Midges Attack Northern Michigan

 

Attack of the Midges

 

This past week we were camping with our granddaughters a few hundred yards from Lake Huron. To be more precise, we were at Bay City State Park, at the pre-eminent entrance to the Saginaw Bay, adjacent to the mouth of the Saginaw River where flows an average discharge of 4,827 cubic feet per second. All that water comes from Michigan highlands (including Roscommon) into Lake Huron via the Tittabawassee River that becomes the Saginaw River after it joins with the Shiawassee, Flint and other large rivers that drain much of the central area of mid-Michigan.

As you might have guessed, we spent a portion of our week before the 4^th of July at the Saginaw Bay Beach, adjacent to the Tobico wetlands. Tobico features several ponds, bogs, and an assortment of other-named wetland areas, all of which provide sought-after viewing of numerous birds. The birds are attracted to the wetlands because of the protein-filled bugs that inhabit the quiet waters. The bugs were of little interest to us while we soaked up BTU’s from the cloudless skies that flooded us with enough lumens to make our skins red.

We quit the beach early -- opting for the air--conditioned comfort of our camping trailer and a game of Sequence at the kitchen table. This, of course, was only permitted after the obligatory camp fire maintained by a grand-daughter. Of course, I offered tips on keeping the blaze at least four feet high by the generous application of fire-starter liquids. We roasted several hot dogs and pigged out on corn chips in a gooey, but tasty dip.

We let the fire finally burn down as the sun settled. By now we were all tired, but the game of Sequence beckoned. We climbed in the trailer, clicked on the lights and opened the windows and the trailer door to admit a welcome and cooling breeze that helped alleviate the strange burning sensation that we experienced from our afternoon sun exposure. The open windows, and open door and the lights became a terrifying mistake. (Insert here: the sound of the spectacular cadence from the movie JAWS). Fifteen-year-old grand-daughter Shana was the first to notice as she was sitting next to the screened window. “What is that?” she exclaimed with some urgency. Wait, make that terror in her voice.

We all looked to see a swarm of tiny insects, inches from Shana, on the opposite side of the thin window screen that was keeping a horde of nasty looking little bugs at bay. Maybe. The JAWS music was increasing in volume as we watched the horde getting bigger and bigger. I noticed that a few bugs had somehow found their way inside the trailer, maybe 50 or more that were gathering inside, most near the ceiling. I got up from my chair to investigate. There was a trail of bugs from the table to the entry door. The outside door was open and the ill-fitting screen door indicated their probable entry point.

I looked closer. There was another horde of bugs at the door, even larger than those gathered at the screened window where Shana first called them out. Maybe a thousand bugs were silently buzzing about, each following a light beam, each intent on having sex. It was a problem. The bugs had somehow found a small entrance at the screen door and several dozen were now beginning to explore the inside of our trailer.

The construction of our camping trailer is such that one must open the screen door to access and close the outer door that was now wide open. Opening the screen door would be like inviting the horde to come inside and attack those of us who were breathing. I pondered the situation. I was pretty sure that one of the three females in the trailer would taste better than me, thus diverting their attention while I would make a desperate lunge to reach and close the outside door. I developed the plan for one of the females to open the screen door, being ready to slam it shut after my heroic effort to close the outside door.

Since I calculated that Marjorie was the least likely to scream and alert other neighborhood bugs to the attack, I asked her to manage the screen door. She reluctantly agreed. At the call of three I steeled my nerves and we implemented the plan.

Here is a photo taken from inside the trailer showing the accumulated bugs on the screen immediately after I closed the outside door. My sudden lunge and closing of the outside door seemed to help decimate the bug population from a thousand or more to several dozen who were desperately searching and miraculously finding a way in.

The black dots in the photo are the approximate 100 little devils who remained on the outside of the screen door despite my effort to sweep them away as I was closing the outside door.

