Muzzle Blast Dander

emily abendroth

Muzzle Blast Dander[or, A History of Muskets at Mattamuskeet]

20 21

ABenDrotH

In the month of December 2006, myself and filmmaker Kate Dollen-mayer spent a little under two weeks in a doublewide trailer, the property of East Carolina University, within the boundaries of Lake Mattamus-keet Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina. A favorite wintering spot for migratory birds in the Atlantic Flyway, Lake Mattamuskeet’s 50,000 acre pocket is currently home to more than 800 species of wildlife, includ-ing more than 200 species of birds. As a site, it has also been the locus point of fierce debates regarding increasing military occupation and uti-lization of rural areas, the effects of large-scale human-initiated trans-formations and manipulations of natural environments, and conflicting consensuses concerning what “sanctuary” for wildlife in the contemporary world could or should consist of.

At the turn of the 20th century, between 1909 and 1932, three distinct attempts were made to drain Lake Mattamuskeet in its entirety and to build a town, coupled with an agricultural industry, in its newly dry (or at least less water-ensconced) depression. The last of these attempts succumbed to bankruptcy (as had the preceding two) in 1932, at which point the federal government purchased the property and in 1934 declared it a national refuge for waterfowl and other wildlife—a status which it retains to this day. What precise rights or opportunities that “special” status confers to the creatural residents, both seasonal and permanent, who variously inhabit this site, is (like its geographic territories) a murky marshland of legal and linguistic interpretation.

22 23

ABenDrotHRefuge / Refugee

mattamuskeet, whose name implies:“Who reaches by leaching” “The Fitful Cull[er]” “Bucket in the Wood” “Plucky” “Hankering for Tank-ing Storms” “Whose girth is below land-low” “The Disaffected” “One Unlinked Den of the Five-Lined Skink [Among Many]” “Hem-Teaser”“The Shallow Mammoth”

When a space, like surrounding hyde County’s space, is this flat and sparsely populated, the attentive animate lookout can see stars where you [“Reader” “Shamblebound” “Of Eye, Calloused” “A Spinning Tizzy of Husky Flanks” “Blinded by Inns” “Whose Neck Locks” “Like Unto Me”] wouldn’t even think to stare for them simply by peer-ing straight forward and out, at the meager height of the fetlock.

the whole accustomed demand for overhead viewing, an awkward neck skewing tilt is jilted, thrown akimbo.the horizon’s low-orbit allowances bowing untilany glibly tossed glance might glean in reams of peppered cosmos

12/14/06—When we go out nights, walking the orderly man-made canal roads that circle Lake Mattamuskeet’s perimeter and pass out briefly into its massiveness, this laborforce of stars is bright

“All this is fact. Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.” —Marilynne Robinson

An Origin Porridge / A Lane of Surnames

lake mattamuskeet is the current name for the largest natural lake in north Carolina.

the “largest” “natural” “state” “lake” is a proportionally exaggerated puddle.

Plumped up in stealthily slurped asides to a dimensionality eighteen by seven miles wide.

mattamuskeet’s pleats speak a wetlands depression that sates itself with rainwater alone

Plying its ample waistband with runoff and leakage from the horizontally-racing adjacent flatlands.

it is not fed by underground springs or by headwaters.nor does it “naturally” purge into them. it “naturally” refutes this usual connection of aqueous

circulations. rejecting the recombinant vitreous network of tributaries,

offshoots, or cascades.

Collecting its liquid innards by other means —by hovering for seepage.

in this age,mattamuskeet is not only “largest” but “undermost”: the lowest point in all the county.one which, once double current dimensions, and lower still, now lingers at three to five feet below sea level.

and numerous enough to see by. Moon or no moon, our doddering hauls—their slinking and uncertain flesh hulls—track the road solely via the tempered strength of this tinpoint luminosity kit. Its thick candescent cropping, mating with the water’s surface, breach-births a full letterpress set of wobbly punctuation in over-inked and half-blinking streaks. Tossed trippingly across the lake’s shrewd glass tulle by flares of whipping air, these lexical accents saunter with a pronounced lisp.

24 25


the supple din of the lake’s pocosin habitat tapping the ongoing presence of recondite deposits whose subterranean seatings turgidly gird its silt-fat soils. one popular narrative intervention holds that long ago these underground peat sheets caught fire provoked a flaming which spread subcutaneouslycollapsing the prior surface pulling it down—torched—into new vacuitieslurching toward the now earth-emptied pockets of ash below. a gross moss heat-drossing. on account of which the marshlands coughed—awfully loud. belched cinder and sunk.

balking to hear such a cocky stock of hominid plot monopoly, other tellers cry skunk. Suggesting instead that not only mattamuskeet but other less attention-catching lakes nearby were, to the contrary, each scoured out by a hailstorm of performance-rowdy meteors who nip-tucked their scorching guts and vigorously struck the entire Caro-lina coastal plain. Subjecting it to a volatile dropping in rather than dropping out. a scathing astral raking.

thus, mattamuskeet, Whose names include:“The Scoured One” “Sour to Desert Rapture” “A Zone of Non-Alluvial Wet Hardwood” “Raspy in Ashes” “The Comet’s Comment” “Birthed by Nettlesome Burn” “Who slumping, pumps new waters” “The Stricken District” “Testy” “Whose Sperm Takes the Form of Ungainly and Horizontal Berm”

include “Favored by Fowl”Which it has been, longly. though not always by the same birds, and like unto its

Tonight in particular, two brilliant planetary tykes lowest on the ripple-touching-sky line extend like an apoplectic set of end brackets—at once ramrod and ramified in dispersion—another version of what illumination could interpose.

A tickling piquancy. A soft glare-homestead.

hyde County today is defined by its ditches, crosshatching and inter-latching as they dothe nearly gradationless fields—alikely marked for private consumption and as semipublic commons

From an aerial view, the absolute flatness is interrupted only by patterns of auspicious shovelings in a regular finning into the loam mantel never an elevation.

in courteous simulation of the terrain, and in contradistinction to its circumference enormitymattamuskeet as well is hardly a steep pitcher.any thigh-high bulwarked human body might facilely vie for even its boastful inmost nethers

a slaking and weedy rime, its silky films ribboned in loblolly pine are stapled at the edges by red maple and bald cypress tresses

Caressing, on the other hand, the origin of this massive cousin-to-marshes crater is not so easy.

For these positings too run to knee-deep in their multiplications

forming an ante bantered by the interested that defies consolidation.

26 27


particulate envisioned in this description should be 30 feet across and 50 feet high, couched between two mountains, locked in at the seams by their crags. The wind which blows across its taut photo-

projected conception, certainly not with those same birds always being human-gazed in the same ways.

to say all this is not even to speak of sharper declivities, riven of the given differences between those volants [across the ages] who stayed versus those who chose to simply pass through. repeatedly.

the “Passing through” Winged Generations.

12/11/07—When Kate and I first pull into the refuge in the middle of the night we step out of the car into a soundscape so bizarre our rudimentary city-numbed ears can’t translate. Although sensibility prods against it, I think wolf fleets, packs and packs. I even feel compelled to press that the cumulative roar confirms it. But standing in the sightless dark, listening harder, we realize the explanation won’t do; that only the sutured racket of 150,000 gaggled tundra swans and snow geese can account for this turbulent colloquium. Weeks later in the library, in a Peterson field guide to birds, I read that the tundra swan has a wingspan of 6 to 7 feet, that its bill is black with a small yellow basal spot, that it is long-necked but short in leg, that its voice clearly hoots “klooo” or “kwooo.” And most critically, that “a distant flock sounds like baying hounds.”

