uses it to tell stories of his days afield hunting whitetail deer and wild turkeys in beautiful Allegany County or to offer sometimes scientific, sometimes deeply reverent insight on the natural world he encounters while on those adventures. I’ve always appreciated how Oak can find and express so eloquently the beauty of the small things and the small moments in our forests.

Back in 2003, Oak published and distributed through the Wellsville paper two books collecting some of his favorite columns – “Whitetail Bowhunting” and “Springtime in the Turkey Woods.” Each book is 140+ pages of his mastery of his art. The books aren’t just about hunting, they’re also about the savoring of the sport and the sights and sounds of the woods.

Oak still has multiple copies of these books available for sale. They are $15 individually or $25 for the pair, postage included. To get your copies, email Oak at oduke4@gmail.com.  

The hunter in your life will appreciate these books.

Books by Gerry Rising

If your outdoorsperson isn’t into books that might occasionally mention the harvest of game animals, another local writer has a pair of books ready for reading pleasure.

Gerry Rising is an impressive naturalist, a great writer, and one the primary inspirations for my Exploring the Niagara Frontier nature columns. For 25 years he wrote the Nature Watch column for the Buffalo News before that paper really got the goat of yours truly and thousands more people across the region. For some reason, the Buffalo News didn’t find value in a science page and without announcement eliminated it 3 years ago. Never mind that there were likely countless readers like me who, when opening the Sunday news, immediately turned to the science page and Gerry’s column. That was something I did religiously through high school, college, and most of my adult life.

Luckily, Gerry found Buffalo Spree magazine willing to carry his work. If you don’t get the Spree and still want to sit down and enjoy Gerry’s columns, fear not. In the past couple years Gerry has collected and published some of his very best columns. Each tome has 100 of his articles about local birds, with ornithology being Gerry’s most passionate and popular work. If you go to Amazon.com and enter “Gerry Rising” in the search function you will find “Birder’s Break” and “Birds and Birdwatchers” at $10.95 each, which is a steal.

Nature lovers will enjoy how Gerry makes our avian friends, from the rare to the abundant, approachable and understandable to the layperson.   

These four books will make fine Christmas gifts for friends and family who like to explore the Niagara Frontier. They’re well-written, relatable to area residents, and you’ll be supporting two fine gentlemen who are real treasures of Western New York journalism.


From the 15 November 2018 All WNY News

EXPLORING THE NIAGARA FRONTIER: The invasion of the nuthatches

If I was asked to make a short list of my favorite birds the red-breasted nuthatch would be on it. Not only are the birds cute and friendly, but their songs transport my thoughts and memories to vacations and weekends on their home turf, be it the seemingly endless coniferous forests of northern Canada or the tracts of hemlocks, pines, and spruces found in certain locales of Allegany County.

You see, this nuthatch, unlike its very common and very familiar cousin the white-breasted nuthatch, is not especially common on the Niagara Frontier, especially where I live on the lake plains. Red-breasted nuthatches have an affinity for cone-bearing in great numbers. Those are forests of the north, or, here in Western New York, atop some of the higher peaks near the Pennsylvania border or in the woodlands that were planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression.

These birds might occasionally be found nesting throughout the region, perhaps making home in a mixed forest where there a few larger spruce mixed with deciduous trees. But, for the most part, they are a hard find until winter when migrants visit our feeders. Even then, their numbers are light.

This winter is already shaping up to be different… a lot different.

Occasionally, various species of birds from Canada that would otherwise stay there make their way to the States to stay the late-fall and winter due to food shortages or horrid weather back home. This is called an irruption.

Well, this is an irruption year for sure for these little mites.

A few weeks ago, well ahead of schedule, they started appearing in every nook and cranny of Western New York. I have two that frequent my feeders in rural Gasport. My parents have some. I’ve heard them every Sunday morning within the actual hamlet of Gasport itself. One of my Twitter friends has them at her feeders – in the heart of urban Buffalo.

Take the time to admire these birds. As mentioned earlier, they’re cute. They are a fifth to a third smaller and much sleeker than white-breasted nuthatches and a lot more attractive, which is saying a lot because white-breasted nuthatches are pretty birds to begin with. Red-breasts are 4 ½” long, sporting a blue-grey back, a black cap, a black line through their eye, and many are brushed with a chestnut or red on their grey-white breasts.

