Muzzle Blast Dander

[or, A History of Muskets at Mattamuskeet]

emily abendroth

In the month of December 2006, myself and filmmaker Kate Dollenmayer spent a little under two weeks in a doublewide trailer, the property of East Carolina University, within the boundaries of Lake Mattamuskeet Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina. A favorite wintering spot for migratory birds in the Atlantic Flyway, Lake Mattamuskeets 50,000 acre pocket is currently home to more than 800 species of wildlife, including more than 200 species of birds. As a site, it has also been the locus point of fierce debates regarding increasing military occupation and utilization of rural areas, the effects of large-scale human-initiated transformations 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 wildlifea 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
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territories) a murky marshland of legal and linguistic interpretation.

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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. mattamuskeets 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.
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mattamuskeet, whose name implies: Who reaches by leaching The Fitful Cull[er] Bucket in the Wood Plucky Hankering for Tanking 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 Countys 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] wouldnt even think to stare for them simply by peering 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 horizons low-orbit allowances bowing until any glibly tossed glance might glean in reams of peppered cosmos

12/14/06When we go out nights, walking the orderly manmade canal roads that circle Lake Mattamuskeets perimeter and pass out briefly into its massiveness, this laborforce of stars is bright and numerous enough to see by. Moon or no moon, our doddering haulstheir slinking and uncertain flesh hullstrack the road solely via the tempered strength of this tinpoint luminosity kit. Its thick candescent cropping, mating with the waters surface, breachbirths a full letterpress set of wobbly punctuation in over-inked and half-blinking streaks.Tossed trippingly across the lakes shrewd glass tulle by flares of whipping air, these lexical accents saunter with a pronounced lisp.

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Tonight in particular, two brilliant planetary tykes lowest on the ripple-touching-sky line extend like an apoplectic set of end bracketsat once ramrod and ramified in dispersionanother 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 do the nearly gradationless fieldsalikely 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 enormity mattamuskeet 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.
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the supple din of the lakes 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 subcutaneously collapsing the prior surface pulling it downtorchedinto new vacuities lurching toward the now earth-emptied pockets of ash below. a gross moss heat-drossing. on account of which the marshlands coughedawfully 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 Carolina 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 Comets 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

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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.

12/11/07When 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 cant 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 wont 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. Were not trying to populate a landscape but rather echolocate and mug its rumpled palpitations as they feather the hammer and dulcimer.The grainshaft

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 photosynthetic sheeting is not fierce but undulating and so the whistle and hum, the peculiarly fibrous sibilant vibration shuttles unevenly acrossnow 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 suddenlyas if collectively recollecting the absolute unsuitability of this airborne smacker stacked habitatin 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 rubberbulbed 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 bands from alaska to the east Coast

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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 preexistent 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.

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. but be wary. they wont live long. there was apparently wide concurrence among the whisperers 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 dormancyor 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 Kelps [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 americas 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 leavetaking, we didactically cite:

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

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 worlds 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, audubon 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

3/5/07When 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 dont understand the Atlantic Flyway. Nor do I get imprinting; Not as it concerns an inscription process carried out by man-made pressesthat I can tactilely comprehendbut 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 days 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 uncuteach front-toback siding a workable pocket in form.The text explains, Years ago, before birds of prey were so thoughtlessly slaughtered, great flocks of red-tailed, Swansons, and rough-legged hawks might be seen wheeling majestically across the sky in the Plains states, and in the East the flights of broadwinged, Coopers, 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.
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Until his own dogged rigor finds audubon writingin the vocabulary not of scientific austerity, but of crippling emotional needhow he felt incomplete if he didnt 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 audubons[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 below deemed 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?

Still 3/5/07Seeking information on animal movement through printed matter, how can I ask of these texts, of these migrations, not only 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 Pallass 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 overaimed, aspect-blind or demonstrably false taints.
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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 . . . . . . . .

the lacerating fans of the mechanism, sculpting a permanently fluttered fish schism mirroring in its gory collage the overhead soaring cormorants 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 placeholders 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 americas wetlands (& their demolition) reporting: Farmers drained 69% of iowas wetlands and 68% of missouris 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 persons tipped script quipping as if monster ditcher and restorative elixir were equably assessable belly-up simulations of one another

Casting Judas Goslings

to shatter the ghastly pumps whose roiling turbines pining siphons unslaked is 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

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To reduce to clatter these crested-beyond-peak steel-plate lumps copiously apply blasting caps ward off precariously positioned residents the 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, fortified by an astute sense of ceremony, officially dumped the pumps, declaring the now federalized property a uniquely protected zone renaming it the Mattamuskeet Migratory Waterfowl Refuge the lapsed iron wrappings and exoskeletons of the watermitigating 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 publics 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 Conservation Corps to occupy hyde County for almost nine years

performingamongst other thingsthe 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 werein invisible reposeby 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 opportunities, a managed network of lands and waters whose designated officiates pinky-swore to coring out their inexorable part in a collective effort for all american generations, assuring the free-to-caper citizenry of an unfettered feathered accessibility via this rouge powdering of spotted refuges across the continents facean often racing combination, 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:

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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 cooperators 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 cant 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

