Forest Service Law Enforcement Officer Fatally Shot

This sad release from the Outdoor Wire. There is a price for the wildlife we all enjoy. For some it is much higher than others...

A USDA Forest Service Law Enforcement Officer was fatally shot Friday, March 5, at the Ocmulgee Bluff Equestrian Recreation Area on the Oconee Ranger District of the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest in Jasper County, Georgia. | For More...

Turkey hunter cited for shooting fellow hunter

From the Times Argus Staff - Published: November 19, 2009

Turkey hunter cited for shooting fellow hunter


BRADFORD – A hunter accused of shooting and injuring another hunter last month in Bradford has been cited to appear in Vermont District Court in Chelsea to face an aggravated assault charge.

Richard Sylvester, 42, of Topsham told police he thought he was firing at a turkey when he pulled the trigger and shot Ryan Terrill, a 22-year-old Bradford man on Oct 25 at about 8:20 a.m., according to a news release from the Vermont State Police.

Sylvester and Terrill had arrived separately at a cornfield on Sand Hill Road in Bradford on Oct. 25, police said.

Terrill showed up first and set up a hunting chair in the woods near the cornfield, said police.

Sylvester told police he arrived at the field, saw turkeys, parked his vehicle and started stalking the birds, the news release said. He reported hearing a turkey and shooting at what he thought was a turkey within the wood line, and ended up shooting Terrill, police said.

Terrill was transported to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H. where he was treated and later released for his injuries.

Note from
Eric : fortunately these type shootings are rare, but not rare enough! Everyone is preventable. First and foremost you should never fire until you are 100% sure of your target and beyond. Any doubt at all and it is a no shoot. 2) turkey hunters should never stalk - the odds of success are remote, and most of all it can lead to tragities like this one. Stats show that if there is a hunter shot, 50% of the time it is the person being stalked and 50% of the time it is the stalked who is shot. 3) Lastly hunt defesively . If you see someone coming into your are speak up and tell them you are there, don't wave, stand up or make animal sounds. If your are using a ground blind, put some orange on it - without movement it will not scare turkeys but it should alert other hunters.
During the rifle season for the sake of your family and the future of hunting wear orange! It works

Hearing research in humans

While reading this I wondered if hearing doesn't play a greater role in mistaken for game shooting incidents than we have thought in the past...

New York Times June 23, 2009

Basics

When an Ear Witness Decides the Case

By NATALIE ANGIER

Spoken clearly, the sounds “dah” and “bah” are easy to distinguish. Yet if you play a film clip in which the soundtrack says “dah” while the image on the screen shows a mouth saying “bah,” people will swear they heard “bah.”

If you ask people to count the number of times that a light flashes, and you flash the light seven times together with a sequence of eight beeping tones, people will say the light flashed eight times.

When confronted with conflicting pieces of information, the brain decides which sense to trust. In the first scenario, those clearly percussing lips could never be articulating a “d,” and so vision claimed the upper hand. But on matters that demand a temporal analysis, and making sense of similar sounds in a sequence, the brain reflexively counts on hearing.

Click click click. You can listen to a series of clicks at 20 beats per second and know they are separate clicks rather than a single continuous tone. Run a series of images together at 20 frames per second and — welcome to the movies.

“The temporal resolution of our vision,” said Barbara Shinn-Cunningham of Boston University, “is an order of magnitude slower than what our auditory system can cope with.”

It’s easy to take hearing for granted, that sprawling stereophonic Babylonia where the gates never close and there are soapboxes for all. You can shut your eyes against a bright sun or avert your gaze from a grim scene. But when one neighbor’s leaf blower sets off another neighbor’s car alarm, hey, where are my earlids? We’ve been called the visual primate, and the size of our visual cortex dwarfs the neural platform assigned to audition. Most people, when asked, claim they would rather lose their hearing than their sight.

Yet in ways that researchers are just beginning to appreciate, we humans are beholden to our ears. Mechanically, electrically, behaviorally and cosmetically, our paired sounding boards are a genuine earmark of our species. And if the words aural and oral are often confused, they should be, for our ears and our mouths jointly gave us our voice.

Scientists now suspect that the origin of human language owes as much to improvements in the early hominid ear as to more familiar spurs like a changing vocal tract or even a generally expanding brain. In one recent molecular analysis, John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin reported that eight genes involved in shaping the human ear appear to have undergone significant changes over the past 40,000 years, some as recently as the dawn of the Roman Empire. Only with highly refined auditory infrastructure, researchers said, could our ancestors have tuned in to the sort of tiny fluctuations in pressure waves that characterize all human speech, let alone properly conjugated Latin.

Moreover, the avidity with which our auditory sense seeks to organize ambient noise into a meaningful acoustical pattern — a likely consequence of our dependence on language — could help explain our distinctly human musicality.
(more)

New Camo what does it mean for safety?

The Gore company has developed a new camo that appears to make you invisible to deer and to hunters. Check it out at the Science of Nothing or http://www.optifade.com/ Skip to the 2nd and 3rd videos. It is pretty amazing.
The question it raises to me, being the old hunter ed instructor, is what does this mean for hunter safety. We are already seeing a rise in mistaken for game shootings during bow season with the current generation of camo. Also, Vermont has no orange law during rifle season, and more folks wear camo than Darwin's survival of the fittest should allow for. Once this new generation of digital camo gets out there it will become very difficult to "be sure of your target and beyond" no matter how conscientious and safety minded you are.
Seems to me it is time to get ahead of this increasing problem and require orange during deer rifle season and while small game hunting. Coupled with this should be experiential training during basic hunter education class and outreach/advanced training for seasoned hunters, covering defensive hunting It could be easily blended in with the Successful Hunting seminars that have been piloted by myself, Orion and VT Hunter Ed in Stowe and Putney.