Coming out of their beaks is a tinny, nasal call, that is itself cute -- it sounds like a small toy horn.

Their feeding style in unique. Like other nuthatches and quite unlike woodpeckers and flickers they climb trees downward rather than upward. You have to admire their upside down climbing technique. They do this while looking for insects or cramming seeds under pieces of loose bark or in crevices which they then use as leverage so they can pry them open – which is where their name came from (nuthack in olde English). 

What forced them from Canada’s boreal forests and brought them here? It was one of two things.

One, there could have been a shortage of seeds all year, so they ran out early.

Two, there were actually so many pine and spruce cones early in the season that the red-breasted nuthatch parents overproduced offspring in response to the bounty and the nourishment they were given and the grown “baby boomers” ate all of them out of house and home to the point of running out.

The second option seems the most plausible this year, because Canada’s drier weather was conducive to nuthatch-friendly crop that allowed cone seeds to become easier to crack open. Also, I have seen irruption reports all across the northern United States, meaning that the nuthatch population was very large, Canada-wide.

For whatever reason, they’re here. And, it’s something to celebrate and see up close. If you have some in your yard, go out to your feeding station. They will let you walk right up to them and, with a little patience, they will even eat out of your hand. Most other bird species won’t oblige, but these ones do, maybe because they are like all Canadians --- friendly.


From the 08 November 2018 All WNY News

Democratic control of New York is really bad news

Being non-partisan (or, more accurately, someone who thinks “both” parties are equally bad), in last week’s election I practiced what I preach, voting for people and principles, not party. My ballot saw bubbles filled in for 1 Libertarian, 3 Republicans, and 3 Democrats in contested races.

With a mixed approach like that I was pleasantly surprised that control of the US House of Representatives went to the Democrats. Despite being someone who, as long-time readers would gather, trends closer to the right than the left, I welcome mixed control of our constitutional republic. Republicans shouldn’t hold all the power. And, neither should the Democrats. Even with all the division and divisiveness doled out by that, our citizens are best served by diversity of people and thought -- we need a means of check-and-balance. One party should not be fully empowered to run roughshod over a country or state. Someone has to be there to tighten the reins.

That said, the outcome of the state elections is what has me greatly concerned. The Democrats won the Senate, which means they control both houses of the Legislature and the Governor’s office. It will make a bad situation a lot worse.    

 

New York, specifically upstate, is in rough shape economically. It’s expensive to start or build a business here unless you happen to be a well-heeled, well-connected entrepreneur -- and I use the term “entrepreneur” loosely when those businessmen come to the trough -- like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos who have all sorts of money and inducements thrown their way.  Our towns, villages, and cities have become economic wastelands thanks to public policy that has driven too many bright minds and too many loved ones from our borders for better opportunity elsewhere.

This decline has come about from a group effort.

In recent years, through force of bullying in both houses or through executive fiat, Governor Andrew Cuomo has driven a stake through the heart of our dying upstate economy. A cornucopia of failed, or soon-to-fail, experiments from massive minimum wage hikes to the possible end of the tipped wage to 12 weeks of universal bereavement leave to call-in pay standards, to name a few, have done nothing but stifle opportunity. Realize that we’re talking about an administration so morbidly into micromanagement of the private sector that it now regulates how farmers use old tires to keep tarps down on their feed bunkers.

Cuomo’s long-standing foes in the Republican Party are just as guilty as he. Remember, the Senate was alleged to be in its glory years when Joe Bruno was in charge of it from 1994 to 2008. If it was, how did an alleged fiscally-conservative GOP double state spending under his watch with fellow Republican George Pataki in the Governor’s office for most of those years?

Mind you, all of those horrible policies and bad spending habits (and many more like them) have occurred for the most part with not one party having total control of the 3 Men in a Room routine. Bruno had Assembly leader Sheldon Silver as a foil, while Cuomo has had John Flanagan and before him Dean Skelos leading the Senate.

If the checks and balances of having multiple parties sharing some of the control were really in play, think of how bad things really could have been had they not. Without Sheldon Silver, even as corrupt as he was, would Bruno and Company have increased state spending even more? Without Flanagan looking over his shoulder, what more could Cuomo have pushed through from his self-proclaimed progressive agenda?

