Repost: Open Season (Joe Pickett #1) by C.J. Box: A review

About three years ago, I started posting reviews of the books that I read on The Nature of Things. This was one of the early ones that I posted on August 29, 2011. There must be a lot of C.J. Box fans among my readers because many of them responded and the post still gets hits on a regular basis.

And by the way, I am now reading the fourth book in this series. The review will be posted soon.

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I was introduced to the writing of C.J. Box through my local library's Mystery Book Club. Open Season, the first in Box's Joe Pickett series, was the club's selection for reading in June. Although I didn't get a chance to read it in time for the meeting, the discussion of it made me curious and I put it on my to-be-read list. I'm glad I finally got around to it this week.

Box has created an enormously appealing character in Joe Pickett. A Wyoming game warden, Joe is a devoted family man with two young daughters and a pregnant wife when we first meet him. He and his family are able to barely scrape by financially on the meager salary of a state employee (Been there, done that!), but Joe is a happy man, because he's living his dream. Being a game warden was what he always wanted to be.

Not only Joe but his whole family are lovingly drawn by Box. We get to know them well and to like them and want them not just to endure but to triumph. Seven-year-old Sheridan, particularly, who has an important role to play in this story, is a child after my own heart. I know her well because I could easily see seven-year-old Dorothy in her.

The story begins with Joe's sidearm being taken from him by local wilderness outfitter/game poacher Ote Keeley when he confronts Keeley about his poaching, catching him red-handed, literally hands dripping blood, with the carcasses of his out-of-season kills. Keeley eventually gives the gun back and Joe writes him a ticket for poaching. Soon the story of how the bumbling game warden was disarmed is making the rounds and Joe becomes something of a laughingstock. But, he stoically continues doing his job every day to the best of his ability and continues to write tickets for scofflaws, even when it might be more convenient or popular for him to look the other way.

Then comes the night sometime later when a mortally wounded Ote Keeley rushes into the yard of the Pickett family with a plastic tub in his hands. His face is seen at her bedroom window by Sheridan but she convinces herself that it was only a dream and doesn't wake her parents. The next morning, Ote Keeley's dead body is found next to the Picketts' woodpile with an open plastic tub containing some kind of animal scat by his side. Why would Keeley use his dying breath to drag himself to the Pickett home? What was he carrying in that plastic container? Joe is intrigued, of course, and he gathers some of the scat into envelopes to send for analysis, before he calls in the local sheriff.

As the investigation proceeds, Joe begins to suspect that something is rotten in the state of Wyoming. He and another game warden and a local deputy are sent into the wilds to find Ote's two partners, who, it is suspected may be responsible for shooting him. When they arrive at the camp, they find another eccentric local coming out of one of the tents with a gun, but the other two men in Pickett's party shoot the man before he has a chance to say anything. Searching the camp, they make another gruesome find in one of the other tents.

This is a real page-turner of a first novel. Box keeps the action going and keeps the reader guessing until close to the end, even though it seemed obvious pretty early on who the bad and badder guys were going to be. I look forward to reading more in the series and seeing how these characters develop.

I did have quibbles with one part of Box's narrative. His presentation of the effects of the Endangered Species Act seemed quite biased to me. He bemoaned the fact of the negative impact on the local economy when logging and other outdoors jobs were lost because of the need to protect a dwindling population of his fictional "Miller's weasels," which seemed to be based on the real-life experience of the endangered black-footed ferret. In the next breath, he talks about outsiders pouring into town to see the ferret or to take part in its protection. Surely, those people have to stay somewhere. They have to eat something. They have to buy gas for their vehicles or supplies for their treks into the wilderness. This would seem to pump a lot of money into the local economy and to create new jobs and new opportunities for entrepreneurship. Does the word "ecotourism" ring a bell? I know it certainly does along the Texas coast with all its bird and butterfly festivals and its year-round influx of birders and other outdoors-lovers from right around the world. I don't see why that wouldn't work in Wyoming as well.

Repost: Pythons upsetting ecological balance in Florida

This post originally appeared in my Backyard Birder blog on January 31, 2012. Since that time, the problem that it reports about has only gotten worse.

