Where I grew up in NW Pennsylvania it looks alot like this lovely rendering in early winter. The abandoned farms and little homes were there too and we hunted around many of them as younger men. It was already a "resistant pocket of depression" by the time I graduated high school in 1976 and that particular malady only seems to have deepened since my departure from there in the middle 1980s.
Access to many of those places is no-longer available because so-much of it is posted now. That sense of a community's use of a "shared resource" is overshadowed now by a fear of "liability" (& perhaps by some previous bad behavior). Bird populations there have also plummeted for a number of reasons. West Nile Virus was blamed heavily by the State Game Commission but the numbers had already been badly-reduced before that particular pestilence became generally known there.
I always wondered about how wild turkey populations affected the ruffed grouse populations in the coverts of my boyhood home (because as one gained population the other seemed to lose) but I have by told by several "experts" now that my observations were merely a coincidence.
Oh well...
Last edited by Lloyd3; 04/17/26 06:12 PM.