Some afternoons, Kate and i try to articulate these calls, to apportion written portraits of constricted equivalency to them, to attempt their shareability in absentia of their most direct nouns. of the full blown daytime chorus, we gesture toward juvenile wheat whistles. 12/16/06 Not the young girl with the stabilized reed sanctioned between the slivered gap of her cupped thumbs blowing, though the rambunctiousness and intensity of that pursing of lips should be retained. Only now dismiss her trunk, we command our notebooks/ourselves. We’re not trying to populate a landscape but rather echolocate and mug its rumpled palpitations as they feather the hammer and dulcimer. The grainshaft

synthetic sheeting is not fierce but undulating and so the whistle and hum, the peculiarly fibrous sibilant vibration shuttles unevenly across—now here, now there, now higher, now lower, but never ceasing. A chatter as of 40,000 fish yaps pressed against the grass curtain breathing out first in wisps and then suddenly—as if collec-tively recollecting the absolute unsuitability of this airborne smacker stacked habitat—in spasms of panicked exhalation.

later, trying also to account for the puddle ducks, the diving ducks, the occasional scissoring merganser whose cackling and solo disruptions provide standout oratory amidst the general mob chorus, we sit achingly still on the rutted, packed-earth lake sill, wondering upon our fluttering sheaves: What if a metronome were guided not by clockwork mechanisms, the regularized transpiration of temporal seconds, but rather by the most moderate changes in air direction and surface temperature? What if its sounding consisted not of the inimitably planar clocking, the metallic clack of steel ball to steel ball, but alternately an inconsistently measured yet insistent squabbling? A pursuant drubbing by oak bat of a bed-sized mound of rubber-bulbed bicycle horns.

Until nearly burnt out now by ear-bending, When the tundra swans pass over our heads at dusk, in flocks of vying thousands, the crying is something altogether other again: a fleeting twilit tiff, a hustled vagrant drone.

the tundra Swans are also referred to as “Whistling Swans” not for anything come of their lungs but a roar born right out the wings a motor of motivated flight

these “whistling swans” migrate roughly 4,200 miles each winter, bustling across in long bandsfrom alaska to the east Coast

28 29


While the more wizened trawlers of lake and sea offered unto fellow shelf and shellfish ransackers hand-me-down warnings, advising them how to revive these night-capping ave masses whose downy plumage was unintentionally netted in brusk lifts of cuttlefish and stripers

“take them into a warm room,” they told their companions.

“they will revive.” “open a window.”

before humans thought of these voluble and flapping populations as soluble by “migrating” they thought of them as something else.

they were aware (as well as we, if not more) that certain aviary species went surprisingly unseen for durations whose length was measured in the fields’ fallownesses. hardly remiss in observation, they noted this missing and applied a preexis-tent explanation, murmuring of temporary inducements into torpid states, tonguing hibernation.

more specifically, and in realms scientific, they extemporized on the prospects of a somnambulant flock-wide off-shoring into arctic liquid stock. an underwater coldspell settling.

Some early ornithologists wrote fantastic accounts of the flocks of swallows that allegedly were seen congregating in the marshes until their accumulated weight bent into the water the reeds on which they clung and thus submerged the birds. it was even recorded that when fishermen in northern waters drew up their nets they sometimes had a mixed ‘catch’ of fish and hibernating swallows. (source?)

how many people “saw” this? “Caught” this?

shrill fleets of soggy poorwills the upland plover rolled over in droves

eared grebes steeped onto bouillon in swampwaters

the entire avifauna of the continent:conglobulating together, scissoring round and round, and then all by happy heap in a group transgression of surface tension, throwing themselves under water settling into the viscous slurries of an unhurried and mum aquarium “for winter.”

“but be wary. they won’t live long.”

there was apparently wide concurrence among the whisper-ers that each swooping troops’ longevity would be largely predicated on whether the movement from bogfloor huddle to air emergence was urged by the powwowing fowls’ own intuitive call to shirk dormancy—or otherwise. any forced and starling-startling upsweep of flounder hitched to finch would inevitably bear its consequences.

this bottom-lurking model warbler, operating in the human imagination as:“Who Weighted, Lies, In Wait [In Mud]” “Piteous When Caught” “The Silt-Docked Flock” “Dwelling with Fishes” “Whose propellers are feathers” “The Reed-Pickled” “Frigid to Finger” “The Kelp’s [Surprise] Whelp” “Whose State is Torpid” “Who Shares the Company of Carp [*Also said of starfish]”

“So firmly rooted was the theory [ . . . ] that in 1878, dr. elliott Coues [one of america’s foremost ornithologists] listed the titles of no less than 182 papers dealing with the hibernation of swallows.” (Peterson)

these, the selfsame birds of whom, attesting now so firmly (so intellectually unsquirmishly) to their seasonal leave-taking, we didactically cite:

30 31


“in 1813, John James audubon rode all day under a sky filled with migrating pigeons. he reckoned that a billion birds had flown past him by nightfall . . . . in 1866 another legendary flight arrived in Southern ontario: over a mile wide, with an estimated two birds per square yard, it took fourteen hours to pass overhead. Subsequent estimates suggest there were more than three billion birds in that assembly.” (Gibson)

For audubon, as an avid wildlife notetaker, these hurtling airborne aviaries were both muse and something to use

an anchoring point for his “artistic purposes.”

For audubon, recording best almost always involved laying the so-pictured into a meticulously molded state of permanent arrest.

one of the first bird artists to use fresh models, audubon led his eager viewers to ecstatic appreciation of the world’s living natural wonders through heaps of hand-preened carcasses—their freshly-turned-corpse torsos fine-tuned via the careful lacing of slender-gauge wires through the delicately tufted bodies. With personally harvested samples, audu-bon exercised a scrupulous attendance to the moribund anatomy that he excused himself from in its animate version cautiously tugging the metal threads far out to the finest brittle tips of dangerously fragile appendages.

this ceaseless practice, pursued over decades, found audubon both cagey and unrelenting in his patience for “shapings’ purposes.”

the massive corpus of made drawings precisely pen-thatched and shaded

“Swelling with Fishes [Eaten]” “Star Avatars” “Antsy” “Whose Span is Fleetness Itself” “Wander-ing in Temperament” “Who Dive Only Briefly” “Of Unparalleled Distance Acceptance” “Whose Con-gregations Constellate [the Winter Skies]” “Leggy in Egg-Making” “The Able Aerial Trail-razers [*Also said of F-16 jet planes]”

3/5/07—When I have returned to the city where I live, seeking interpretive assistance, I make my way to the library once again. I paw at the shelves impatiently for bird migration information. To be frank, I don’t understand the Atlantic Flyway. Nor do I “get” “imprinting”; Not as it concerns an inscription process carried out by man-made presses—that I can tactilely comprehend—but rather and more wildly as it refers to an aviary inheritance of intuitive and detailed topographical knowledge, an inferred time and means for moving along.

