NWR, for the non-environmental types, is a national wildlife refuge. All national wildlife refuges in the U.S., including Hagerman in north Texas, are parts of, and run by, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Hagerman, like some other larger, and generally more popular and visited, NWRs, has a "friends of" support group. It has a Facebook page, restricted to members.
The friends group, in turn, has a nature photography group Facebook page, NOT limited to official friends supporters, of which I am a member.
And, that brings us to the header.
For nearly a month straight in early summer (starts in May here in my climatological definitions) and into early June in full summer, most of Hagerman was underwater due to heavy rains.
To explain, Hagerman was created after the feds bought land on both sides of the Red River in the 1930s while Denison Dam, built to impound today's Lake Texoma, was being built, in anticipation of floods at times putting most this land underwater. This year, my area near and upstream of the dam got about 11-12 inches of rain, on average, in April, hugely above normal, and about 7-8 in May, a fair amount above normal. It's very flat land, largely surrounding Big Mineral Arm of the lake.
There's an additional twist, which ties indirectly with the header.
The feds bought ONLY the surface estate of all this land in the 1930s, primarily out of cheapness. Well, soon, the first exploratory drilling happened, and yes, found oil. There are still-active muleheads / nodding donkeys on pads within Big Mineral Arm, as well as in higher areas, in the latter case, having oil tank storage batteries with them.
Well, greenhouse gases and climate change, right?
A few of the members have talked at times about climate change, though none has talked about the climate crisis. And none of them batted an eye when a regional FWS admin this spring gave a presentation about how good the awl bidness was to FWS, as I wrote here, when I accused the friends group, since this was a regular event sponsored by IT, not Hagerman FWS, of whoring themselves out.
This:
Learn all about the oil rigs on the refuge, and the ways in which they benefit Hagerman NWR.
Along the lines of eXXXon saying "Carbon brings things to life," is whoring yourself out.
Few of the people there seem to have any idea how anti-environmental FWS is in general, specifically on things right here in Tex-ass like the dunes sagebrush lizard (with original help there from then-Texass Comptroller Susan Combs, then from O'bummer's Interior Secretary Kenny Boy Salazar), so bad it led to a new lawsuit, and the monarch butterfly, where even the Center for Biological Diversity fell for kind of a head fake — since Kenny Boy Salazar was involved. They just want to see purty birdz, probably mainly while driving in their cars.
Or now, FWS being a sellout again, this time on the lesser prairie chicken. (And, yes, that's in part Trump-related, but I'm sure not entirely)
That's part 1 of the discontent.
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Part 2? Non-locals, like people from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metromess, asking all during this time "Is it above water yet," and some even driving up here.
Admins have written occasional posts about how long it would still be before it aired out. But, they never "pinned" a post to the top of the Facebook page to cut off such dumb questions.
They never went beyond that and suggested to Metromessers alternatives to Hagerman, like I did in comments to two of the posts.
And there are!
From where I live, within 40 miles, there's national grasslands near Alvord, Texas, a city lake with 3-4 miles of trails at Muenster, Texas, and a city nature preserve at the northeast corner of Denton. In Fort Worth, Samson Park gives you up-and-down hiking and as for birds, I've seen a black-crowned night heron there. You can see all sorts of birds in the Trinity parks complex there, or White Rock Lake in Dallas, or one of the undeveloped Dallas County parks, all of which I've been to.
During the "wet" time, I saw dickcissels, painted buntings and yellow kingbirds at Muenster, and further away, black-capped and white-eyed vireos at Wichita Mountains NWR.
Of course, at all these places, you have to actually get out of your vehicle and hike, per Cactus Ed Abbey.
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Part 3?
Some of the newer members of the photo club.
There's one whose Hucksterman profile calls herself "digital creator," and whose home page says "Owner/Manager/CEO at Backroad Photography," with no website, in other words:
"I'm a person who has a camera and shoots photos in the country."
To make it worse, her first profile photo looked like someone playing with Photoshop while indulging substances and who should have their Photoshop privileges revoked.
As it turns out, her "organization" actually a Hucksterman group created by said person. She's about the only person who posts there herself, and a bunch of it is cheesy 3-D Hucksterman photo effects that confirm what I just said above. Fortunately, she doesn't try this on the Hagerman site, or else they don't let her.
That said, to sidebar? Hagerman photo group admins DID let one person, a very occasional poster, post a picture of a Brahminy kite from India claiming they'd seen one in or near Hagerman. Worse? It was the actual illustration photo on Wikipedia's article. He either hauled it down himself, or admins did. I don't know if he got booted; he should have.
Back to the person at hand. I suppose I should salute their love of nature, but I don't, because of how it's expressed.
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Part 4?
I've often suspected the photo group of playing favorites. And, the most recent Facebook "header" photo? The shooter said it was in a small pond "near Hagerman." As in, not inside refuge boundaries.
Add that to "overposters," who have to dump photos from a month earlier?
Off-putting.
"Hagerman influencers" would be another way to describe them.
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Part 5? Friends of Hagerman itself.
I know more than most people about how "managed" many national wildlife refuges are, primarily to serve the "hook and bullet" constituency. So, "Adopt a Goose"? Uhh no. First, I'm not a total fan of the overseeding, any more than water diversions out west to places like Sonny Bono and Bosque del Apache. (Interestingly, a state part or wildlife refuge in the same area doesn't have the same problems right now.) Also, why not get the oil industry best buds to take up the slack?
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