Waiting for new spring green growth to appear, I thought about last fall’s beautiful colours and the day that I noticed there were new colours popping up in the woods on my route home - blaze orange and process blue. Plastic tape, not so artfully arranged, every kilometre or so, near places where I’d happened to see deer over the late summer and early autumn months.
Having also seen men with half ton trucks, camo vests and ball caps along that same road, and knowing that sometimes hunters will mark deer trails, it wasn’t much of a stretch to figure out who had hung all the orange and blue markers, and why they’d done it! It was very obvious to me what they were up to – trying to increase their odds of bagging a buck when hunting season started!
Not being a hunter and loving little Bambi, it became my mission in life to foil their efforts and save some deer in the process. It took about two seconds to convince my visiting city sister to help in this preservation effort, and off we drove filled with good intentions, on a meaningful mission! Exhilarating!
It was truly amazing how many trails the hunters had marked! At least 10 in one 3 km stretch – but we also have a lot of deer, so that made sense to us as we cheerfully slogged up and down steep ditches, through prickly wild rose bushes, and over to the flapping Bambi’s-been-here ribbons to quickly yank them off the branches from which they dangled.
A few of the ribbons had writing on them – things like “PTC-1 A:200’ D:60M” and so on, but this is the hi-tech age, so we knew that these were GPS coordinates (or something like that ) giving the exact spot where the deer had been sited. It was a little trickier though trying to figure out why they would also put stakes in the ground at two of the sites and paint them blaze orange as well. And rational explanations completely eluded us when we saw what looked like a tap (also blaze orange) screwed into the ground. We both stared at the tap and it was then that we shared a Oh. My. God. AH HA moment, or rather… AH Hydro! moment. Very much like a deer in the head lights, lets get outta here quick moment.
We dashed back to the car like little comets, knowing we had been vixens during our anti-blazing blitz.
We offer our sincere apologies to Hydro Quebec.
Your tape is in the back seat of my car. Sorry. Won’t do it again.
Having also seen men with half ton trucks, camo vests and ball caps along that same road, and knowing that sometimes hunters will mark deer trails, it wasn’t much of a stretch to figure out who had hung all the orange and blue markers, and why they’d done it! It was very obvious to me what they were up to – trying to increase their odds of bagging a buck when hunting season started!
Not being a hunter and loving little Bambi, it became my mission in life to foil their efforts and save some deer in the process. It took about two seconds to convince my visiting city sister to help in this preservation effort, and off we drove filled with good intentions, on a meaningful mission! Exhilarating!
It was truly amazing how many trails the hunters had marked! At least 10 in one 3 km stretch – but we also have a lot of deer, so that made sense to us as we cheerfully slogged up and down steep ditches, through prickly wild rose bushes, and over to the flapping Bambi’s-been-here ribbons to quickly yank them off the branches from which they dangled.
A few of the ribbons had writing on them – things like “PTC-1 A:200’ D:60M” and so on, but this is the hi-tech age, so we knew that these were GPS coordinates (or something like that ) giving the exact spot where the deer had been sited. It was a little trickier though trying to figure out why they would also put stakes in the ground at two of the sites and paint them blaze orange as well. And rational explanations completely eluded us when we saw what looked like a tap (also blaze orange) screwed into the ground. We both stared at the tap and it was then that we shared a Oh. My. God. AH HA moment, or rather… AH Hydro! moment. Very much like a deer in the head lights, lets get outta here quick moment.
We dashed back to the car like little comets, knowing we had been vixens during our anti-blazing blitz.
We offer our sincere apologies to Hydro Quebec.
Your tape is in the back seat of my car. Sorry. Won’t do it again.
