An organized gun range is a beautiful place. It’s a classroom – indoors or out – because it teaches valuable lessons. Lessons in safety and care and maintenance of weapons and ammunition.

Most importantly, gun ranges are places where you learn discipline and respect. Respect for rules and the discipline to ensure that you and others follow them.

Regretfully, there is a gun range in Haliburton County that is not a beautiful place. It’s a place where respect does not exist and discipline is nowhere to be found. It is a garbage-strewn, dangerous place and a disgrace to us all.It’s the abandoned gun range on the former Frost Centre area on the west side of Highway 35 near Margaret Lake Road. It is not the former Frost Centre property bought by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU). OPSEU bought the 40.6 acres of Frost Centre property bounded by St. Nora Lake and Highway 35. 

Some Frost Centre activities, an old sawmill, a maple syrup demonstration site and the gun range, were conducted in the bushland on the other side of Highway 35 but were abandoned when the Frost Centre was closed in 2004.

That area was not part of the OPSEU purchase and is public land owned by the province. The township offers cross-country ski trails through the area and has erected signs saying a pass must be purchased to use them.

The gun range is accessed through a rough dirt road off Margaret Lake Road. It is gated but the chain lock has been broken many times and the gate has been wide open for many months, if not years.

People are still shooting there, without any organization, supervision or usual gun range protocols. They have turned the place into a garbage dump.

One of the first rules a shooter learns is to pick up spent casings. When you finish firing, you bend down and collect the empty shells.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of spent shells litter the range grounds, along with other garbage. There are plastic and brass shotgun casings, plus brass rifle and handgun shells. Some of the handgun rounds are .38 and .45 calibre – the type used by law enforcement.

/Photo by Jim Poling Sr.

There is a building on the gun range. It is a substantial, well-built structure that has been vandalized. Its doors are torn off and the inside is strewn with used targets, empty beer cans and a variety of other garbage.

I have no idea who is using the range. There was shooting there (it sounded like handgun shots) this past weekend.

The place needs to be shut down immediately. Who is responsible for doing that, I don’t know – it doesn’t matter who. Just get it done.

I am not writing this because I am anti-gun or opposed to shooting ranges. In earlier days I was a competitive shooter who competed against Michigan State Police and U.S. Army combat defence teams. It is a challenging fun sport and one that teaches responsibility and focus.

But what’s happening at the old gun range off Highway 35 is a sickening disgrace. 

This is Haliburton County, not some U.S. hillbilly county where people who have eaten squirrels for too many generations do a lot of stupid things and are content to live surrounded by their own squalor.

I try to be Mr. Nice with my critter neighbours at the lake. It is becoming more difficult, however. Much more difficult, especially this spring.

I feed and comfort the little birds: the sparrows, nuthatches and chickadees. And, I don’t shout at the bullying blue jays and crows when they horn in, chasing the hungry little guys away from the feeders.

I’m also calm and gentle with the chipmunks. Obviously, they are not affected by COVID, because they have multiplied by the thousands during the pandemic. They have brought their relatives and friends to my place to dig holes wide and deep enough to swallow an 18-wheeler.

I understand they must dig for their tunnelling systems, but why any tiny rodent wants to claw through hardpan and packed road gravel is a mystery to me. There are hundreds of acres of soft, easy digging soil around my lake.

Playing Mr. Nice is hardest when it comes to squirrels. The black squirrels and their grey cousins are relatively respectful and law-abiding. They don’t chatter at me when I catch them trying to steal something.

Red squirrels, however, are unredeemable career criminals. They respect no property or possessions. When I try to talk to them about leading more  and productive lives, they mock and taunt me. 

Two of their cousins, red flying squirrels, chewed their way into my place a few years ago. 

When they couldn’t get into the food cupboards, they chewed – totally out of spite – a trophy lake trout I had mounted on the wall.

Last month I discovered that red squirrels tried to destroy my new car. I brought it in for routine servicing and a tech came running into the customer waiting room with bad news. The red squirrels had started packing engine spaces with acorns. The cleanout cost me $60.

