The Essence of Life

The Essence of Life

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Olympian

Rodrigo Meirelles, Johnny Pellielo, Pino Facchini
On September 24th my friend Signor Pino Facchini, who you already have been introduced to, called to see if I was available to join him in a visit to Johnny.
He picked me outside of my office in Torino and it took us about an hour to drive the 50 miles to the town of Vercelli, in an East-Northeast direction, and then we arrived at Tiro a Volo San Giovanni di Vercelli.
Upon entering the club house I was introduced to several people, including Giovanni “Johnny” Pellielo, a quiet and polite gentleman of about my age, accomplished shotgunner, three times Olympic medalist (Bronze at Sydney 2000, Silver at Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008), ISSF International Trap World Champion, top contender for the London 2012 Summer Olympics and local hero.
I bought a flat of 12 gauge shells and when I opened it I was surprised to see the off white boxes with the TAV San Giovanni crest on top of “WORLD CHAMPION JP 28 by FIOCCHI” written in gold letters. This is a 28 grams (roughly one ounce) load designed by Johnny and loaded for him and his gun club.
We talked a little bit and soon I had the opportunity to shoot in the same squad as Johnny. It is impressive the change from the laidback Johnny from the club house to the focused athlete at the trap line.
Hat and ear muffs in place, 50 shells in vest’s pockets, and Johnny tears the flaps of the boxes and uses the ear muffs to hold them as screens to prevent distractions. He steps to the station, mounts the gun and the world becomes one single clay pigeon. And as a rule he breaks them on the first barrel, taking the second shot at a piece that follows the original trajectory to better use the barrels swing.
The same gun mounting is repeated at each station, twenty five times.
Many of the visiting shooters are at TAV San Giovanni to watch the Olympian and learn from him. Some take pictures, others make short movies. But in the best sportive spirit, Johnny takes time to coach young shooters, be polite to visitors and play practical jokes at his friends.
As it was to be expected, Johnny’s Beretta stock is custom made to exact dimensions, but during the afternoon he did several adjustments to cast and drop, simply by loosening the stock main bolt and inserting or removing small pieces of business cards from certain strategic points.
At the end of a most entertaining evening we had the opportunity to talk a bit more, using my bad Italian and his good English. Shooting and hunting were the topics. He is even considering spending his birthday hunting ducks in Arkansas with us in early January.
And as we were leaving Johnny presented Pino and me with signed T-shirts from TAV San Giovanni.
We drove back to Torino and Pino took me for a fantastic mixed grill dinner at Le Gru in Grugliasco, when the very cold Birra Rossi quenched our thirst from a very hot afternoon.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Connections

Cougar Hunting Knife

As we travel the around the world many times we find people and things that connect us to our roots, generally in the most unexpected ways, and in most cases those events leave strong and pleasant memories in our minds.

On a given Saturday, sometime after we had relocated from Brazil to the Netherlands, I decided to go for a bike ride with our children. My general manager was traveling and his wife just had have a baby, and their son was a very active boy, so I told her that I would stop by and include him in our small bike expedition, so she could have a couple hours alone with the baby.

When we came back to bring her son back, Margaret invited me in and said that she a Brazilian friend that she would like me to meet. We exchanged some pleasantries and in typical Brazilian way soon started enquiring about each other’s background. I asked where Carla was from and she mentioned that I probably would not know it, a city in Northern São Paulo state, called Ribeirão Preto. Well, I was born in Ribeirão Preto. Which part of the city do you come from? My family is from Vila Tibério. That is where my grandparents used to live. What is your family name? Tardelli. Well, that is my mother’s maiden name. In less than five minutes we figured out we were cousins.

Next on the list happened sometime after we relocated from the Netherlands to the United States. I visited a gun show in Kalamazoo. When I was no more than a child, a close friend to my mother, Ivete, gave a hunting knife to my father, who was an avid sportsman at the time. It was a Cougar, made by Mundial, a large Brazilian cutlery. I was looking things around at a gun show when coming on to a table I saw a card box with the picture a high power scoped rifle and some bottlenecked cartridges on top of a jaguar or leopard pelt and inside it a brand new Cougar knife.