One of the best books that I encounter on this day’s search is a text that was first released in 1952. The copy available at the Free Library of Philadelphia is a weirdly mimeographed grafting of doubled-up long sheets whose edges remain uncut—each front-to-back siding a workable pocket in form. The text explains, “Years ago, before birds of prey were so thoughtlessly slaughtered, great flocks of red-tailed, Swanson’s, and rough-legged hawks might be seen wheeling majestically across the sky in the Plains states, and in the East the flights of broad–winged, Cooper’s, and sharp-skinned hawks are still occasionally seen.” (Lincoln) Another book from 1910 speaks of vast groupings of ravenous eagles that, departing the Northern European winters, proceed to follow massive aggregations of locusts across the expansive continent of Africa. Swarm chasing swarm. (Pycraft)

I live in the East and have never once (even in childhood) heard of a throng of hawks.

32 33


Still 3/5/07—Seeking information on animal movement throughprinted matter, how can I ask of these texts, of these migrations, notonly how far did they come, and how quickly, but how do we “know”? A legacy of learning through slaughter.

Flipping further through the pulp-frayed and agape fading pages, littered as they are with spangled “firsts,” “records,” and “foremosts,” and finding therein an addled catalogue of the sporadic irruptions of Pallas’s Sand-grouse. An account which notes that “These birds, natives of the vast Gobi deserts, occasionally make their appearance in Europe in enormous numbers and for reasons which as yet are absolutely inexplicable. During the last forty years, three separate invasions of this handsome species have occurred in Great Britain. The first of these took place in 1863, the last in 1888, when both previous records were totally eclipsed, vast hordes making their way across Europe, following on the routes taken by their predecessors; of these, thousands finally reached Great Britain only to be speedily exterminated by the ‘Collector’.” (source?)

Or, “The greatest speed thus far recorded for any banded bird is that of a lesser yellowlegs banded at North Eastham, Cape Cod,Massachusetts on August 28, 1935 and killed six days later 1,900 miles away at Lamentin, Martinique, West Indies.” (source?)

A record broken by burial. All the listed achievements ‘captured,’ in fact, through killings.A ‘winning’ status surely ill comprehended by its now-rigid

recipients.

Where in all these instants and instances of slay-to-know showings is our own current one? or your current narrator?how will you [“Like Unto Me”] ever determine where “[her] problems” “[her] infatuations” “[her] misgivings” imbue “this lake [lake mattamuskeet]” in variously over-aimed, aspect-blind or demonstrably false taints.

Until his own dogged rigor finds audubon writing—in the vocabulary not of scientific austerity, but of crippling emotional need—how he felt ‘incomplete’ if he didn’t kill a hundred birds a day.

audubon frequently offing a dozen species-in-common individuals before finding the one [“The Representative” “Emblem Unto Others” “Pliant” “Ample in Death” “Whose Skin is Akin to Godly Model” “Itching for Wiring”] adequate to his self-selected task.

What are we to make of audubon’s—[jubilant?]—diary recording how in a single 19th century day 48,000 Golden Plovers were gunned down near new orleans

the yellow and fawn flank feathers, now blood-spattered, and seen as vermillion from belowdeemed far too mangled by the exuberantly expended charges in their majority to be compelling ‘painterly fare’ too sundered to be rendered how poorly these fowl fared in the scopes of this attention

the questions thus left to us today including:how has audubon, the celebrated feral confidante,

framed an entire history (early and current alike) of american “naturalists”? or our expectations of what they might look and act like?

What about the concepts of “sanctuary” later to come?Where have they sucked at the stringy ligaments of these rarebit prior nibs?

34 35


the lacerating fans of the mechanism, sculpting a permanently fluttered fish schism mirroring in its gory collage the overhead soaring cormo-rants lodged in jet fuselages, each one logged as animate damage-conducer, an inconvenient deterrent to production While, inversely, any human-induced project difficulties are rapidly papoosed within the raw bureaucratic caws of beneficent “reclamation” —a swaddling verbal mirage whose cause involves evoking the comfortably vague sensation of apropos policy afoot, an unnamed return

to a hitherto unseen eco-state wherein wild millet, panic grasses, and spike rushes alike are forcefully propelled into thick hatches of corn, soy, and winter wheat, ratcheting the complex former flora sidelong to mere marginal aura

the linear agricultural patches proposed as their place-holders spelling to the legislature a tantalizingly buoyant but invented past whose ambitiously tailored constellations reek from the outset of inoperability

the kicky chops of one recent study on the history of america’s wetlands (& their demolition) reporting:

“Farmers drained 69% of iowa’s wetlands and 68% of missouri’s wetlands by 1922. in California, more than 70% of the wetlands were reclaimed.” (Vileises)

the terms “reclaimed” and “drained” being clanged about interchangeably even within those very texts bent on testing the assumed viability of that association, each person’s tipped script quipping as if “monster ditcher” and “restorative elixir” were equably assessable belly-up simulations of one another

She:“A Din-Monger” “Who has never seen more than two hawks at hand” “Kin to the Collector” “Whose own Feathers are Long Tethered” “Tippy” “For whom whooping is neither coop nor coup” “Living by Plastics” “Loving the Audubon Detail”

there are five diversely-sized islands located in the far west end of lake mattamuskeet. on older maps they are called heron bay island, big island, head of lake island, house island, and topping island. on new maps, they are not called

the rest of the last of . . . . . . . .

Casting Judas Goslings

to shatter the ghastly pumps

whose roiling turbines pining siphons unslakedis pursued by mining the lake raking in its moisture to the tickle of 1,200,000 gallons a minute, wracking back 35 tons of hard-veined coal within every sunrise-bound interval

the station cavalierly declaring itself, via the opulence of its ravenous paunch to be “the largest pump-supported land reclamation project in america” except when impassably clogged in its quaffing by sucked-up bottom-clucking carp

whose badly rattled habitat is fit to tattered for these acts of booming vacuum. the carps’ broad aquatic bodies a burly forearm in size, a bulk hurled inadvertently into

36 37


performing—amongst other things—the conversion of the demobilized moistland-combating plant into a robust rustic hunting lodge, building a freshly suspended floor to hide the lower halves of the inert pump housings, buried as they were—in invisible repose—by the ceaselessly accreting and uncleared silt beds while the incoming armed crowds, rowdy, tussled for sweet buns and indiscrete guns above

where they still sit, pitted in dirt, out-sized, oxidizing

When the mattamuskeet lodge opened to the public in november of 1937, the waterfowl refuge quickly became known as the “Canada Goose Hunting Capital of the World”

the refuge hunting capital a satiric panegyric one hyperbolic plateau for the portmanteau

the crisp roadside brochures promising to its drive-in visitors an “administered” wildness, “quality” hunting oppor-tunities, a “managed” network of lands and waters whose designated officiates pinky-swore to coring out their inexo-rable part in a collective effort for all “american genera-tions,” assuring the free-to-caper citizenry of an unfettered feathered accessibility via this rouge powdering of spotted refuges across the continent’s face—an often racing combina-tion, even competition, of conservation for species and/or for sport

Courting the numbers, since as early as 1920, various avian monitoring outfits have been underway in different parts of north america. the original federal U.S. bird banding office was located at the Patuxent research refuge in rural laurel, maryland. according to its early documentations:

To reduce to clatter these crested-beyond-peak steel-plate lumps

copiously apply blasting caps ward off precariously positioned residentsthe ragged shards of flying casing must be dodged in their detonative disassembly

they must be ducked quailed before the explosive shrapnel nearly shaving veering short-tailed

shearwaters, a visibly unbuttoned mutton bird

on december 18, 1934 the United States government, forti-fied by an astute sense of ceremony, officially dumped the pumps, declaring the now federalized property a uniquely protected zone renaming it the “Mattamuskeet Migra-tory Waterfowl Refuge”

the lapsed iron wrappings and exoskeletons of the water-mitigating machinery were shipped afield from the small coastal community of englehardt to the manufacturing centers of Japan which had embarked on a worldly-in-scope scrapheap buy-up amidst WWii hostilities onset.

this is “reclamation” as it refers to a gross national project, one unhesitatingly propagated as befitting a mass public’s moral shoring or common utility.

the pumphouse fittings being in this case quickly “reclaimed” again for another domestic endeavor that was likewise distinctly other than repetitious in its dimensions

the depression-era roosevelt work departments bussing in large bands of itinerant men formulated as Civilian Conser-vation Corps to occupy hyde County for almost nine years

38 39


“Insincere” [*or also “Dreary” in the North] “That Kneels Dry-heaving” “For Others’ Future Brothers” “An Everyday [but eery] Language”

12/15/06—The Lake Mattamuskeet Wildlife Refuge as it exists today continues in the vein of an intensively supervised environ-ment: its water levels are controlled by pumps and imposing control structures, its vegetation manipulated by regular burning, discing, and mowing. The aim is to keep the entire area in a constant stage of arrested early succession—an open confession of preference for rarer marshlands. When Kate and I arrive on the premises there is about us abundant visual evidence cuing one to the contemporary dredg-ing projects currently taking place here. A private company has been contracted to remove 60,000 square yards of materials from the site. There’s no complete job exactly (minus the quantitative yardage excision) short of slowing up the present processes of sedimenta-tion and attempting to comply with a century-old regulation which reads that the canals must be optimally maintained at a depth of five feet. The canals have apparently never been that depth since the ordinance was issued, but the written obligation remains on the page all the same. This numerical ideal that has, for a hundred-score and more, been the poured-over mandate but never the sand-pack actu-ality strangely unfins the underpins of many supposedly empirical conversations taking place between the living land and its legisla-tions. The enforcers of this palpable predicament are necessarily working off two false standards simultaneously; they are supervisory sticklers to a preferred past instant that is also nonexistent. A con-fusion that for the moment entirely defers the difficulty of which instant we should be seeking to return to or retain whatever the given frame.

Gamely taking much away, a dredger is a creature that clears a route as it goes, an automation of geometric eliminations, repeatedly ripping all roots at its nose. In the case available to our viewing however, this passageway already exists, is simply seeking greater

“the banding of birds is done by regular officers of the U.S. and dominion Services, by biologists and technicians of the States and Provinces, and by volunteer coopera-tors who are specially licensed under the provisions of the migratory bird treaty act.” (source?)

the killing of birds is done by anyone.

do not collect nuts and berries.

the more you shoot, the faster you look away. a sightline-to-mind ricochet.

resonant but waffling for the driving heat.

Force-pulsing until a wakeful ear can’t but help catch positive evidence of what is going on aloft.

another coughing to cover the coitus of musketpowder contacts.

by 1934, the continental waterfowl population had dropped to an all-time low of 27 million birds. the egret population was reduced to 150 birds, and whooping cranes numbered 14.” (boardman)

a precipitous decline lined to overhunting, severe drought, and economic dips of seizuric proportions

the refuge itself related softly into sleepy ears as:“For those Seeking Secret Floggings” “Whose Lowest Gut Mutters [Most Unfavorably]” “The Protected” “Oh So Peligroso” “Land of the Ramming Pram” “A Sanctuary that Buries” “Precious [Little]” “Part of the Bad Dad Fad”

40 41


to optimize building zone protocols in one party’s favor. a caustic atmospheric exchange abstractly cost-out on paper as if sprinkled from a pepper caster.

or when so-referred average persons can’t gather why there’s hunting approved on a wildlife “refuge,” it is perhaps not because said persons are a widbit or mass fit of slow-witted. it raises their linguistic and ethical hackles, raises confusion, seems nefariously intended to loosen the holds of grammar in the least liberatory and most violating ways.

i.e.

“this isn’t a baton,” an officer of the law insists. “this is a muff.” the listener left huffing breathlessly at the impasse, pacified, bruised till pulpy by a particularly hot-headed handwarmer.

to follow this shelving oral coastline:contend her, remember that overgrowth is a growth itself.

according to present day hunting regulations at the refuge:Waterfowl at lake mattamuskeet “may only be taken with shotguns using approved non-toxic shot”

this incredible world wherein the concept of “toxicity” has been severed from “mortality”

correspondence-bereft the cleft and soaring light-filled interiors surrounded by barricades

left overlooked between soft articulations the vitiated viscera

pronunciation, leaving the elephantine instrument trundling gawkily in the open waters, heaving up inelegant discharge from the murky bottoms. In order for the machine to perform still more easily, another contractor has been concurrently hired to clear away all trees from either side of the canal—hundreds of huge stands—which they are then accordingly permitted to sell on the market. Arcing their judgment, personally pocketing the felled lumber income is a detail which inevitably shapes the contractor’s already rusty codifications of what is justly disposable. The first week Kate and I are at Lake Mattamuskeet, the banks we walk and drive upon are a staggering fount of towering hardwood canopy, its bounty marooned all the same by red-tagging, flagged for demise. The next week, only a prodigious and trying blur of identically decimated calf-high stumps.

Grumpily disinterested, each uninterrupted scoop of the methodical dredger whose loops continue to accompany this arboreal dozing, removes roughly a cubic yard of materials, ploughing out about 800 scoops a day.

It is:a long-reaching beachhead,

a bald gurney, a popcorn bastion luring in loam-oily kernels by the bushel

Shuffling along, the dredger and its driver work hard— but when one works at the level of pure numbers, ecosystems can become obfuscated—hardly seen.

meaning, when so-called lay persons can’t understand such self-proclaimedly “straightfoward” arrangements it is perhaps not because these persons are a dimple simple-minded but rather because they are genuinely attuned to the particulari-ties of geography. their perplexity is in contrast, for instance, to the “clear” understanding of complicated regulatory allowances that permit even the selling and exchange of overhead airspaces by well-vested investors in order for them

42 43


upbraid their hidden feet. they both hold a shotgun in one hand and a brown paper bivvy of vittles in the other, wear-ing mittens they seem smitten by in their warm clunkiness. in the second and following image, the overall light is a good sight brighter, their fingers have long ago been uncovered by the blossoming day, the blanket pitched with the inching off of early frosts. the lunches too are absent (presumably consumed) and have been replaced by bagged geese, cinched at the neck in quartets, their limp heads awkwardly and aggressively crushed against one another in the man’s gath-ered hands. the marginalia, in jocular regalia, memorializes another “successful day.”

Within this hiss of regulated harvests of surplus animals, surplus applies to whom?

the further looming croon being does an interest in something necessarily translate into a commitment to its preservation—even at the level of one’s own person.