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There are several stories in the news today about a recently released scientific study on the impact of an invasive species, the Burmese python, on Florida's wildlife. The study focuses on the Everglades and on the devastation of the small mammal population there. There are areas where raccoons, o'possums, rabbits, foxes, even bobcats, and other small mammals have virtually disappeared as a result of the introduction of these big snakes. The snakes also prey on reptiles and, to some extent, birds, but their preferred prey is mammals.

Pythons probably first got into the wild after being released by pet owners when the snakes got too big for them to deal with, but natural disasters such as hurricanes have also played a part when pet stores that had sold the snakes were destroyed and animals escaped. Because of the year-round warmth of the Florida climate and the abundance of prey animals, including domestic cats and dogs, the animals had no trouble surviving. The last two winters had brought cold weather to the state which had knocked the snakes back a bit and killed many of them, but this winter's mildness has been a boon to them, and it seems likely that they are on the march - or on the crawl - again and expanding their range. There is a fear that the warming climate will allow them to move into other areas, particularly across the Gulf states and even into South Texas, where their presence could create havoc in the ecology of the region.

While it is true that the bigger snakes mainly prey on mammals, the smaller ones do take birds as well as bird eggs and chicks during nesting season, but even if they never preyed on birds, upsetting the balance of Nature affects all the animals in it and, generally, the effect is not benevolent. Florida's wildlife officials, along with conservation organizations like the Nature Conservancy, are, of course, well aware of this and they are waging war on the python. They kill or remove from the wild as many of the snakes as they can find and they destroy nests when they locate them.

This picture, taken by Mike Rochford of the U.S. Geological Survey, shows the size that these creatures can reach. This one weighed in at 163 pounds.

But how do we stop an invasive, highly adaptable and fertile species? Is it even possible? Unless we get an assist from Mother Nature, in the form of colder winters, it seems likely that these snakes will continue to expand their range, despite our best efforts. Will the day come when I find one crawling in my Southeast Texas backyard?

Repost: The American caste sytem

Income inequality in America has been much in the news recently, but more than two years ago, there were reports that showed that the idea of American meritocracy was a myth. No matter how smart you are or how hard you work, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the average American to rise to a higher economic status than he or she was born into. This post originally appeared on January 9, 2012, and unfortunately, it is still relevant today.

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The New York Times last week had a report about how the myth of the American meritocracy is just that - a myth. In fact, of all the countries in the industrialized world, it is harder for a person of low economic status to rise higher in the United States than it is almost anywhere else. If America as the "land of opportunity" ever existed, it has disappeared, and this is primarily due to the policies pursued by the government. The governments of other developed countries make it their goal to protect and help their citizenry and to take care of those who are least able to take care of themselves. In this country, the government only very begrudgingly assists at all, and thus the poorest must fend for themselves and find ways to improve their economic lot if that is to be done and there will roadblocks all along the way to a better life. Roadblocks put in place and defended unto death by the government.

This is not a pretty picture and it is certainly not the image that most Americans have of their country. Unfortunately, our government is in the grip of heartless people whose extreme wealth separates them from the masses of citizens. They've got theirs, often from the hands of lobbyists for corporations they should be regulating, and they couldn't care less about helping their fellow citizens better themselves. Thus, the country is well on its way to establishing a hide-bound caste system - whatever caste you are born into will determine your lot in life and will be the caste that you die in.

Paul Krugman's column in The Times today is on that topic, the unlevel playing field. Krugman almost always nails it in his columns, but never has he done it so well, in my opinion as in today's column. You can follow the link to read the entire piece, but let me quote extensively here:

Americans are much more likely than citizens of other nations to believe that they live in a meritocracy. But this self-image is a fantasy...America actually stands out as the advanced country in which it matters most who your parents were, the country in which those born on one of society’s lower rungs have the least chance of climbing to the top or even to the middle.

And if you ask why America is more class-bound in practice than the rest of the Western world, a large part of the reason is that our government falls down on the job of creating equal opportunity. 