After asking for the price of the knife I paid the amount so fast I must have frightened the seller. I had to be quick or Cougar could get away. This connection is described in detail as “Chasing Cougar over 30 Years” in my book “A Wild Beast at Heart”.

Today another unexpected connection happened to me as I was perusing through used books at the Crocetta fair, in Torino, where I am currently working from. My initial objective was to buy a cheap used book to help me improve my Italian.

I discovered a small treasure instead. In the €1 session, I found four books from Francisco Marins, a great Brazilian writer of books for children and teenagers. They are all hard bound, second and third editions, well read but in good shape. The fours books are “Nas Terras do Rei Café” which I first read when I was 10 or 11 years old, “O Coleira-Preta” which I just finished reading minutes ago, “Gafanhotos em Taquara-Póca” and “Viagem ao Mundo Desconhecido”.

Right now I am feeling that Mr. Francisco Marins just allowed me to travel in time and space. I am feeling like a 41 years old child, walking on the red rich soil of Fazenda Taboa.

Which connections do you have?

Monday, September 5, 2011

A Taste of North Dakota



In the second half of October 2007 (repeating the experience in 2009) I spent a week pheasant hunting with a group of friends in North Dakota, a landscape of distant horizons and constant winds, and where according to local folklore there is a beautiful woman behind every native tree. The only problem is finding those trees.

The basis of the five hundred thousand inhabitants state economy is farming and ranching, and to foster those activities the state is crisscrossed by a network of county roads in the North-South and East-West directions, just like an endless chess board. Each side of the squares is a mile, and each square is roughly 640 acres, and these form the standard module for the states rural properties, the mostly unpaved county roads forming “natural” property lines.

Just like farmers all over the world, and despite government subsidies, North Dakota farmers and ranchers live a somewhat difficult economic life and uncertain future, where any additional income is welcome.

And sporting hunting is just the source of such welcome income.

As little as fifteen years ago “hunter” and “pheasant” were bad words for many North Dakota farmers, especially in the Southwest regions, where the cities of New England (500 people) and Regent (300 people) are located, right in the center of the “Golden Egg”, which is the cradle of the nest wild pheasant hunting in the world.

For the farmers pheasants were simply a nuisance, braking headlights, damaging radiators, and helping to jam combines during harvest season. And for the majority of landowners, and due to the actions of an irresponsible minority, hunters were more than a nuisance, leaving gates open e allowing runaway cattle, damaging tiled land with their vehicles and littering the landscape.

But a lot changes in these fifteen years, changing a somewhat difficult situation and evolving to an environmental management model that is so successful that is sets a benchmark to be followed by other stated and even other countries.

The main point is that wildlife became valuable, both for the State as well as for land owners.

As we are all painfully aware, one of the main activities of any state, and for many their only reason for being, is to collect taxes and other tributes, and with small North Dakota population dwindling every year, attracting out of the state visitors that would pay the State directly or indirectly for the privilege and pleasure of their visit looks like a magic solution.

Faraway from everything (my round trip from Michigan was over two thousand miles) and with few attractions besides the already mentioned pheasants and other wildlife population, the few tourists really interested in North Dakota are hunters, and for enjoying the pleasure of two weeks of hunting, during which time the sportsman can harvest up to three pheasants a day, during the three month season (from mid October to mid January), each out of state hunter pays just under one hundred dollars for the small game license, that can be purchased at the internet, to any hunter that completed a hunter safety course in its home state.

But to attract hunters, it is first necessary to guarantee access to game reach tracts of lands, and with less than ten per cent of public lands in North Dakota, and the majority of those being less than prime for pheasants, a solution had to be reached.

Such solution is called PLOTS, an acronym that means Private Land Open To Sportsmen.

The mission of the North Dakota Game and Fish Department is to protect, conserve and improve fish and wildlife populations and their habitats, and this could not be accomplished without working directly with landowners and land users, and the PLOTS program is the backbone of the Game and Fish Department to improve habitats and hunting access in private properties.

The PLOTS program include grazing land, annual crop land, and also other areas many times unusable for conventional farming and ranching practices, and the participation in the program is based on points reached by the different type of landscapes, like wetlands, forested areas (few and far apart), no till farming, and selective grazing. Property location to other PLOTS land is also important.