When I returned home later in the day, two red squirrels were sitting in a tree beside my parking spot. They pointed at me and began chattering and laughing.

Squirrels never seem to have enough places to store their acorns. 

This spring, I decided to tidy up my ATV shed. I have a vacuum there and sometimes the hose is plugged into the blower end instead of the suctioning end. This day the hose was on the blower end and when I turned the power on, it began raining acorns.

Raccoons enjoy hanging around my place and I try to be Mr. Nice with them. It’s not easy because they are sneaky and come at night. They get into the bird feeders, not just taking a snack but tearing them down and carrying them off into the woods.

I’ve taken to trapping them – in safe and comfortable wire cages, of course. I spray their tail tips with fluorescent orange paint and release them into a far-off Crown forest. 

I’m waiting for the morning when I look out and see a cage occupied by a raccoon with an orange tail.

This spring I received the ultimate insult from my critter neighbours. 

Every fall I unhook my dock and tow it down the shoreline and into a protected bay where it will not be damaged by shifting ice. Every spring, I tow it back and reattach it to the shore.

Bringing it back this year, I noticed it was floating very low on one end. I took a crow bar and pulled off some boards to check the floats.

What a shock! Two floats were gone, and so were the boards that held them in place. All that remained of the holding boards were gnawed stubs – the unmistakable chew marks of beaver.

Sometime during the winter, beavers had chewed away the wooden supports, somehow removed two Styrofoam floats and created a cave-like space where they had started to build a comfortable home.

It took several hours and some money to return the dock to its useful state. When the repairs were complete, I sat down exhausted and thought: I must stop being Mr. Nice.

Later, after a few refreshments, my thinking changed. My critter neighbours were here first and I was the intruder.

So, I guess I’ll continue to play Mr. Nice and simply put up with their antics.

The abortion debate has flared into rage again in the United States, spilling of course, into Canada and elsewhere.

Much time, energy and money is spent arguing whether governments should allow women to terminate pregnancies. Wouldn’t all that time, energy and spending be better directed at lessening the chances of a woman having to make an abortion decision

For instance, improving sexual and reproductive health services would reduce the need to worry about abortions. 

Here in Canada, provincial health plans typically do not cover most contraceptive drugs and devices. Many people have to rely on private insurance plans, sometimes available through their employers.

Single women, who have a high percentage of abortions, often do not have the higher-level jobs that provide such benefits.

Much can be done to improve work life for women who must work to feed their children. Many of these are single mothers, who number almost one million in Canada. Nearly one-third live below the poverty line. 

You can chalk that statistic up to inequality. Earnings of single moms lag well behind that of men – roughly 82 cents to the dollar for the same job. The gap is even larger for racialized women.

Also, the median income of Canadian families led by single women in 2020 was about $49,000 compared with $101,000 for married couples.

Working single mothers need improved programs that will help them raise their children while doing their jobs. Many have lower-level jobs with unpredictable work schedules that make it difficult to take care of children. They also need satisfactory paid family leave and affordable quality daycare. 

Affordable daycare is on the way. The federal government has made deals with the provinces to provide $10-a-day daycare. 

In Ontario, which has some of the highest daycare costs in the country, the average daily cost for daycare is roughly $70, which is difficult to handle for a single mother earning food outlet wages. However, earlier this year the province signed on to the federal plan that will lower the cost of daycare to $10, but not until 2025.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit single mothers particularly hard. One study has shown that the employment rate for single mothers has not rebounded as pandemic restrictions have eased.

An analysis of Statistics Canada data found that the employment rate for single mothers with children under age six was down 36 per cent between February 2020 and the end of 2021. Employment of mothers with partners and children in the same age group was up 4.5 per cent.

No matter what laws governments pass to control abortions, they will continue to be done. The plain facts are that the majority of women seeking abortions are poor, or categorized as low-income, and feel they cannot afford to raise children.