We discussed how best to remove the bugs that had managed to find their way inside. Then I remembered the vacuum cleaner that we carry inside the trailer. I plugged in the machine and began chasing the devils with the extended length plastic tube. I wore out after a few minutes and passed the vacuum on to Kylie, who went after the horde with a vengeance. After Shana’s turn with the sweeper, we had reduced the population inside the trailer to less than dozen so that everyone finally felt free to take a large breath and open their eyes when the bugs came near.

We continued taking turns with the vacuum and finally there were less than a dozen bugs –most in hiding. Sometime later we felt obliged to discuss our near miss with the horde of bugs. Mr. Google and I had a lengthy discussion and it was determined that our swarm of little bugs had come from the nearby waters, gathered in the fading sunlight, made a bee line for the lights in our trailer, and sought out us humans as they enjoy the smell of our carbon dioxide-rich exhalations. I assume that one hazard with the bugs would be sleeping with your mouth open. We further determined that the hordes assemble as the means for males and females to come together in the production of eggs for future generations. Apparently. their amorous behavior is so energy intensive that they die a few hours after a single massing of the horde.

The midges that attacked us are similar to the May Flies (also known as fish flies) that inhabit southeast Michigan and especially Lake St. Clair where nearby roads sometimes become slippery with the bodies of millions of fish flies. Midges, as the name implies, are much smaller that May Flies. A recent news report indicated that this year was a productive one for Midges as the critters swarmed Mackinaw Island and Mackinaw City, to the consternation of island visitors who returned to find their parked cars completely covered with dead bugs.

Here is a picture taken on the day following the attack. The photo is showing the base of our screen door, testimony to the one-day life of the Midges after their frontal attack at our trailer. 

I presume the Better Business folks and those involved in tourism have been working overtime in discouraging news reporters from announcing the recent bug outbreak.

A Recovered Blog Not Previously Posted

 

The Political World According to Bill

(A rant about former President Trump written just after the 1^st impeachment was announced)

 

Anyone who watches the national news regularly surely must have come to the same conclusions as I have, and, by all accounts, most of our foreign counterparts have; those who see the effects of our political machinations on a global scale and are impartial observers of American politics. Their common refrain is ‘Americans seem to have lost their minds.’

The reason for this view is that our nation now regularly does things that are counter-productive for ourselves and for the rest of the world. On the aggregate, it is safe to say that only the deranged can do something that harms both themselves and others and then brag about it. This is the work of a self-described ‘stable genius’ according to one high ranking leader, one who seemed deranged even as he announced his intellectual capability to an unbelieving world.

Foreigners imply that we began losing our national competency in 2016 when the Republican Party decided to allow a neophyte to join the ranks of a dozen or more political wanna-be’s who sought the Presidency of the United States; they allowed a man who was completely unfit for any political office, one who had no qualifications even to serve as dogcatcher, to become a candidate for the highest office in the land. His candidacy was a joke as he relied on juvenile name-calling to denigrate his competitors. He appealed to only the lowest ranks of the Party, promising no new ideas beyond a disjointed effort to dismantle the accomplishments of his predecessor. His campaign was based on hate, lies and sentences with only small words uttered loudly with feigned indignation. It was both sad and shameful to watch red-hatted supporters completely succumb to his brand of skullduggery.

His Democratic competitor, a woman, won the hearts of the electorate by a popular vote majority of several million votes. Yet the Republican candidate limped into the Presidency courtesy of the outdated electoral college that no one understands, a bag of dirty tricks (including the illegal help of Russia), suppression of votes, Republican Gerrymandering, and a dearth of uninformed voters who must have been fans of the reality TV show that featured an unskilled actor who adopted a make-up ritual of orange face paint and a yellow comb over pasted to a shiny skull.

Number 45 began his Administration by hiring crooks to become the leaders of the massive bureaucracy in the US government. When the dust settled, the government had become a look-alike assemblage of old white men with beautiful secretaries who echoed only those things they believed that the Trumpeter wanted to hear. His special brand of incompetence came into clear focus quickly as he named one after another Secretaries of State, all of whom whispered about his stupidity.