The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition and receive inadequate health care. It continues once children reach school age, where they encounter a system in which the affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools or, if they choose, to private schools, while less-advantaged children get a far worse education.

Once they reach college age, those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to go to college — and vastly less likely to go to a top-tier school — than those luckier in their parentage. At the most selective, “Tier 1” schools, 74 percent of the entering class comes from the quarter of households that have the highest “socioeconomic status”; only 3 percent comes from the bottom quarter.

And if children from our society’s lower rungs do manage to make it into a good college, the lack of financial support makes them far more likely to drop out than the children of the affluent, even if they have as much or more native ability. One long-term study by the Department of Education found that students with high test scores but low-income parents were less likely to complete college than students with low scores but affluent parents — loosely speaking, that smart poor kids are less likely than dumb rich kids to get a degree.

As Americans look at and evaluate candidates for political office in this very political year, they would do very well to look at whether they appear to be interested in making the field more level for all of us or whether they are only interested in protecting their own "caste." Or to quote Krugman further:

Think about it: someone who really wanted equal opportunity would be very concerned about the inequality of our current system. He would support more nutritional aid for low-income mothers-to-be and young children. He would try to improve the quality of public schools. He would support aid to low-income college students. And he would support what every other advanced country has, a universal health care system, so that nobody need worry about untreated illness or crushing medical bills.

If Mr. Romney has come out for any of these things, I’ve missed it. And the Congressional wing of his party seems determined to make upward mobility even harder. For example, Republicans have tried to slash funds for the Women, Infants and Children program, which helps provide adequate nutrition to low-income mothers and their children; they have demanded cuts in Pell grants, which are designed to help lower-income students afford college.

And they have, of course, pledged to repeal a health reform that, for all its imperfections, would finally give Americans the guaranteed care that everyone else in the advanced world takes for granted.

So where is the evidence that Mr. Romney or his party actually believes in equal opportunity? Judging by their actions, they seem to prefer a society in which your station in life is largely determined by that of your parents — and in which the children of the very rich get to inherit their estates tax-free. Teddy Roosevelt would not have approved. 

Right on, Dr. Krugman. One can only hope that your fellow Americans will heed your words.

Repost: Weeds

Continuing with my blasts from the past, here's a repost from March 22, 2010. This entry was originally posted on my Gardening With Nature blog and many gardeners empathized with my weed problem.

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Spring is weed season in my garden. Well, if I'm really truthful I would have to admit that every season is weed season in my garden. I do have a lot of weeds. 

But during spring, all those weeds that have been at least a little bit discouraged by winter cold are suddenly back with a vengeance. I spend a day pulling weeds and feel really good about what I've accomplished. Then, looking around two days later, it's hard to tell I did anything.

There are several really pernicious weeds that I have to deal with and although I occasionally win a battle against them, the war continues.


I've been taking major hostile actions against this weed for more than a month now. This is henbit. It infests many of the beds in my veggie/herb garden. I pull it out by the roots wherever I find it. Fortunately, it is pretty easy to pull, but to completely eradicate it, I need to pull every single sprig of the stuff before it reseeds itself to carry on another generation, and I always fail in that effort. Some will escape my notice and so the plant perpetuates itself and the war goes on.


I don't know the name of this plant. (A reader tells me it is Carolina geranium - which seems right to me.) It's just as pernicious and hard to get rid of as the henbit and it grows in some of the same places, as well as in many of my perennial beds. It, too, is fairly easy to pull, and that's the way I deal with it, but I have every reason to believe that this army of invasion will still be marching around my yard long after I'm gone from it.



This is "sticky weed," sometimes called "sticky Willy" as well as many other names, some of them very, very bad indeed. It grows rapidly and can overrun a bed in just a few days if it is overlooked. Its most annoying characteristic is its stickiness. It sticks to everything - Muck boots, garden gloves, skin, clothes, tools. Basically, it will stick to anything that it touches and attempt to hitch a ride. Many times, I've finished my garden chores and gone inside to sit on a chair of sofa, only to find when I stand up that the sticky weed that was hitching a ride on my butt is now attached to my chair. This weed, too, is easily pulled. Just be sure to wear gloves and then good luck on extracting weed from gloves. 