Standing in dispersion, surety-shorn and forlorn in corners, baldly adorned in ammo and saying over and over to our-selves “it is only an animal” an ad nauseam caterwaul bawled because we can (as adorno ripely observes) never fully believe this . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . even of “animals.”

any act of violence always involving a delusional economy

a shunning shunted forward in rituals of excessive ingestion

each biological being imbibed inscribed into state procedures on which it battens noisome punchdrunk three hucks too lunky for settling

a rookery of yellowbelly turtles the leonine eastern fence lizarda glossy ibis & its fitfully perambulating gosling the canebrake rattlesnake shaking in warning

(clearly we are speaking of, but not only speaking of, these)

on the shores of near Pungo lake a swarm of hundreds of broad-winged dragonflies zing to an ovular leeward cove.

bold rovers, chidingly named the “wandering gliders,”they are a species that rarely touches down by day, that spritelike, in prolific rushes sometimes crosses clear to europe

try loping then, groping to listen to one’s surroundings as if they were scrubbing you, to be scoured til swooning—a single shriveled but critical palliative

the nature of the covenant a dry-docked dreadnaught

Caught distraught, treading warily through the only (and picture-heavy) history book written solely on the matta-muskeet region, the willful reader will encounter a pair of photos featuring a middle-aged couple posed in the great out-of-doors, or rather just outside the oak doors of the lodge—taken at two different points on the same day. the first caption reads, “north Carolina Secretary of Conser-vation Claude Wickard and his wife head out early from mattamuskeet lodge in 1941 for a morning of shooting.” a long unadorned wool blanket is thrown nonchalantly over the woman’s arm, thick visored caps with earflaps rest dully on each head, enormous unshapely waders shade and

44 45


the omnivorous mammals skulking for bloodfeeding tree-dwellers

the jowl-flouting voles tubbing down rot-mooching grubworms

huge shoals of fussy vegetivorous fish eaten by piscivorous diving birds

their short-gutted form, the gizzards occasionally perforated by slender cartilaginous bones

one london adornment dealer was reported by the Society for the Protection of birds in 1892 as having imported in a single shipment: 32,000 hummingbirds 80,000 waterbirds 800,000 pairs of wings

the bronzed grackle the diminutive cackling geese the helmeted guineafowl

lapland longspur frail chats loggerhead shrike beardless flycatchers

bank swallows & saw-whet owls & fieldfares & curlews

that disrupted presumption of worthy company leveled, lost to ornamental ostentatiously balanced on the mantel

throughout the United States in the1920s and 30s, with hyde County hardly crying out in exception, the recre-ational tracking of ducks and geese was frequently enacted through the use of live decoys. the advertisements for orga-nized hunting parties in popular sporting magazines prom-ised “experienced guides” with “live decoys furnished” “no State or County licenses necessary.”

our policies peddling in anatomies until, as another writes, “We have altered, destroyed and fragmented natural areas while, as an afterthought, designating a tiny minority of them for ‘protection’.” (source?)

confecting a life in impactable matter, as that, cathected

a flip braying of ashes their coal-lit flotsam cachés caught, scotched and crushed.

outrunning the capacity of any single term to encapsulate its contents, any single tern

learning in turn by prying that upon its opening, and into the height of popular operations, Fdr was amongst the mattamuskeet hunting lodge’s most loving visitors.

his outpouring adoration of gunning for goslings.

the jacksnipe the sniper the sooty bitterns the soldiers the slate-colored junco munching shoots gleaning waste corn wasting others

brothers by gaggle and flock

in 1895, a conference convened by the French government produced a draft text of an international convention which classified all avian wildlife into three basic groupings: useful birds, game birds, and noxious birds. the appendices of the document further reduced these species divisions into only two columns: useful and noxious.

when one said useful one meant insectivorous

rhetorically ignoring,

46 47


devoutly venturing out in wending weekend posses of men pointedly tendering their proudly strung broods as lewd baits in waiting

linguistically speaking, a live decoy and a hunting refuge have arguably more than the pip

of chapped lips in common

most commonly, the imperious hunters called these birds “Judas Birds,” treating their aviary captives as if self-motivated and incensed traitors who bristled against the identificatory sanctity of extended waterfowl roots by feigning their own deadly frolics.

the biblical moniker of insult was applied by these propri-etors with as much voracious ease as any foot anchor, as the rashly and regularly slashed wings, the deftly clotted organs of sought mobility. With unseemly agility, the largest war-dens routinely accused their beak-agape charges of “aping” enthusiastically performing the ruse of unencumbered limb-use to unsuspecting traveling fellows.

this particular bellow was admittedly regarded by some as a rather stunning run of auto-exoneration

taking place, as a rule, on a stupendous scale as a rule, coming in deadly rushes

Crushing in its success, the live decoy strategy was so effective and the concomitant slaughters so massive that its practice was forcibly criminalized and abandoned nation-wide in 1935.

Un-shied by this preclusion, Jodi mcneel, a waterfowl hunter from north Platte, nebraska still offers nostalgic

the decoy element of this event lay not in the bird’s assumption of liveliness

which was, to the contrary, vibrant unto volatile in its veracity

but rather in their illusory liberty

during a usual outing, the live geese would be tethered quaking to a stake, left to wallow for the day in the lake’s shallow waters while the hunters who owned them sat unbatting on the surrounding impoundments, pounding down their well-packed chow.

by employing an ample enough anchor rope, up to thirty-five birds could be so toggled at a time, still leaving leeway behind in the line for each gander’s swimming capacity crippled as it was, to be seen from afar.

Sparring for territory, the men further installed sagaciously unseen pedestals—lightly covered by the surfeit fat of the water’s surface—whose wood-urchin perches, hardly meant to coddle, were mind-fodder fueling the migrating observer’s fanciful apprehension of organic action below.

and despite its fraction-of-former-motion status, this mini-mal appearance of “free” movement did indeed serve as a sure lure to passing wild flocks, deceptively projecting the peripherally-viewed tableaus, not as a lethal blow, but as welcoming to their incoming presence, emboldening them to drop down into gunning range.

in each of the four western hemispheric flyways, large num-bers of bird-offing hobbyists kept in captivity sordid and sizeable consortiums of just this sort, zippily clipping the birds’ burgeoning wings or amputating the tips in order to fight all inclinations toward fugitive flight.

48 49


“Ruminating By Harpoon” “Who Nightshift as State Heads” “Our Roaring Saviors” “In [Your] Best Interest” “Chesty” “Suffering the Goose to Take Its Liveliness” “Who Keep to the Hills” “The Color of English Owsels [*That is, Yellow]” “Good to Turn a Cage” “Spoiling More Than They Eat” “No Bigger Than a Chigger [But will Fight a Crow]”

the year live decoys were formally outlawed, an estimated 20,000 birds were freed in the atlantic Flyway alone.

amongst the handicapped herds, even those birds without clipped wings did not recommence their migrations. an intact instinct is one thing, but infant fowl, whether tutcock or owl, lock on in the main to the geographical details of their sailing behaviors by mimicking the swerve of elder rudders.

these puttering progeny of involuntary amputees thus saw the glimmer of such sumptuous ambulatory resumptions as teasing . . . . . but ultimately unfeasible. after three or four generations in cages, there were literally no flock mem-bers possessing even a misremembered ember touching on former springtime sallies

in the atlantic Flyway today, the 1.2 million resident Canada geese, arranged in non-wandering fleets outnumber the migrants by half again.

they stay aloof from their vagrant friends.