POTUS quickly aroused tensions around the world by insulting our most cherished allies and then after promising a nuclear war, suddenly changed course to treat despots like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un as old friends or, in the case of Kim, as new lovers. Other missteps by Comrade Trump were more serious. On a whim, our leader of the free world suddenly decided to abandon our allies by removing our troops from a field of conflict, giving up our bases to the Russians and leaving allies open to a massacre, that in fact occurred.

While he was stumbling in Europe and the Middle East, he secretly longed to spread his ideology across the American continent and follow up on an idiotic promise that had been made, that of building a wall at our southern border that would rival the Great Wall of China. When it became painfully obvious that such an idea was an absurdity, he reverted to a 2^nd goal: that of preventing emigration at the Mexican-US border. For this, he hired an especial set of officers, those who were totally lacking in humanity and had no sensitivity to human suffering and grief. These were men and women who were capable of stealing children from their parents to discourage emigration. The stolen children were first jailed, then hidden, then lost track of, before public pressure demanded that it be stopped. It was announced that that policy has ended, but recent revelations indicate that it has not; that children are continuing to be kidnapped by US border officials in the ongoing racist effort that is a secret government program.

And now we have Corona Virus, the most potent killer the world has ever imagined with Mr. Unqualified to lead us from our misery. We were doomed from the outset as our Bunker Boy removed the federal office that had been developed specifically to deal with pandemics. And then the worst happened; # 45 decided that the battle against the corona virus provided him with a wonderful opportunity to showcase his skills as a war time leader. He decided to personally lead the US effort against the dreaded disease. One of his first objectives was to secretly invalidate Obama Care by having his lawyers prove to the Supreme Court that helping ordinary Americans with their health care was bad governing. When that didn’t work, he initiated Plan B; attacking the world’s infectious disease specialists and ending our support and association with the World Health Organization. How’s that for helping combat the pandemic?

The results of having Mr. Know-It-All leading efforts to combat the Corona Virus were predictable – the United States now has the worst record in the world in battling the virus as we have more dead, more sickness and more suffering than any other nation. No one disputes these facts yet Mr. Big Lie reports that we are the envy of the world in dealing with the virus. Sadly, there are some who continue to believe his lies even as they see the suffering of their fellow citizens on the nightly news.

I suspect that knowledgeable foreigners who repeat the notion of Americans losing their minds do so with the knowledge that we have had at least two opportunities to remove the cancer at the top of our bureaucracy. The first was when his cabinet officers began to understand his incompetence and whispered to one another about implementing the rules of the 25^th amendment to remove an unfit President. I understand they included Vice President Pence in their number, and he agreed to the take-over of the top job if there was unanimous support for the idea. The group wanted iron-clad evidence and a plot was hatched for the 2^nd in command at the Dept. of Justice to wear a wire at a meeting to obtain the evidence wanted. Somehow the plot was divulged to a news reporter before the plotters were ready and the first opportunity to eliminate the orange-faced mobster was lost.

The second opportunity followed the impeachment of the President and the resultant trial in the Senate where we learned that we had elected the only Republican politicians in the world who were born without backbones. These poor souls meekly followed the demands of the Republican party leader and voted not guilty at a trial that was held without witnesses, thus depriving our long-suffering citizenry of the chance to make a change at the top.

The remedy to all this madness is the one thing that we can do and have done over the 200 plus years of our experiment in democracy: Throw the bums out at the next election. Only this time we have an additional special concern, what if he decides not to go as he has hinted several times? I hope that someone in government has a plan for that eventuality and has the handcuffs ready to lead him toward the nearest jail for his numerous attempts at robbing the American people and damaging the world order. It is the least we can do to show that our nation can rouse itself in returning to sanity.

