A lot of sports have been in the news lately for the poor conduct of some of their members. Football and baseball seem to be rife with abusers and drug addicts. While I’m quite sure that you can find rotten people doing rotten things in almost any sort of activity, I’ve sure been lucky in associating myself with some sports embraced by some really good people.

Hunting’s kind of a touchy sport with a lot of people, and yes, there are abusers. We call them poachers, not hunters, but the general non-hunting public fails to make that distinction. So those of us who do it honorably tend to get painted with that same broad brush, and that’s not exactly fair. We responsible hunters usually dislike the poachers even more than the Average Joe does, as we’re a little more knowledgeable about just exactly what they’re taking away from us.

The show Wild Justice is doing sort of a horrible job of depicting hunters as poachers. I’m sure it’s all for ratings, as a whole show of wardens stopping people and having them be perfectly in compliance wouldn’t make for a very dramatic television show. My friends and I are on really good terms with the wardens who patrol our hunting areas. I hear the wardens on the show mention now and then that 90% of the people that they encounter are upright sportsmen. That 10% makes the rest of us look bad, and I tend to chew on the corners of the TV when they call those poachers by our good name, hunters. They are not hunters, they are outlaws.

I wouldn’t be a hunter today if it weren’t for the kindness of some of my friends. They took me in as a cold rookie, and spent a lot of years teaching me how to hunt, where to go, and what to do if you got something. It took a number of years before I felt comfortable enough to go off on my own, and I owe all of that teaching to them. Complete strangers I’ve run into while hunting have typically been very good people as well. Somehow, based on a friend’s reference, I inserted myself into a tight-knit group of bear hunters and became part of their camp. Even better, they knew other people, and one of them became my husband. I would never have met him but for the kindnesses of strangers.

Roping was an interesting sport also. The structure of roping is such that people of any skill level or age could enter a team roping and be competitive within their handicap level. It’s filled with generous people too; it wasn’t unusual to see someone lend a $10,000 horse to someone else whose horse came up lame. There are a lot of good people in those arenas across the country. Hardly anyone makes any money at the sport, but they all do it for the love of it.

The shooting sports reminded me so much of roping when I was introduced to it. So many people are willing to help a newcomer; lending guns, ammo, and teaching isn’t at all unusual. There are so many different disciplines with the general shooting sports cap that a person would be hard-pressed to be exposed to all of them, but the people within the branches mostly all seem to have a kindness in common. They’re usually mild proselytizers, hoping to bring someone new into the fold of their shooting religion, but they don’t seem to take it personally if you don’t want to jump right in.

I hung around the edges of trapshooting for a couple of years. I did some photography, which was fun and let me participate a little bit. I mostly just watched and learned how things went before I jumped in. I am fortunate to have an excellent teacher; Junior’s father is a master at the sport and endlessly (so far) patient with those of us who don’t quite get it. Junior says he can teach you all you need to know about trapshooting in five minutes, but it’ll take you a lifetime to master the sport. I’ve definitely found that to be true. This was the year that I jumped in, after fiddling around with little meat shoots and practice days. This year, my friend and I started a Winter League team. Three women in their forties, one in her twenties, and an almost-teenage boy make up our team. A couple of the women are much better than the rest of us, but they’re in it for the fun of it, not to be competitive. The rest of us are learning, and have a great series of coaches bringing us along. You’d pay a lot of money for this kind of training, but this is given to us by people who love us, and you can’t beat that.

While we were practicing today, I happened to run across another branch of the shooting sports, which I hadn’t ever seen before. Another section of the range had a group doing Fast Draw, a cowboy-type timed sport where they shoot metal targets with wax bullets out of old-fashioned single-action pistols. I was standing there watching and someone noticed me. He came over and asked if I had any questions. It turns out that I did, and this very generous man spent quite a bit of time explaining the intricacies of the sport to me. I went and got Seamus and Shelley and Junior to see it too. Here was another sport with the same tone as some of my favorites; not in what it did, but in who the people supporting it seemed to be.

This man didn’t have to explain things three times to spectators. He didn’t have to introduce his son to Seamus to show him that kids his age could do it. He didn’t have to be our personal announcer, but he did, clearly because he loves the sport and wanted to spread the joy around. I could see enjoying it myself, if it weren’t for all of the other hobbies draining my time. I can certainly see why he likes it. That kind of enthusiasm is contagious; had we been run off for being in the way, that sport would never appeal to me. But now it does, and like the other things I’ve been exposed to, it’s because of the people involved. I applaud that whatever the activity. That kind of passion and interest demands respect. That seems to be there very definition of sportsmanship, and with exposure to this kind of sportsman, it’s no wonder that professional baseball and football isn’t worth my attention. I’d rather root for the good people, and they’re all around us, quietly doing their thing.

So with the almond flowers of spring comes time to start to hatch eggs and raise chickens again. What? You don’t have spring yet? Sorry for rubbing it in, but February is one of the only green months around here. The weather’s not reliable, but it’s foggy less often than it was. The grass starts to grow again. The bees are out pollinating.  We start to think ahead.

Well, OK, I’ve been thinking ahead to chickens for months now. Seamus has decided to show Silver-Laced Wyandottes for 4-H this year, with my enthusiastic support. We’re on a waiting list for some hatching eggs, but they’re slow growers, so when I saw an adult pair at the poultry show last weekend, I snapped them up. They will be the start of our show bird flock. Seamus is working on taming them, and for now, they’re isolated from the regular flock. Partly for health reasons, although they have access to each other through the cage, but mostly so they all get used to each other and the dog doesn’t eat them before the show.

But before I bought grown chickens, I went on a bit of an egg-buying spree. Junior fixed up the incubator I’d bought at the end of last season. I stuck 11 of my own eggs in it, and had some more shipped in. Cold weather is stopping some of them from coming, but I have five Blue Marans eggs, 7 Olive Eggers, and 11 Blue-Laced Red Wyandottes. I’m on a waiting list for a dozen more Silver-Laced and Blue-Laced Red each, as well as some Bourbon Red turkeys, which won’t be available for a while. and I just bid on six more Silver-Laced from a different line, and I have a dozen more Olive Eggers paid for but those hens went on strike, so who knows when those will be shipped. Oh, and I expect a shipment of 25 Freedom Ranger chicks tomorrow or next Friday. Those are meat birds; Seamus will pick two for his meat pen at the fair and the rest are for eating.

Yes, that does seem a little excessive when I lay it all out like that. The eggs won’t all hatch at the same time either, so that incubator is going to be running for months. I have a smaller one that I can use to hatch them in so I can adjust humidity levels a little better. And I have two brooders ready. I hope that’s enough. I’m going to have chickens coming out my ears pretty soon.

Don’t forget, I started last year with 30 chickens, and ended up with 11. The dog ate more than I did. He’s a bad dog, but I love him, so he gets to continue living – with the shock collar on most of the time. All that’s taught him is to not go near the chickens when both the collar is on and I can see him. I’ve had to have Seamus sneak out to catch him at it to correct him lately. But I hope to get to eat most of the meat bird batch, and at least half of the hatch will be roosters. I can’t abide a mean rooster so I’ll be eating many of them too. In fact, Yellow Rooster met his match a couple of weeks ago when he went for my face, as evidenced above.

But I enjoy the poultry a lot more than I’d expected to. I’ll have to lock them out of the garden soon, and they’ll be a hassle to keep out of it, but they’re fun. I like giving the eggs away, and I sure like homegrown chicken. I like having something to be interested in, and to take my mind off of other things.