This is the worst of the lot, a truly dangerous weed, and, again, I don't know its name. I just call it "stingeroo." (A helpful reader says it is called stinging nettle.) If you see it, DON'T TOUCH IT! Don't let it graze your skin anywhere. It stings like fire, much worse (for me) than fire ants. It may be that I am just excessively sensitive to it, but it has caused me not a few sleepless nights because it touched my feet or ankles and set them on fire. For this weed, I deploy the "nuclear option." I use an herbicide, either Round-up or a homemade mixture with vinegar. It can be easily pulled (wearing leather gauntlets), but with my sensitivity to it, I just prefer not to get close for any reason.



The little yellow flowers and beginnings of tiny red berries belong to mock strawberry. It's actually a pretty little weed and grows in several patches of my so-called lawn. In many places, like in this picture, it is thicker than the grass. When it is in the lawn, I just leave it. When it gets into my perennial planting beds, I pull it when it's obtrusive, but, on the whole, I find this weed to be benign and I practice my live and let live philosophy with it.



This is a weed that is famous in song and Southern folklore. It is 'poke sallet'. Remember "Poke Salad Annie"? You're probably too young, but that was actually the name of a popular song many years ago about a girl named Annie who ate poke sallet. It is not exactly a gourmet dish, but in many poverty-stricken areas of the South, especially during the Great Depression, people used the leaves of this plant as greens. Eating them was an adventure because if they were not prepared properly, they could be toxic. From the tender shoots that you see in the picture, this plant grows rapidly into a rangy shrubby plant that has masses of white blooms and, in the fall, it produces blue-black berries that the birds - especially mockingbirds - go absolutely wild for. I have this clump of the stuff near my back fence. It's in nobody's way there and I leave it alone for love of the birds. The more formal name of the plant is pokeweed.

These are only a few of the weeds that are doing their best to overrun my garden in this new season, and the war is on. As some famous gardener once said (or should have), "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty from weeds!"

Repost: Doves in the pine tree

As I noted yesterday, I am reposting some popular blog posts of the past while I am taking a few days off for vacation.

This is an oldie from my first blog, Backyard Birder, which I just recently folded into this blog. This particular post got more response from readers than any other entry I made on that blog in the almost eight years that I maintained it. And I have no idea why. If I did, I would write something like it every day. For some reason, it just seemed to strike a chord with my readers. Maybe they just really, really like doves. Well, what's not to like?

The post first appeared on April 26, 2006.

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I watched a pair of Mourning Doves building their nest this afternoon. The male picked up straw and sticks from the ground and took them to his mate who worked on weaving and shaping the nest. Their nest is between 30 and 40 feet up in a huge pine tree that stands just across the backyard fence in my neighbor’s yard. The doves construct their nest on a horizontal limb, about two-thirds of the way out from the trunk. It is a flimsy looking affair. One would think that the first strong breeze would blow it right to the ground, but it stands up to the rigors of nesting. The doves raise several families there all through the summer.

There has been a dove nest on that limb every year for at least three years and I assume it is the same pair, year in and year out. I couldn’t find anything in the literature available to me to indicate whether the birds mate for life, but if not, it would be a remarkable coincidence that different birds should build a nest in virtually the same spot every year.

Members of the pigeon and dove family have many interesting behaviors that distinguish them from other birds. For instance, they are among the few birds that can drink by simply sticking their bills in the water and sucking it up, unlike other birds that take the water into their beak and then tip the head back to swallow it. They are also unique in that they produce a substance called “pigeon milk” to feed their young. This is a milky secretion that is produced in the crops of both male and female birds.

It is rich in fat and protein and for the first few days of their lives, it is all the nestlings are fed. After that, the parents gradually begin to feed a mixture of the “milk” and regurgitated seeds.

The birds are vegetarians and readily utilize bird feeders. They are one of the most numerous birds at my feeders. They favor the feeders that I fill with a mixture of seeds, rather than the ones that have only black oil sunflower seeds. They prefer to feed on the ground and are usually seen walking around and picking up seeds that have been knocked out by overly vigorous feeders like grackles or woodpeckers. I also sprinkle cracked corn on the ground under the feeders for them.