 

 

The Situation at the Poles

 

The Situation at the Earth’s Poles

[Time Magazine recently sent one of their correspondents, Aryn Baker, to both the Artic and Antarctic to report on recent climate changes at the two poles. Her findings were reported in the May 22/May30, 2022 issue of Time and are summarized here]

“After visiting both ends of the earth, I realized how much trouble we’re in.” Aryn Baker

The indigenous people who live in the Artic depend upon the ocean for their sustenance. In the words of a 96-year-old resident, “The ocean is our grocery store.” Their grocery is increasingly being depleted by the inexorable changes wrought on both poles by increasing temperatures. The food chain for many of the world’s critters begins in the coldest areas of our oceans where tiny animals known as krill cling to the bottoms of sea ice flows. Many other sea creatures depend on sea ice for their food including seals, walrus and polar bears. The tiny krill become food for other animals. Those who feed exclusively on krill are beginning to show the effects of fewer krill as ice cover disappears because of increasing ambient temperatures at the poles.

The loveable Chinstrap Penguins in the Artic are one of those who depend upon krill. These natives to the coldest areas are disappearing rapidly as the krill population declines. Recent studies of several colonies show some have declined as much as 50% of their former numbers while others have lost 77% of their former size. The cause - less ice is formed later in the fall and it melts sooner in the spring. Another of the native animals that is disappearing is the bearded seal that natives know as ugruk. This critter has been used for food and a variety of other purposes for as long as anyone can remember by Inkupiak people who live on and about the village of Unalakleet. The seals are now so rare that hunters can no longer count on them as a food source.

Overall, the Artic is increasing in temperature four times faster than the rest of the globe. Both poles are similarly affected by increasing temperatures. At Argentina’s weather station on Esperanza Island in Antarctica a new, high temperature record was noted in the middle of winter – on Feb 6, 2020 the mercury climbed to a nearly unbelievable 65 F near the middle of winter. At the other end of the world, the temperature reached 100 F on June 20, 2020. The sea ice didn’t last long at either pole at these winter temperatures.

The concern over increasing temperatures is not just about the poles and the food supply at those regions. Science has proven that the poles have an overarching effect on weather around the globe. In fact, the poles regulate our climate, our weather patterns and our maritime food supply. These effects occur since sea ice reflects sunlight, minimizing temperature changes from the incident sunlight. When the ice melts, the sunshine is absorbed by the dark ocean raising its temperature, thus altering ocean currents, weakening the jet stream and changing wind patterns. These changes are the birthplace for greater droughts, storms and flooding in areas around the globe, the very things we are experiencing in our western states and other areas around the world. The extraordinary costs of these changes and the uprooting of people’s lives has grown to nearly incalculable heights.

Despite the continuing insults to the polar regions that have occurred to date, the worst may be yet to come. Much of the polar regions are girded by a subsurface soil layer known as permafrost. This soil contains thick layers of nature’s detritus accumulated over thousands of years. As it melts, the frozen material has the potential to release the accumulated carbonaceous material in the form of carbon dioxide. This further insult to the atmosphere can become another major new source for air pollution that will add to the problem of climate change.

The science is clear; to prevent further disruption to our way of life from climate change, we must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 compared to 2010 levels. As the 2020’s wear on, it appears increasingly unlikely that we will be able to meet this goal given our current lackluster progress.

“Our polar regions protect life as we know it only as much as we protect them.” Aryn Baker

 

So, what is next for us? The Artic is nearing a tipping point. Overall, 2020 marked the hottest year on record at the two poles heralding the smallest amount of sea ice cover ever seen in the two regions. The ice melt raises the level of ocean waters thus threatening low-lying regions around the world. Possibly even worse is the effect on permafrost. The permafrost layer at the poles is a carbon bomb waiting to go off. As increasing temperatures melt the subsurface layer beneath the ice, the carbon rich soil becomes ready to give up a mix of gases that are rich in carbon dioxide, further exacerbating the climate problem.

Life as we know it will change unless significant improvements in preventing greenhouse gas emissions into our fragile atmosphere are made soon. 2030 is date that many regard as the tipping point for the globe. Unless we can make major changes in greenhouse gas emissions before then, increasing frequency of storm, fire and flooding disasters are expected at extraordinary costs and further loss of life.

