Alien Invaders

I guess I'm always a month behind the times. I report this incident now, that actually happened in August. For those of you who know and love the BWCAW, The bizarre behaviors perpetrated by the pseudo-humans described below is alien and unimaginable.

It seems that five 'men' and a juvenile from Ely have been accused of terrorizing campers in the BWCAW.

The six suspects are accused of shooting off fireworks, firing guns, using abusive language and threatening to kill campers on Aug. 7 on Basswood Lake.

One family described how they were hiding in the woods, terrified that several men were going to kill them. At one point, they said, the men appeared to come ashore, where they threatened to kill the father and rape his daughter.

The Lake County District Attorney announced that 79 charges have been filed against the men, including felony, misdemeanor and gross-misdemeanor charges for damage to property, theft, possession of stolen property, reckless discharge of firearms, underage drinking and harassment.

Confiscated items included cases of beer, a bottle of schnapps, mortar-like fireworks, a Russian-style, semi-automatic assault rifle, a .45-caliber Glock semiautomatic handgun, a .22-caliber semiautomatic handgun, a .22 caliber handgun and a .22 rifle.

Here are some sources I found for this report... All of my information is regurgitated from these sources (Remember, shoplifting is stealing)

• Pioneer Press (Click to see a couple of pictures of these clowns)
• Duluth News Tribune
• The Lake is the Boss (Personal To-do list item: check this guy's blog out)

View Larger Map

Deer = Rats?

Strib Article: Deer and people clash in Minnesota

Suburban dwellers of the Twin Cities metro area have similar complaints about Canadian Geese. Who is encroaching upon who's living space seems to be the question. Unless a day comes where people are corralled into the cities, stories like this will continue to get play. America has a Love/Hate relationship with itself - So gleeful about the housing boom, so sad that some mean people want to kill the deer that wander into these new neighborhoods.

27-year-old walleye found in Lake of the Woods

Read the story at the strib site.

That fish dates back to the Carter administration and the first Star Wars Movie! It never occurred to me to wonder how long these fish might live if they are not harvested or predated upon. Or Gill netted.


1:00 PM - I removed the photo of Mace Windu and the reference to 'Going out like some sucka." Not everyone might get the Samuel Jackson reference plus I don't want any trouble for linking to a SW.com photo.

In the key of "Dee"

An interesting article about some friends of mine:

Study: Chickadee chirps complex code

Owl be back

I am having more outdoor urges today. Partly because it is sunny and warm, partly because the wife read my desperate plea for help from last friday and suggested that we could "maybe" go somewhere this spring. Wherever it is I hope that they have trees. Of course stories like this also get me itchy to go into the woods. Owls large enough to carry away children and small livestock. Sign me up!

I don't know what it is about owls that captures my imagination. As a toddler the story goes that whenever we drove past a red owl store I would get excited and point up at the sign. My Red Owl obsession was apparently acute enough that my grandmother took notice and made a Red Owl pillow for me. At the farm where my grandparents lived there was a wooded pasture inhabited by a great horned owl. I canot recall if I ever actually saw the bird myself, but what I do recall is that I had some very wild ideas about the appearance of any creature with the words "Great," "Horned" and "Owl" in their name. I envisioned some sort of ultrabird, a super-owl. Perhaps a man-sized owl with horns like a bull. In the mythology of my childhood the great horned owl that lived in my grandparents' pasture was like a flying minataur. Except instead of being mean he was wise, of course. Not just because he was an owl, either. this creature had decided to live on my grandparent's farm and to me that seemed like a pretty wise move on the owl's part.

These days I take in information and it just sits in my head like the wool fluff that you find in a pillow. I look back to those days and I reallize that the way a child can take that wool fluff and spin it into a golden tapestry, designed to suit their entertainment needs. It's a lost art, insofar as we all have it and by growing up we lose it. Day-to-day living, task-oriented activities, and duty-Duty-DUTY suck the creativity out of us, until we can scarcely remember what it was like to think like a kid.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but very soon I will return to the woods and look for my old friend the great horned owl.