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

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12/15/06The Lake Mattamuskeet Wildlife Refuge as it exists today continues in the vein of an intensively supervised environment: 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 successionan 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 dredging projects currently taking place here. A private company has been contracted to remove 60,000 square yards of materials from the site. Theres no complete job exactly (minus the quantitative yardage excision) short of slowing up the present processes of sedimentation 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 actuality strangely unfins the underpins of many supposedly empirical conversations taking place between the living land and its legislations. 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 confusion 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

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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 canalhundreds of huge standswhich 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 contractors 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 obfuscatedhardly seen. meaning, when so-called lay persons cant 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 particularities 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

to optimize building zone protocols in one partys favor. a caustic atmospheric exchange abstractly cost-out on paper as if sprinkled from a pepper caster. or when so-referred average persons cant gather why theres hunting approved on a wildlife refuge, it is perhaps not because said persons are a widbit or mass fit of slowwitted. 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 isnt 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 hotheaded 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
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a rookery of yellowbelly turtles the leonine eastern fence lizard a 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 ones surroundings as if they were scrubbing you, to be scoured til swooninga single shriveled but critical palliative the nature of the covenant a dry-docked dreadnaught

upbraid their hidden feet. they both hold a shotgun in one hand and a brown paper bivvy of vittles in the other, wearing 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 mans gathered 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 preservationeven at the level of ones own person. Standing in dispersion, surety-shorn and forlorn in corners, baldly adorned in ammo and saying over and over to ourselves 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
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Caught distraught, treading warily through the only (and picture-heavy) history book written solely on the mattamuskeet 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 lodgetaken at two different points on the same day. the first caption reads, north Carolina Secretary of Conservation 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 womans arm, thick visored caps with earflaps rest dully on each head, enormous unshapely waders shade and

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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 cachs 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 lodges 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

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

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
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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 recreational tracking of ducks and geese was frequently enacted through the use of live decoys. the advertisements for organized hunting parties in popular sporting magazines promised experienced guides with live decoys furnished no State or County licenses necessary.

rhetorically ignoring,

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the decoy element of this event lay not in the birds 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 lakes 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 thirtyfive birds could be so toggled at a time, still leaving leeway behind in the line for each ganders swimming capacity crippled as it was, to be seen from afar. Sparring for territory, the men further installed sagaciously unseen pedestalslightly covered by the surfeit fat of the waters surfacewhose wood-urchin perches, hardly meant to coddle, were mind-fodder fueling the migrating observers fanciful apprehension of organic action below. and despite its fraction-of-former-motion status, this minimal 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 numbers 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.

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 selfmotivated 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 proprietors 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 wardens 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 nationwide in 1935. Un-shied by this preclusion, Jodi mcneel, a waterfowl hunter from north Platte, nebraska still offers nostalgic

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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 tactics 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 litters 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 minority who, by system or fist-wagging or whispers, proffered the mens names otherwise:

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 members 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.

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12/18/06Kate 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 variously merged and scattered like cataracting cauliflowertheir mobile

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blooms zooming instantaneously from dense ripple unto sparse wash. Cutting a conspicuously mean line, the fit swifts have mastered 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 ferocious speeds through the airdropping 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 spectators eyes near to writhing.Then, just when the downward bobbing borders on merely injurious, a mitigating self-preservation commands the swifts wings to be raised and fluttered furiously againtheir 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 possibility of attackfrom above and behindan 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.

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 sky into 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 room reeling 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 fencedin 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 taxonomical category hardly unheard of even in its most preposterous auspices carried as they were, by quartering breezes, across decades, from clime to clime
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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 Taxonomys 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 Bindweed The Wilted Flapper Saddled and Ladled by Christians Of a Delicate Aurora-Color One Planters Prejudice Graces Mutable Trace In [whip] Poor [wills] Taste The Mischievous Victual Breeding Not Among Us One NoiseMaking Seedling Of Soft Placemat-Frequenting Fleshes Having a Topping Kohlrabis 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 wear our druthers
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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 couldnt 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 acquaintances 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.

alert

to come out with others like a covert underwing

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and it is for all these very reasonsthe rare neartotal light obfuscation, an uncharacteristically low human occupancy, the extreme topographical horizontality and morethat 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 strips own illumination would still likely be the only given signal of its kind for miles. in other words, the navy might say, one cant get much closer (for strategic practices 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 navys 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 threequarters of the tundra swans in the entire atlantic Flyway spend the years bitterest months roosting in the eastern

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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

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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 navys own draft Supplemental environmental impact Statement, released on February 23, 2007: When the use of habitat modification and management 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

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 ultimately 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 navys 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 navys 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

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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 sites 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 navys decision and demanding a response to the inadequacies and outright gaps within the navys 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 countrys 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

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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 navys 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 states two senators had all expressed vocal concern about the projects suggested location, the navy still wouldnt 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

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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 futureboth 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 studys release there have been two more, with a further

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 illthought upstepsmaking their logics and consequences as transparent and open to dispute as possible in the process. and of course, where and whenever possible, morehopefully always moreexerting 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 navys 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 outif 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,

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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 Americas Wetlands, Washington d.C.: island Press, 1997.

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.

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