I guess we’ll find out the answer to that second question over the next couple of years, if not for an even longer period of time.

If I had to hazard a guess we’ll soon see mandated paid sick time, increased taxation of electrical energy and heating fuels, passage of Cuomo’s once-denied 14% windfall tax on health insurance, a carbon trading system, a Ban the Box movement, the end of employment-at-will, a push for a single-payer system, a transformation and strengthening of state agencies to usurp local control, and more money thrown at education without first fixing the broken system that has neutered school boards and stifled good teachers.

That’s just a sampling of what could occur. There’s likely much more to worry about.

If you own a business or home in upstate New York State brace yourself. The past few decades have been a race to the bottom with two parties sharing – and abusing -- the power. Now, with one party having total control, the bottom will get here a lot quicker.    

From the 12 November Greater Niagara Newspapers and Batavia Daily News

New York’s pupil shortage: An educational crisis

I’m the chairman of the board of a local nonprofit that serves area youth. A couple of years ago, we made a difficult but necessary decision to change our business and staffing model, a proactive measure in response to the population trends facing the region. We knew that just a few years down the road our old way of doing things wouldn’t be economically sustainable as there would be fewer potential clients to serve.

Seriously declining enrollments in area schools (specifically numbers from the 2014-2015 school year) were the catalyst for our strategy. Every county in which we operate saw double digit percentage drops in pupils, undoubtedly an outcome of an aging local population, young people moving out-of-state for what are greener pastures economically, and parents in general having fewer children.

Using my district as an example of what faces all of us in upstate New York, over that school year our sixth through twelfth grades saw a peak enrollment of 128 and a low of 100, averaging out at 115 students per grade. The average class size for grades kindergarten through fifth in the 2014-2015 school year was 90 students – that’s a sudden drop of 25 students per class or 22%. That statistic is scary in itself, but it’s nothing compared to the concern elicited by the enrollment numbers for that year’s kindergarten class: 79 students.

When looking at other districts in eastern Niagara County we found these disturbing declines in average class size for sixth through twelfth versus kindergarten through fifth in the 2014-2015 school year: Barker 23%, Wilson 21%, and Newfane 12%. The populations we serve in neighboring counties saw similar declines.   

These negative trends were reinforced in a report issued by the Empire Center this past September. They found that across the state public school enrollments had plummeted to levels not seen for 29 years. A telling map that came with their press release showed K-12 enrollment fell by 10 to 15% for Genesee County schools, 15 to 20% for Wyoming County districts, and 20 to 25% for Orleans County schools for the 10 academic years ending 2017-2018. 

We are, without a doubt, heading into an educational crisis.

The thing is, we already experienced one recently -- and, sadly, our voters and school taxpayers hardly learned from it -- as an outcome of the revenue losses of the Great Recession when sports and arts were temporarily cut, and superintendents, resources, and even students were shared across districts. Once the national economy found its mojo again and school boards and administrators had grown tired of having their heads served up on platters to the angry parents of students, those services were, for the most part, returned to the way they were.  

The crisis that we will be feeling over the next 5 to 15 years will far rival what we experienced during the Recession.

As these kids from the smaller cohort groups age into high school and the classes behind them remain dwarfed in numbers, untold numbers of teachers will lose their jobs, portions of facilities will be made obsolete, sports teams will have unsustainable rosters, and the way that we’ve been always been doing things will change dramatically. Students, parents, and whole communities will have to change their expectations, even their identities. Districts will have to share services and/or consolidate. They will have to do as my nonprofit board and make wholesale changes in response to the new norm facing Western New York’s socioeconomic conditions. It will be a major culture change and, for many, an uncomfortable one.  

The writing is on the wall, so, in the coming years, don't scratch your head or get too fired up when school boards and school officials have to make different, interesting, and difficult decisions concerning budgets, services, extracurricular activities, and consolidations.

As a matter of fact, right now is the time when you as a parent, taxpayer, and concerned citizen should be preparing for that by asking yourself a question that school boards have already asking themselves: What will the future hold?

From the 05 November 2018 Greater Niagara Newspapers and Batavia Daily News