12/18/06—Kate and I spent this morning watching flotillas of petite swifts whickering around the wax myrtle and titi trees near the trailer. Radiant in their perilous cadence, the groupings vari-ously merged and scattered like cataracting cauliflower—their mobile

platitudes on the activity, waxing, “they always sounded like real ducks because they were.”

they always sounded like . . . “Civilians” “Schools Instead of Outposts” “Hospitals” “Agricultural Fertilizer Rather than Ammunition” “Inexcusable Lateral [and Vertical] Damage” “Non-combatants” because . . . .Prior to the tactic’s legal end, overhunting had so runted the wild stock of Canada geese specifically that some of the only remaining living specimens wound up being those very birds belonging to the hunters themselves.

the nestling litter’s monumental littleness on a continental scale finally convinced concerned persons to demand an accounting of the mounting disappearance.

Suddenly, the hunters’ own hobbled and cooing crews were freshly seen as invaluable harborers of the raw genetic materials obligatory for beginning the arduous processes of species restoration.

Stationing themselves on standby for applause, these savvy mavericks promptly re-billed themselves as unshirking salvage workers, seed-savers at the ready, a steady stream of laboring johns eager to jimmy and prop the wild goose populations.

Cooping for hoopla, they perfected the rabid ability to coin oneself publicly

as both redeemer and destroyer.

although there still persisted an insistently dissenting minor-ity who, by system or fist-wagging or whispers, proffered the men’s names otherwise:

50 51


mildly rattled, they are responding to traffic noise by altering the pitch of their song.

absconding fresh sound fronds

flitting at jitters through the rain-issued precipitous tissues of the city

night-kiting in tight-knit gangs

tacking past clattering rail transoms to join a racketing mackerel skyinto which the shrill griping of thousands of chick pipes lightly subsides

how to ride that,—one asks— how to cup that creeping quietness like a just quitted roomreeling within the tightly congealed energy which peals then not like a perilously ripe fruit but across the sky

how many times, and in how many places have you [reader] or me [reader] encountered that terribly fenced-in sentence ending “in conditions hardly fit for animals.”

What are these conditions?

in the country of Guadalupe, the chicks of the northern fulmar were formally designated as “vegetables” so that they could be eaten during lent. a convenient overhaul of taxo-nomical category hardly unheard of even in its most prepos-terous auspices

carried as they were, by quartering breezes, across decades, from clime to clime

blooms zooming instantaneously from dense ripple unto sparse wash. Cutting a conspicuously mean line, the fit swifts have mas-tered the skim and scrim of precocious clean purchase on a material that allows one to plow so leanly through it. Often when these diminutive firecusps light out, there are points within their soaring wherein the wings are deeply drawn in, tucked by tight adhesion to the tufted sides, and the birds seem simply to lob themselves at fero-cious speeds through the air—dropping in rich pitches. During the burst of those brief intervals, their bodies are an impossible picture of motion, non-intuitively staving off landing through raving plummets. A thick draught of ought fills the detecting spectator’s eyes near to writhing. Then, just when the downward bobbing borders on merely injurious, a mitigating self-preservation commands the swift’s wings to be raised and fluttered furiously again—their wee roundness leapt at, upswept in uncharted throttling. A smartly darting principle of infinite rescindability. Though in full disclosure, as the watcher, one certainly wonders: why that dangerously unsupported sequence and its frequency at all? Such tremulous bleacherside remarks are active in observation but nonetheless lacking a marked uneasiness to their parts, missing the cart of how all practices can sometimes be turned back upon themselves. For in terms of outwitting their potential predators (short of the shotguns), one method a fanning lift of swifts has for dealing with an incoming hunger-driven assailant is not to outrun it, but to come up behind the bird of prey and follow it. This unexpected reversal leaves the intending stalker with only one pos-sibility of attack—from above and behind—an extremely effective kind of neutralization.

an impromptu posture of de-escalating translation.

in other cases, in conditions of famished impatience, their former roosting and feeding grounds invaded, some stripes of smaller birds in Great britain have been modifying their comportments to meet the nutritive sources presented in english milk bottles.

52 53


Current Threats to the Lake Mattamuskeet Environs: A Note in Closing

on our second to last night in the mattamuskeet area, Kate and i took a long, straight, leisurely canoe ride down a lengthy man-made canal link that proceeds (like others of its kind) with perfect linearity until dropping off into the opening mouth of the Pamlico Sound. there it produces a singularly strange wet horizon line: a bleary commingling wherein the crystalline stillness of the narrow channel meets the undulating waves of the Sound, which is, on the contrary, so large that one is unable to see land in any direction except for the direction one entered from. having been cozily and without interruption hemmed in throughout the day, it felt notably unsettling and exciting to then suddenly find oneself briskly paddling into an aquatic expanse without perceivable end; all the more, since a “canoe” in particular, as an object, seemed just barely up to the task of that navigation.

We slept there on the sand, at the orifice of those meeting waters, in a tiny inlet beach that couldn’t harbor more than three persons at a squeeze. Standing at the outstretched tip of the reed-cloaked wetland point in the late evening all we saw were stars, no town lights, not even the dispersed brightening effects of light pollution that strike one as part of the ubiquitous experience of merely being within range of a human population. For several hours, the soundscape was sharply punctuated by the loud shouts of a bird whose call rang of a very patient man with a very distant friend who hoped to re-cement his acquaintance’s company by unanxiously bellowing a measured “tom! . . . tom!” into the similarly little-hurried and cupping air over and over and over again. it was, however, not a man but a large fowl; for the greatest duration of our stay there, all we could hear were birds and rustling wild grasses.

the butter-edged fledglings pointed to by the pious but gluttonous plebes at the table as:“The carrot cuckoo” “Tubered in Infancy” “A Fetus Lettuce” “Taxonomy’s Stumper” “The Table-adverse Vegetable” “Pithy Wigeon” “Jesus’ Coveted Mid-day Menu” “Made for Us Alone” “Whose Harvesting is Pesky” “As Dainty a Sidedish as Any” “Wanting One Third of the Woodcock in Bigness” “A Hiding Bind-weed” “The Wilted Flapper” “Saddled and Ladled by Christians” “Of a Delicate Aurora-Color” “One Planter’s Prejudice” “Grace’s Mutable Trace” “In [whip] Poor [will’s] Taste” “The Mischievous Victual” “Breeding Not Among Us” “One Noise-Making Seedling” “Of Soft Placemat-Frequenting Fleshes” “Having a Topping” “Kohlrabi’s Fiery Squab” “Whose Climbing Vine Tendrils are Tufted”

From this seemingly unending source list that moved like sea drift through the flexible lexicon loosing its druff in every region, suffering both local eliminations and bawdy-evening substitutions, there was one name that nonetheless solidly lingered, cabling steadfastly through the oral fables gabling its hooked deadeye, resolutely hewing its way into the tutelage of young and feuding alike.

its phonemes were as deep-boned as unchiseled stone it was “Made for Us Alone”

attempting to sluff off its stiff drone how somehow now

to come out on level to come out with othersto wear our druthers alert like a covert underwing

