Familiarity breeds semi-discontent in re Friends of Hagerman NWR's Photo Club

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? 

Texas Progressives talk special session, more

The Texas Progressive Alliance wishes the Legislature an unhappy and unproductive special session as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff looks at the first re-redistricting map on display, which would be a radical and ridiculous reapportionment of the state's Congressional districts.

SocraticGadfly salutes the second and much better than the first lawsuit against the state over the Ten Commandments bill.

The Waco Bridge assesses that city's flood risk.

The Dallas Observer notes a political cartoon about the Hill Country flood that generated MAGA death threats against its artist.

City of Yes explains why Austin's "Capitol View corridors" are bad for housing and other development.

The 19th profiles Katherine Wells, the health official who led Lubbock's response to the measles outbreak.

Space City Weather asks you to please be wary about taking your weather reports from TikTok.

Jef Rouner ponders the potential of Trump voter regret to lead to changes

The REAL footprints in the sand

Whether you're actually a secularist or not, you may, like me, be tired of the old "footprints in the sand" saying. I'd call it a poem, but to use the word "poem" for such writing does violence to the word "poem."

So, about two months ago, hiking a freshwater beach area at my nearby national wildlife refuge, when I stumbled upon a series of shoreline footprints due to a great blue heron, I knew what I had to do.

And, that is what you see below.

(It definitely embiggens when you click.)

This is not quite William Henley's "Invictus," with which I don't totally agree. (And, to the degree Invictus is a kind of lodestar for Gnu Atheists, that's part of why I disagree with them.)

That said, this is a good place for me to quote the self-invented secular Shahada:

"There is no god and I am his prophet."

Trump is actually right on California's high-speed rail

And, yeah, if cutting $4 billion in federal subsidies either forces California to get its shit together, or else walk away, so be it.

I said 15 years ago that HSR projections in California were dubious.

Six months after I wrote that, I went into much more detail about everything wrong with California's high-speed rail plans.

The clusterfuck of stupidities included too many stops and not straight enough lines.

Beyond the problems, it also included miscomparisons, as I noted much of "old Europe" trains aren't really "high speed" rail, just "faster than US" rail. 

There's also the massive stupidity that, unlike in Europe, rail lines in general in the US, including HSR proposals, whether in California, Tex-ass or Flori-duh, don't tie into airports. 

In Governor Pothole's California, cost overruns are less a problem than construction delays. The main line, San Fran to LA, was supposed to be done by 2020. Even if the federal money stayed, I doubt it would be done by 2030. 

Intellectual dishonesty from All About Birds?

Per a now-deceased friend of mine, All About Birds became, on his recommendation, my go-to site for identification of, and information about, birds. Ahead of Audubon.

But recently, while Net-surfing about the Lord God Bird, the extinct (sic) ivory-billed woodpecker, I came across some intellectual dishonesty by AAB.

It relates in part to the "similar species" slider it has at the bottom of the page about each bird.

For the ivory-billed, it lists very similar pileated woodpecker among similar species, but also the red-headed.

And, for the pileated? Also on the red-headed, but NOT on the ivory-billed. (The only other similar species for it is a crow. That's laughable.)

On every alleged (sic) siting of the ivory-billed for 25 years or more, one counterclaim has been that the spotter has actually seen a pileated.

And so, AAB, who had a Cornell prof behind the alleged sitings in Arkansas 20 years ago, this is a way to cover up. Don't admit the two birds are similar.

And I could have sworn when I first saw this in May that the pileated was NOT a comp for the ivory-billed, either. Because, as it, it doesn't make total sense.