The mourning dove is one of those birds that says “home” to me. I’ve been listening to its soulful song all my life, and so I tend to think of it as a bird of the south, but actually it ranges all the way from Canada into northern Mexico. It is one of the most numerous birds in all parts of its range. For a bird that appears rather fragile, shy, and retiring, it is one tough cookie. It has learned to adapt to the human-altered landscape and, like many of our successful backyard birds, it thrives in close contact with humans.

By the end of the afternoon, my birds appeared to have finished their nest. Now they can settle down to laying the two eggs that comprise their clutch and incubating their first family of the year. According to the guide books, they may raise as many as six clutches before the end of summer. Maybe that explains why they are one of the most plentiful birds in all parts of their range.

Repost: Fifty shades of bad writing

For the next few days, I am going to be on the road, enjoying a late winter vacation. In my absence, I am reposting some of my most popular blog entries from the past. I hope you will enjoy them.

We start with this entry from April 22, 2012. It was my take on the publishing sensation of that year, Fifty Shades of Grey and it certainly got a response from a lot of readers!

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“You beguile me, Christian. Completely overwhelm me. I feel like Icarus flying too close to the sun.”- The virginal Anastasia speaks to Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey 

One of the more interesting and puzzling phenomena in the world of books recently has been the popularity of the soft porn book - often referred to as "mommy porn" - Fifty Shades of Grey. The book, first in a trilogy, shot to the top of the New York Times combined e-reader and print fiction best-seller list and it was quickly followed by the other two parts of the trilogy.  The books have stayed there now for six or seven weeks.

If news of this latest reading rage that seems to have lots of horny women panting for more hasn't reached your ears - or eyes - yet, let me tell you what I know about it. It will have to be second-hand, because, frankly, I haven't read it either. I've just read lots about it.

The author, E.L. James, apparently conceived of the books as a bit ofTwilight "fan fiction," an homage to the paranormal love story of Bella and Edward in that popular series - which I also haven't read. James “reimagined the Bella and Edward love affair set in contemporary Seattle, Washington with Bella as the young college graduate virgin and Edward as the masterful billionaire with secret sexual predilections.” She named the Bella character Anastasia and the Edward character Christian Grey and Fifty Shades of Grey was born.

The relationship of Anastasia and Christian is based on kinky sex, specifically bondage, dominance, sado-masochism or BDSM in the shorthand of the day. Christian is one messed up individual and he gets off on spanking Anastasia, dominating her and causing her pain. And Anastasia likes it! And it seems that a lot of women really, really enjoy reading about it. When one reads the comments on online reviews of the book, one sees that the women fans of the book empathize with Christian because of his tortured past. They forgive him and understand all of his funny little predilections. They see him as incredibly romantic and someone they'd like to have handcuff them to the bedposts.

Now, I'm not opposed to erotica as such. A well-written sex scene is a pleasurable read and a great - um - tension-reliever. But the excerpts that I've read of this book just reek! For example:

“I pull him deeper into my mouth so I can feel him at the back of my throat and then to the front again. My tongue swirls around the end. He’s my very own Christian Grey-flavored popsicle. I suck harder and harder … Hmm … My inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves.”  

Anastasia's "inner goddess" seems to be an ever-present participant/observer in their encounters, completing a virtual three-way, so to speak. Again, after a sado-masochistic romp:

“We lie there, panting together, waiting for our breathing to slow. He gently strokes my hair … Boy … I Survived. That wasn’t so bad. I’m more stoic than I thought. My inner goddess is prostrate … well, at least she’s quiet.” 

I am at a stage in my life when there are so many good writers and good books out there and time is just too short to spend it on bad writers and bad books. My "inner goddess" tells me to stay far, far away from Fifty Shades of Grey.

If  you, on the other hand, are curious, you can speed read some of the naughtiest bits of the book here and then see what your very own inner goddess tells you about reading the whole thing!