54 55


north Carolina region among its various protected wetland zones and agricultural fields. Snow geese roll into the area from as far away as Greenland and the endangered bald eagle frequently asserts this habitat as one of its favored own. Pongo lake particularly (which lies within the borders of the Pocosin lakes refuge) supports what some claim may be one of the densest black bear populations to be found anywhere in the world. of similar global significance, the red wolf, a species that used to roam the entire southeastern United States, was officially declared extinct in the wild in 1980. to date, the only successful and sustaining site of its reintroduction has been the albemarle/Pamlico Peninsula. the number of red wolves in this territory has been steadily increasing over the years and the wolves are now actually living on the entire peninsula, including the proposed navy outlaying landing Field (olF) site.

nor is the olF that the navy is proposing by any means a low-traffic or low-impact installation. Since it is conceived as a “practice landing strip,” it is projected that 30,000 touch-and-go landings a year would take place there, not including other military aircraft that would also use the facility. it would be in operation 24/7, embracing a state of unceasing use and constant low-level on-site flying. in response to inevitable public concerns about the infeasibility (even callous animal cruelty) of this project, dan Cecchini, the navy official in charge of analyzing the potential environmental consequences of the airstrip, has offered, “these birds [in the region] are tied to the food source. you eliminate the food source and then the birds will not be there. So, the navy feels confident that even though there are lots of birds, thousands of birds at the refuge, it can co-exist safely with that refuge.” the difference, however, is that despite any inadequacies or ill-completed visions that the various refuges may be faulted with, they do want the birds to exist. their aim is not the complete annihilation or

and it is for all these very reasons—the rare near-total light obfuscation, an uncharacteristically low human occupancy, the extreme topographical horizontality and more—that the United States navy currently desires to install a landing field for F-18 Super hornet fighter jets in the vicinities of this region. because even as one moves further inland, the overwhelming rurality is such that the proposed strip’s own illumination would still likely be the only given signal of its kind for miles. in other words, the navy might say, one can’t get much closer (for strategic practice’s sake) to the visual simulation of an aircraft carrier at sea, than a landstrip in eastern north Carolina.

of course, what this depiction of equivalency strikingly leaves out is all the many other things (besides lights) that are indeed present in the preferred land tract that the navy has selected. in September of 2003, the navy named a 33,000-acre site on the albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula resting on the border of Washington and beaufort counties as its number one choice for the installation of expanding tactical aviation operations in the state. this location is within four miles of the Pocosin lakes national Wildlife refuge and is not particularly far from the lake mattamuskeet national Wildlife refuge. even according to the navy’s own mandatory environmental impact Study, a phenomenon that they refer to as the “bird strike possibility” factor, which gauges the likelihood of collisions between aircraft and avian wildlife, ranks as “severe” for fifty percent of the year here. and since their figure is arrived at by averaging the risk assessment over the total period (despite the fact that the great majority of the birds are only seasonally present), the actual risk involved is much higher during the birds’ peak wintering times of november through april.

Currently, up to and sometimes greater than three-quarters of the tundra swans in the entire atlantic Flyway spend the year’s bitterest months roosting in the eastern

56 57


devices that might mimic predators or otherwise harass wildlife. harassment with pyrotechnics that cause loud noise and visual effects can be effective. other harassment techniques can include the use of other wildlife such as a falconry program or the use of dogs to chase and ulti-mately move wildlife from an area. Finally, the removal of nests, other structures providing cover and lethal removal of wildlife through the application of toxicants, shooting or trapping might be needed. employing a combination of these is widely regarded as a necessary part of an effective baSh [bird aircraft Strike hazard] program. “

So far the sequence of events surrounding the navy’s north Carolina proposal has been more or less as follows. Upon receiving repeated noise complaints from the residents of Chesapeake, Virginia regarding the Fentress Field olF located in that vicinity, the navy began seeking noise-relocation alternatives with a populace presumably less irritable toward their desired uses. the F-18 Super hornets are notoriously the noisiest planes in the navy’s inventory and the Chesapeake community is a relatively wealthy one (certainly in comparison to the poor rural towns of northeastern north Carolina) that has lately been exerting its political muscle to quit itself of the nuisance and unwelcome residential consequences of these made-for-war presences. in terms of the benefits of this potential structural migration to north Carolina residents and governance, as deceptive as the promises of incoming capital from military installations often are, because this particular project is simply an airstrip and not a military base, it does not even pretend to tantalize with such overblown carrots. it is openly guaranteed to cause an economic deficit for whichever county or counties it settles into. and, as previously mentioned, with the release of its Final environmental impact Statement (FeiS) mandated by the national

displacement of the “hazard.” admitting that their basic and rather rudimentary

food deprivation policy may not be substantial enough to mitigate all the potential (and arguably probable) dangers arising from military and wildlife cohabitation, the navy has suggested other contingency plans. For one, the navy announced plans to buy up fifty square miles of farm fields in the area surrounding the olF and to systematically get rid of all those crops which the birds eat, prohibiting the farmers from growing winter wheat until an indeterminate future date and forcing them to plow under leftover corn and soybeans at the end of each growing season. Since it is acknowledged that these crops are economic staples for the local farming community, the navy has suggested that current harvests could instead be replaced by the chemically intensive mono-cropping of commercial cotton. and while this crop certainly carries the benefit of being distinctly unattractive to birds, it is not unworthy of note that it is also unattractive in nearly every other way (economically and as it pertains to the environment) as well. if, despite their fervent efforts, these starvation strategies nonetheless do fail, the navy has further outlined possibilities for a wide variety of imaginative animal harassment and hazing tactics, including the use of chemical repellents on the birds, among them such controversial regulation-controlled and fatal toxicants as avitrol and drC 1339.

to provide one extensive quote from the navy’s own draft Supplemental environmental impact Statement, released on February 23, 2007:

“When the use of habitat modification and manage-ment fails to dissuade wildlife use of an area, harassment and removal of wildlife from the area is necessary. these techniques might include the use of chemicals that alter the taste of food resources, cause irritation to wildlife; audio devices that might harass or cause distress; and visual

59

ABenDrotH

even been mentioned in the original olF documents.during a public flight test on december 7, 2005 that was

meant to serve as a demonstration of the safety and viability of the navy’s plans, the Super hornet jets flying over were forced to bank away from a large flock of birds, averting a dicey tundra swan collision by a mere 150 feet. on another occasion, the navy also had to abort several simulated landings when huge gaggles of disgruntled swans showed up in the midst of the scheduled trial runs. these multiple botched exhibitions were not particularly convincing to the local and skeptical citizenry. then, one month prior to the release of the navy draft Supplemental environmental impact Study (dSeiS), a gag order, issued directly by the department of interior, was placed on U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologists in north Carolina to prevent them from speaking to reporters or the public regarding their positions on the olF. on February 23, 2007, the navy released this court-mandated dSeiS, again naming Washington County as its preferred site. despite the fact that at this point both the north Carolina governor and the state’s two senators had all expressed vocal concern about the project’s suggested location, the navy still wouldn’t back down. in march and april 2007, six public hearings regarding the conclusions of these new reports were held throughout the state, with the period for written public comment closing at the beginning of may.

