cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My Totally Awesome Field Trip Wow! That field trip went great. It was awesome, it was fun, and I think it was literally life-changing for some of my students. We had a total of 8 people, all guys (my one female student couldn't make this trip). The youngest was a 6 year old who came with his father (also a student) and the oldest is probably somewhere north of 65 years old. Only 2 of these students had ever fired a gun of any kind before. It was our guys in their 40's who seemed to get the most out of it. I was seriously not at all expecting to see this kind of reaction, but after we'd been out there for about an hour and they'd been through their first turn and were waiting to shoot again, they had this look of incredible relief. Relief and pure, unfettered joy. These guys had been waiting THEIR ENTIRE LIVES FOR THIS. They'd wanted to learn how to shoot rifles since they were kids. It had been this rite of manhood that they'd totally missed out on. And then there they were at the shooting range, talking cartridges and calibers with other guys and chatting with random other people there as equals. This was nothing aggressive. They weren't being macho in the sense of swaggering or being even mildly threatening. They were just completely happy and looked like they'd suddenly found their place in the world. And the really awesome part is that they all did great. Paul and I worked with each of them one-on-one until we had every one of them consistently hitting targets within what would be the vital zone of a deer at a minimum of 100 yards. In each case they walked away from the shooting bench after their turn visibly beaming with joy at what they had done. This is the first time I have ever spent the entire day on a shooting range and only fired 2 shots the entire time (to demonstrate how to use a certain rifle). And yet I don't think I've ever enjoyed myself in a session of shooting as much as I did on Saturday. I didn't take a single break the entire day. Not even for lunch. But the time flew right by. So the day was a total success. I will absolutely be doing this again. Meanwhile, my cup floweth over with material for the next class. I want to cover ballistics, but there is also a ton of stuff to teach them about tracking. The thing I really, really want to spend a whole class on is the evolutionary history of deer. That is what I've been reading a lot of lately and I find this shit totally fascinating. My concern is that I'm not sure to what extent other people are likely to share my passion for the finer points of convergent evolution during the Late Tertiary, or the intermediate benefits of a partially developed cannon bone. My guess is that I can get away with teaching a full hour on evolution if I put together really awesome visual aids. Like, they might really dig some of these pictures of early muntjac type deer that had fangs, or megaloceros with antlers about 8 feet across. I think much of this is arguably relevant to a deer hunter, because we have entered a period of rapid environmental change. Global warming and the replacement of forest and fields with landscapes tailored for human development. Even the areas that we aren't bulldozing are seeing a very rapid influx of alien species of plants, insects, birds, fish, bacteria and fungii that are completely changing wild habitats. Whitetail deer are the oldest extant species of deer in the world. They are generalist slinkers that adapt quickly and survive where other competitor species do not. The story of how deer have adapted to rapidly changing environments in the past will give us clues as to how their behavior and their bodies will change over the next century. 10:50 a.m. - 2009-10-05 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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