I thought you should know.

Old Shirts and Tight Pants 

 Have you seen the TV spots where a teacher is schooling a small group of men and women in ‘how not to become your parents’? My lovely wife says I need to take that class to avoid dressing like my father. She is referring to that period when Leisure Suits were a big fad and my father became a devoted follower, wearing one of his leisure suits 20 or 30 years after the fad had disappeared. “That’s you,” she mutters, loud enough that I can hear despite my hearing aids and their penchant for broadcasting only the things I want to hear. 

 She is referring to my practice of wearing old clothes. I don’t like the modern style of wearing pants that are so tight I can’t comfortably put them on without contorting my feet to impossible angles. Taking them off is equally disturbing especially when I forget that they are too small at the cuffs to pull over my shoes. I generally remember this too late, so it is back to hitching them up again to remove the shoes before starting the removal process all over. And wearing the overly tight things is no picnic either as they pinch and pull some of my essential equipment to the point that I want to holler out loud as I am now doing.

 So, I stick with my old trousers that she says are too bulky, out of style and easily wrinkled with their pleats and cuffs sashaying along as I walk. But I like ‘em. They are comfortable, easy to put on, and they have big pockets where I can keep my essentials of a knife, batteries for hearing aids, spectacles, money, and whatever other equipment is needed for the day. You can’t have big pockets on pants that are so tight you can barely reach into them. And besides, I tell her, there is a lot of wear left in my favorite old trousers that I have worn for the past twenty years or so. 

And forget about new shirts. I have an entire closet of them and I don’t know how they got there. Some of them I don’t recognize so I suspect someone has been slipping them into my closet when I am gone. The culprit is probably like me, over clothed, handling some of the shirts no more than once yearly when I rearrange my closet to put the summer things in the easy-to-reach shelf and consigning the winter things to the far reaches of the closet. I suspect I haven’t worn some of these old shirts haven’t been worn in years. 

 

In the mode of full responsibility, I must confess that one of the clothing culprits is me. During the height of our square-dancing days, I purchased any number of western shirts that are decorated with horse shoes, saddles, spurs, pistols, long guns, sheriff’s badges and other symbols of the old west, not to mention the extensive embroidery. The excessive number of these shirts stems from an attempt to match the shirts with pants of the same color. And, I remind the Missus, sometimes we just had to have matching clothes between the two of us. All of these old shirts were hand-made, meaning that they were expensive. Now they command a large share of my closet, too distinctive to wear as normal attire, but too valuable (in the memory banks at least) to be taking up space in a landfill. Instead of wearing a pretty shirt, I often find myself reaching for a comfortable sweat shirt. My favorite is an old one, slightly oversized, with a large label on front, “Hartwick Pines” in an old style of lettering that must have been popular in World War I where Edward Hartwick died. The advantage of this shirt is that it meets fashion standards where I live. Most men in my area of the north woods consider the wearing of sweatshirts or camouflage clothing suitable fashion for most any event, including funerals. 

Such details about acceptable fashion for funerals are important to me since attending funerals has become a major pastime for the wife and I. I can’t say I enjoy them so much but I feel obliged to attend. One of my problems in attending a wake is that I am always uncertain what to say to the closest relatives of the dead person. The only thing that comes to mind is something along the lines of “She looks really nice in her casket, doesn’t she?” That doesn’t seem to fit the occasion when the fact of the matter is that, at least to me, she mostly looks just dead. 

Maybe my sudden inability to find an appropriate and consoling statement to gathered mourners is a consequence of my clothing. Sometimes the Missus prevails and I am forced to remove my Hartwick Pines sweat shirt and matching loose trousers in favor of a more current style. Those darned too-tight pants, and stiff shirts with the necktie choking me must be the cause of my intemperate thoughts as I gaze into an expensive casket adorned with a dead body. Maybe you can suggest some more appropriate pronouncements about dead people that I could memorize and have at the ready for the next funeral. 