Given this fluctuating chronology of call-and-response events, more recent developments of past weeks can be regarded as promising (if still distinctly compromised) and reveal how anti-olF organizers successfully brought their concerns and outrage into conversation circles at a national level. on may 17, 2007, the US house passed the Fy 2008 national defense authorization act, which while authorizing a predictably revolting escalation of military forces and equipment generally, nonetheless repealed the

environmental Policy act, the navy publicly announced its intention that this county be Washington County, at a location referred to by them as Site C (one of five lettered site options a through e). Given what has already been said about the site’s proximities, this pronouncement was reasonably and immediately met with much resistance and hostility from local communities, wildlife institutions, and even state government.

Upon the Fall 2003 release of this first FeiS, a combined consortium of concerned parties (consisting of the national audubon Society, north Carolina Wildlife Federation, defenders of Wildlife, and Washington and beaufort Counties) filed a lawsuit challenging the navy’s decision and demanding a response to the inadequacies and outright gaps within the navy’s report. in February of 2005, the U.S. district Court for the eastern district of north Carolina sided with the prosecution, holding that the FeiS was in fact deficient and enjoining the navy from pursuing any additional activity associated with the planning, development or construction of the olF at Site C until they fully complied with national environmental regulations. the court decision noted that the navy had furthermore committed both deception and fraud in selecting the Washington/beaufort counties site, essentially manipulating and reverse-engineering their findings in the FeiS in order to justify an already predetermined construction decision. meanwhile, outside of the courtroom, the navy tried to move the media tides more amicably in its favor by other means. aiming to bolster its fragile public relations standings by appending a fresh point of emphasis which notably appeared only after a strong oppositional presence had made itself felt, the navy now supplied that this facility was critical to the country’s military “surge capacity” in the event of a “national emergency”. a new nerve-kindling brew, such a choleric post-9/11 stew of justifying vocabulary had never

Refuge / Refugee

61

ABenDrotH

group listed as probably extinct. Certainly, this number only continues to climb, and in and of itself is capable of reflecting strictly those situations which our limited computative value scale judges to be inarguably acute or irreparably at risk. as we can see from this one case study of sorts above, such statistics are not isolated mathematical occurrences, but rather ones which interface continuously and integrally with many other issues, including those of poverty, militarism, selective development policies, and long-rooted social inequalities (to name a few). Perhaps our task, as concerned critical thinkers and as it pertains to both humans and animals, must be (at its least) to attempt to continuously intervene to upend these brazen and ill-thought upsteps—making their logics and consequences as transparent and open to dispute as possible in the process. and of course, where and whenever possible, more—hopefully always more—exerting our simultaneous pressure of hands to push for substantive shifts in the very frame through which such discourses occur, resisting its unnecessarily narrow fittings and hem-poor pleats.

to keep abreast of ongoing developments regarding the navy’s proposals for Washington County and all other potential military installation sites in north Carolina, visit www.noolf.org.

Notes:This essay was completed in June of 2007. There is not much to be

added to it today in terms of developments relating specifically to Lake

Mattamuskeet and the Pocosin Lakes Refuges. The bill forbidding the

placement of an OLF in that region continues to stand for now.

However, in terms of acknowledging the overall militarization of the

greater area, it is worth pointing out—if only as one additional example—

that the national headquarters of Blackwater (the controversial private

security firm currently contracted by the United States government in Iraq,

authorization to construct an olF at the site identified by the navy in Washington and beaufort counties (Site C). on may 24, 2007, the US Senate armed Service Committee passed the Fy 2008 national defense authorization bill, repealing the $10.06 million requested by the navy for the construction of an olF in north Carolina in the process. Under this second Senate bill, supposedly no funding will be made available for any of the five potential olF locations that had originally been selected and the procedures of scouting for a space of reasonable navy occupancy must begin all over again.

although this is certainly to be looked upon as a victory, it must all the same be regarded as a partial one even if the Washington County site never becomes occupied by this olF or any other military installation. to make that case, one need only look as far as the fact that this repeal was tied to the passage of the single largest “defense” budget in the entire world. Furthermore, the U.S. government and its armed services divisions across the country are still offering their phrases without cessation to anyone who will listen. they are saying “this is a state of emergency”; they are saying “the safety of our pilots depends on it.” they are unremittingly saying and saying and saying, amidst frenetic tantrums of hyperbolic gesticulations. in this respect, the north Carolina debacle and subsequent struggle is but one element of an ongoing conflict of forces that will be fiercely facing us far into the foreseeable future—both in terms of what will be the orientation of our society and whether or how we will preserve the continued existence of species (both species of wildlife and ourselves).

“Since 1500, a total of 129 bird species have become extinct, 17 of them in the 25 years before 2000.” this sentence is lifted from a book published in 2006 which immediately thereafter appends the fact that since that study’s release there have been two more, with a further

Refuge / Refugee

62 63


Williams, ted. “Crash Course”, audubon magazine, november/

december 2006. http://audubonmagazine.org/incite/incite0611.

html

draft Supplemental environmental impact Study for a Proposed

United States navy outlying landing Field in north Carolina,

released to the public by the U.S. navy on February 23, 2007. www.

efaircraft.ene.com/docs_seis.aspx

www.noolf.com, official website of the various community

and organizational efforts to prevent the installation of a U.S. navy

outlying landing Field in the albemarle/Pamlico region.

Various other pamphlets, brochures, and tourist information

booklets on lake mattamuskeet and adjacent areas.

New Orleans, and elsewhere) is located a mere hour or two away from

Mattamuskeet, in the Noterh Carolina wildlife enclave of the Great Dismal

Swamp.

boardman, robert. The International Politics of Bird Conservation.

Cheltenham, UK: edward elgar Publishers, 2006, pgs 1-55.

Forrest, lewis C. Lake Mattamuskeet, New Holland, and Hyde

County. Charleston, South Carolina: arcadia

Publishing, 1999.

Forrest, lewis C. Personal interview with author. december

2006.

Gibson, Graeme. The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany.

new york: nan a. talese, 2005.

hoffman, rocky. “the Way hunting Was.” NEBRASKAland

Magazine, nebraska Game & Parks Commission. www.ngpc.state.

ne.us/nebland/articles/hunting/was.asp

hope, Jack. “the Geese that Came in From the Wild.” Audubon

Magazine, march/april 2000. http://magazine.audubon.org/birds/

birds0003.html

lincoln, Frederick C., Bird Migration. new york: doubleday &

Co., 1952.

manning, Phillip. Islands of Hope. north Carolina: John. F. blair

Publisher, 1999.

Peterson, roger. A Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central

North America. boston: houghton mifflin Co., 2002.

Pycraft, W.P. a History of Birds, london: methuen & Co., 1910.

reiger, George. “Should We Fear the moto-duck?” Field &

Stream Magazine, www.fieldandstream.com/fieldstream/hunting/

gamebirds/article/o,13199,191922,00.html

robinson, marilynne. Housekeeping. new york: Farrar Straus

Giroux, 1980.

Shogren, elizabeth. “U.S. navy Wants landing Strip in birds’

backyard”. All Things Considered, april 27, 2007.

Vileises, ann. Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of

America’s Wetlands, Washington d.C.: island Press, 1997.

Muzzle Blast Dander

Documents

Transcript of Muzzle Blast Dander