The Guttmacher Institute, a global research and policy institution says 75 per cent of women seeking abortions are living below the poverty line or are categorized as low-income. It believes that a comprehensive package of essential sexual and reproductive health services, including contraception and safe abortion care, should be included in national health systems.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says that 73 million induced abortions take place worldwide every year. It includes abortions in its list of essential health care services.

Meanwhile the rekindled abortion debate continues to rage in the United States. It is a partisan debate that threatens to further tear the country apart.                 

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to strike down the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which said the U.S. Constitution protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to have an abortion without excessive government intervention. That decision basically made abortion legal in the U.S. but hard-line conservative groups have been trying for decades to get it reversed.

The Supreme Court’s decision on whether to strike down Roe v. Wade is expected at the end of next month or in early July. A leaked draft of the decision indicates it will strike it down, creating more massive unrest in a country that some people believe is already on the verge of another civil war.

They are on their way! You should be spotting them any day now. 
The last time I checked they were crossing Lake Erie and some areas of southern Ontario were reporting sightings.

The arrival of the much-admired ruby-throated hummingbirds will complete another miracle of nature. They have been flying for days to get here, travelling thousands of kilometres from their wintering grounds in Mexico and Central America. Many have had to cross the Gulf of Mexico to get here – an 800-kilometre non-stop flight that takes 20 hours. Then they have to navigate roughly 1,800 kilometres over the eastern United States before crossing Lake Erie into Canada.

How something so tiny and so delicate can travel such incredible distances through winds, storms and fluctuating temperatures truly is a miracle. The average ruby-throated hummingbird is a mere nine centimetres long and weighs three grams, the weight of about three standard paper clips. 

They might be tiny, but can be ferocious. Males use their needle-like bills to stab other males in fights for mates. Fights look like fencing, with the birds feinting, parrying and stabbing, sometimes knocking an opponent off its perch.

The Aztecs admired the beauty of these little birds but also saw them as bloodthirsty warriors. Huitzilopochtli, their god of war, was a hummingbird.
The hummingbirds’ unique bills also allow them to reach deep into tubular flowers to extract nectar. They need a lot of nectar to produce the energy needed for long migrations. 

They need to eat every 10 or 15 minutes to fuel their supercharged little engines and consume as much as 12 times their body weight in nectar every day. To do all that feeding they visit hundreds of flowers every day.
During flight, a hummingbird’s wings flap up to 80 times a second, making them just a blur to the human eye. Those lightning speed wing flaps allow the birds to fly like helicopters, even upside down, often hovering in one place as they poke a bloom for nectar.

Hummingbirds are the only birds that can hover or fly backwards. However, they are not good on their feet. They can’t hop or walk very well because their legs are short and weak.

Their lifespan is three to five years, which seems long considering the extreme weather conditions they face during migrations, plus the predators and human-made obstacles that all birds face.

Hummers are great little birds to have around our places. They pollinate a wide range of flowering plants, carrying pollen on their beaks and feathers from one plant to another.

They are easily attracted to garden flowers and feeders. They favour the colour red and some people hang red ribbons on feeders, trees and other objects to ensure they come.

They will go to any bright colour but one theory is that they are partial to red because red flowers are where they find the most nectar.

All they need to make your place a favourite place is a nectar feeder, water source and places where they can perch when needed. Expert bird watchers say hummers are loyal and will return to a place every year if it has all the things they need.

They also advise to keep feeders well-spaced because hummers are territorial.

Nectar for feeders is basically sugar water – one part sugar to four parts water. Many people add red dye as an attractant, but the experts advise against this.

Red dye No.40 is known to cause cancerous tumours in rats and mice. It is one of the most common colour additives and is found in many foods and beverages, notably energy and sports drinks.

There have been claims that this dye impairs hummingbird reproduction and causes skin and bill tumours. There is no definitive proof that red dye is harmful to hummers, but also no proof that it does not harm them.

Anyone wanting to be better safe than sorry can simply use a non-coloured mixture of sugar and water and tie red ribbons to the feeders and elsewhere.

Just a little more sunshine and warmth and we’ll all be seeing them at our feeders. It will be great to have them back.
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