The payment to landowners varies according to the eight different management options available, in cash or tax exemptions, and currently there are around half a million acres that are managed according to PLOTS guidelines, mostly dedicated to hunting.

But as with most things in life, there is almost always a second path, and in 1992 a group of Regent landowners got together trying to develop a business model that would allow them to profit from the pheasants present in their properties.

Instead of joining the PLOTS program in which the free access to hunting land is free to all hunters, they formed a type of cooperative called Cannonball Co. (http://www.cannonballcompany.com/), one of the few rivers in the region.

Landowners that signed contracts with the Cannonball Co. receive a payment for each bird taken in their properties, e hunters are only allowed with a guide that is associated and certified by the company, and they also must stay in one of the Bed & Breakfast available at many of the farms associated.

In their first season in 1992, the Cannonball offered hunts priced at one hundred dollars per day, including lodging and meals, and just less than fifteen thousand acres, and the landowners received two dollars per bird.

In the 2007 season, the Cannonball Co. had over three hundred thousand acres under management, and forty associated landowners, eleven of them offering Bed & Breakfast services. Around eight hundred hunters paid between two and four hundred dollars per day, depending on when the hunt took place, and harvested around five thousand five hundred birds, mostly rooster pheasants and some sharp tail grouse, each netting twenty three dollars.

The economic impact of the Cannonball Co. in Regent is estimated at one and a half million dollars, or around forty thousand dollars per associated landowner. Not a bad return for the basic investment of leaving some untouched corners and ditches in the properties as well as some standing crops here and there to feed the animals during the tough North Dakota winters.

In the yellow metal triangle that identifies all the PLOTS areas, there is a word in each side: SPORTSMENLANDOWNERWILDLIFE. Clearly, the three elements benefit from the relationship. Hunters have legal and free access to land and the wildlife they pursue, landowners have a financial benefit from fostering wildlife, and wildlife enjoys a healthier habitat and established and properly managed seasons.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

The Missed Doves of Michigan

Original illustration by Ralf Birch

In the fall of 2004 Michigan held its first and so far only official dove season in state history. According to the Department of Natural Resources, 4,981 permits were sold and a total of 3,067 hunters actually hunted and killed 28,099 doves.

Before and after the 2004 experimental season the alternative to Michiganders was and is to hunt out of state, Indiana being the closest option and many hunters I know will block their agendas a year ahead and spend September 1st and Labor Day (in the United States the forst Monday of September) in some Indiana field after the elusive gray ghost (I truly believe that a “mourning dove pattern” may be a most effective camouflage for military aircrafts).

In 2005 the “anti-hunt” crowd spent a lot of money to discontinue the Michigan dove season, and unhappily they succeeded. However, the only thing that they accomplished was to reduce revenue for Michigan and move it to Indiana. A lot of Michigan hunters continue to pay “out-of-state” fees to shoot doves that are migrating from Michigan into Indiana.

Due to work (it keeps interfering with my life), I won’t be able to hunt doves this year, but for those lucky ones, I suggest to prepare them the following way:

Dove Breasts with Bean Salad

8-12 Dove breasts
Savory
1 ½ pounds green beans
Half an onion
Vinegar, salt, olive oil, mustard
½ pound cherry tomatoes (if you like tomatoes, I don’t)
¼ pound breakfast bacon
Butter

Boil the savory in salted water for five minutes, then remove. Clean the beans, blanch in the same water so that they are still crisp, leave to drain and place in a dish.

Chop the onion and sprinkle over the beans. Make vinaigrette from four table spoons vinegar, a little mustard, and eight table spoons olive oil. Pour the vinaigrette over the beans. Quarter the tomatoes and add to the beans (not if I am eating this dish). Cut the bacon into strips, pan-fry, and sprinkle over the salad.

Brown the dove breasts in the butter, season with salt (I don’t like pepper), cover and simmer until cooked. Lay the breasts on the beans. Serve this light dish with fresh white bread, and with a good glass of red wine.

My mood changes a lot, but tonight I would take a bottle of Nebbiolo produced by my good friend Signor Mario Vito Benevelli, as it is too warm for his Barolo right now.