Bill  

 

Climate Change Report

There is so much happening in climate change activities I felt compelled to bring you up to date by a brief summary of recent events. First up is IPCC Report (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the United Nations organization of leading climate scientists around the world. This a big deal because the report is only issued when the group feels enough new information has been developed to warrant a public report (their last report was eight years ago). In November of 2o21 they offered their most recent report at their meeting of climate scientists who gathered in Glasgow to present their 6^th report over the last thirty years.

Their conclusion: Only drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions this decade can prevent us from raising global temperatures to a disastrous extent, the scientists have concluded.

The hundreds of climate scientists, thousands of research studies, eight years of work – building on more than three decades of research before that – have been boiled down in the past fortnight to a single message: we are running out of time to fix this problem.

Does this look like war damage from Ukraine? Think again. The photo is illustrating flood damage caused by Climate Change. More is expected.

 

The meeting produced scores of recommendations from dozens of technical experts. Here is one from the head man-The United Nations Secretary General: “greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.”

The bad news about flooding, fires, and other climate-driven catastrophes are likely to get worse as our world continues to pump more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. A new International Energy Agency analysis estimated that global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions had risen by 6 percent in 2021 from the year before, to a record 36.3 billion tons. This, despite all the talk and (some) action in making wind and sun energy into electricity. The ongoing recovery from the Covid pandemic has meant more economic activity. Unfortunately, the business rebound required more energy that was largely obtained based heavily on coal, the agency said. In a separate reading on this subject, I learned that much of the increase in coal usage is courtesy of China.

The same agency reported that there is a sliver of hope that one of the greenhouse gases, methane, can be significantly reduced without excessive cost or lost energy. Here are the facts. Methane, the chief component of natural gas, is produced by the oil and gas industry by drilling for it and then allowing the volatile gas to bubble up from the ground into their pipe lines that they subsequently sell to you and I after processing steps to separate the gas from the oil. It turns out that the drillers and all other parts of the industry who produce and sell the gas, haven’t been very careful in preventing leaks into our atmosphere.

The leaks have been a recognized contributor to the climate problem for some while and various government agencies around the world have naturally been tracking those emissions in the hopes that someday they would be corrected by more careful handling of the material at every step of the process. But here is the new information: the record keepers have added a new data source to their arsenal, satellites. The satellite data shows that all the data heretofore recorded was wrong – the satellite data showed that we have been sending considerably more methane into the atmosphere than previously thought. The good news about this finding is that methane emissions from this source of oil processing and drilling can be stopped relatively quickly at low cost if we have the will. Basically, we need to provide an incentive to the oil and gas companies to clean up their processes to end the unwanted escape of methane.

In the aftermath of the new warnings from the United Nations IPPC, several organizations have published their recommendations for immediate action. One set of recommendations from Leeds University caught my eye because they center on things that individuals and families can do without waiting for government action. Here are their recommendations for personal action that may be ultimately required to keep our planet livable.

·       Eat a largely plant-based diet, with healthy portions and no waste

·       Buy no more than three new items of clothing per year

·       Keep electrical products for at least seven years

·       Take no more than one short haul flight every three years and one long haul flight every eight years

·       Get rid of personal motor vehicles if you can – and if not, keep your existing vehicle for longer

·       Make at least one life shift to nudge the system, like moving to green energy and insulating your home

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine taking center stage, Russian exports of oil and gas may be reduced by governments acting to purchase less oil and natural gas from Russia. President Biden announced this week that the US will no longer purchase oil and gas from Putin’s Russia. Whether this will reduce overall use of Russian oil and its resultant air pollution is not clear. Naysayers suggest that some countries may reduce imports of Russian products but increase imports of oil from South America or other nations that have no intention of reducing oil sales because of climate change.

No doubt the mechanism of capitalism will take over and you and I will be paying higher prices for gasoline and all other products that rely on oil for their production, (think plastics and other materials that are oil sensitive). The increase already seen in oil prices before supplies are reduced is the result of oil companies raising their prices as capitalism promises more income from existing inventories of oil. Oil company executives will be congratulating themselves on their windfall and expecting increased salaries after their Boards think the public is not watching.

