Here is a much better GoFundMe campaign.
Send Oregon Patriots bags of Dicks
I’m in. Anyone else?
Pretty much. This is a large area of high-desert wetlands and some juniper forrest land that was made a wildlife refuge back in 1908 by Teddy Roosevelt.
In the late 1880s, plume hunters decimated North American bird populations in pursuit of breeding feathers for the hat industry. Hunters targeted large flocks of colonial nesting birds and shorebirds, killing birds indiscriminately and orphaning chicks. Eventually, the large numbers of colonial nesting birds on Malheur Lake were discovered by plume hunters. In 1908, wildlife photographers William L. Finley and Herman T. Bohlman discovered that most of the white herons (egrets) on Malheur Lake had been killed in 1898 by plume hunters. After 10 years, the white heron population still had not recovered. With backing from the Oregon Audubon Society, Finley and Bohlman proposed establishment of a bird reservation to protect birds, using Malheur, Mud and Harney lakes.
It is made by the Donner und Blitzen River (yes you read that right) which flows northward through the middle of the refuge, and is irrigated out to create a large wetland. The river flows into Malheur Lake, which in turn flows into Harney Lake forming a large salt sea (Harney Basin). This open water brings thousands of migrating birds through the wildlife refuge every year. Along with the extensive marshland, the total size is 187,000 acres.
It is exceptionally hot in the summer, and cold in the winter. The late spring and early fall are popular times to visit this wildlife refuge, which is basically a high-desert oasis.
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The Malheur Wildlife Refuge is in fact part of a chain of refuges alone the Pacific Flyway, a migratory path leading from the arctic to the tropics and used annually by millions of birds. In 1870, Oakland, California, Lake Merritt Wildlife Refuge was established as the first refuge in this flyway, was the first refuge established in the United States and to my knowledge is still the only refuge within city limits in the United States. It was the first effort to protect and preserve this migratory path that has existed for centuries and functioned flawlessly until the arrival of the European culture.
One of the accepted components of that colonial culture was “if I get there first’est with the most’est, it is mine and I can do with it as I want”. So we tear down mountains for minerals and walk away with no effort at restoration or even cleanup. We clear-cut vast forests and walk away, because, you know, some trees will probably grow back. We dump sewage and industrial waste in waterways knowing that it will get diluted and will be someone else’s problem downstream.
Malheur (“bad” sound or “bad” smell?) was an ongoing attempt at further preservation. Much of the open area around the official refuge has been a gray area, for use be ranchers, hunters, and all other interested parties. Over the past fifty years, the government in its diverse agencies of forest and rangeland, BLM, Fish and Wildlife, water rights, and others, has sot to charge ranchers for grazing and limit the volume of cattle, and to establish bureaucratic control. That has not gone well with ranchers seeking to preserve a lifestyle from the 1800’s.
The Malheur Wildlife Refuge is named after the Malheur River.
The name (derived from the French for “misfortune”) was attached to the river by French Canadian voyageur trappers working for the North West Company on the Snake County Expeditions of Donald Mackenzie as early as 1818 for the unfortunate circumstance that some beaver furs they had cached there were discovered and stolen by Indians. The name first appears in the record in 1826 when Peter Skene Ogden, a fur trapper with the Hudson’s Bay Company, referred to it as “River au Malheur (from rivière au Malheur, literally: River of the Misfortune)” and thereafter as “Unfortunate River.”
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At least the Hammonds recognize when they are beat. Bundy’s still diggn’ and hasn’t really sealed his fate quite yet.
Hammonds, a bit right wing loony but realistic, Bundy, full blown wack job encased in an airtight bubble.