And, as a final note, did you hear the excitement by a lady on Facebook. She said her family was so excited. She and her husband had negotiated a loan that was just approved. This weekend, she said, her family were going to fill up their car with gas.

Stay tuned. The excitement will continue as we deal with those conservatives who still claim climate change is a hoax.

New Neighbors

 

New Neighbors

 

A chance meeting with my new neighbor reminded me that I haven’t written about my neighborhood in a long while. Accordingly, I decided to look it up. My last neighborhood report to you was August, 2019 when I reported on the happenings at my regular coffee-drinking morning meeting where we discussed the ongoing absurdities of modern-day life and its politics. A lot has happened in the neighborhood since then, so it seemed time to update you.

As you will recall, my neighbors and I live on a sparsely settled road roughly 7 miles from the sole village in our county. Roscommon, we call it, despite the confusion resulting from the overuse of one name for three entities: Our county is named Roscommon, our only village in the county is named Roscommon, and our southwestern-most township in the county is also named Roscommon. Since names are so cheap, you would think our previous state and local leaders could have spent a tiny more time for another name or two to avoid the obvious confusion of our same names for three separate entities. As an aside and an example of this, I should tell you that a purchaser of my book, Early History of Roscommon County, wrote a review of this book. He said he liked the book, was glad he had read it, but still disappointed when he determined the book was about Roscommon, Michigan and had nothing whatsoever to do with County Roscommon in Ireland as he had expected.

But back to my new neighbor who lives one door down from the neighbor next to me. The interesting thing about him is that he is a state employee – a uniformed member of the Michigan Dept. of Natural Resources, more specifically, a Conservation Officer. Conservation Officers are a special breed in Michigan with a rich history of law enforcement. “Woods cops,” they are called by some as they recall images of solitary peacekeepers of times gone by.

Their jobs are unique as they work alone, one officer, without direct supervision in a headquarters office, patrolling a county alone. In Roscommon, approximately 50% of the total land area is public land, mostly forested or covered by lakes, streams, ponds or rivers. These uninhabited lands, around 180,000 acres in total, are the domain of our single Conservation Officer neighbor. He is responsible for enforcing the law in these areas across the entire county and he roams the area using his assigned four-wheel drive truck, equipped with weaponry, communication tools and whatever other law enforcement tools that he needs. Depending upon circumstances he may also use a snowmobile, four-wheeler, boat, or plain, old-fashioned shoe leather in the form of water-proof high-top boots.

You might be surprised to learn that Conservation Officers have more authority than regular policemen. For one thing, the CO’s can enter your house uninvited if they have reason to so do – examining the inside of your refrigerator to look for recently taken game, for example. CO’s also have the authority to enforce all laws, not just laws concerning wild game or other activities involving outdoor, natural areas that other law enforcement officials generally ignore or defer to the Department of Natural Resources, better known as the DNR.

A DNR Watercraft Often Used on Major Waterways

 

The Conservation Officers investigate natural resource and environmental protection law violations pertaining to land, air, water and waste, and they are an important resource for local communities faced with environmental conflicts of a criminal nature. Emergency management situations often include the need for CO’s to become involved with other agencies. Forest fires are a continuing concern where I live and the CO’s often are deployed to help local firefighters if their expertise is needed.

 Other emergencies also can activate CO work. During the early days of the Covid emergency Michigan experienced severe weather, extreme flooding, and civil protests, keeping Michigan’s emergency management staff busy throughout the state with response and recovery efforts.

The chance meeting between me and my CO neighbor occurred while he and I were trekking in opposite directions down our road, he running and me walking. Later, I met both he and his wife at our local gym where both were exercising, he with the heavy weights and me with lighter versions of the same weights that I quickly set aside before their diminutive size could be discovered. We had a nice chat and I learned about the Conservation Officer job. I was impressed.

I thought you might like to know.