I think of the internet as the modern-day coffee shop.
Once telephone party lines disappeared and before the Information Super Highway came to be, if people wanted to gossip in groups they had to gather somewhere. Coffee shops were the perfect fit, although they were dangerous until 1996 in Maryland because you could be injured or killed by second-hand cigarette smoke.
Nowadays, online forums or other places where the public can comment are the locations where folks jabber on and on about what they like or dislike. It’s pretty clear that negative comments usually outnumber the positive expressions.
I check in at such places, looking to see what hunters and anglers are saying about hook and bullet subjects. From time to time I discover a lead on a story about which I was unaware.
I was at such a cyber spot, reading about Maryland’s management of deer, when I saw some comments that made me sit upright at my desktop.
“I don’t believe anything the Maryland DNR says,” one respondent keystroked.
“The wildlife biologists lie,” posted another.
And I thought, in a loud way, “No, they don’t. They don’t lie.”
If anybody would know if the people in the Wildlife and Heritage Service at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources are untruthful, it would probably be me.
For 40 years, as outdoor editor at the Cumberland Times-News, I wrote a weekly column about hunting and fishing. For six post-retirement years I have continued that column on a freelance, biweekly basis.
My tenure is approaching a Bill Burton-like level, although the 50 years during which that word legend spread the outdoor message from Baltimore and Annapolis included many more platforms than I have accessed. I think I have a lengthier run, though, than other Maryland woods-and-water scribes, such as the gentlemanly Jim Guilford in Frederick.
In any event, many of my columns had to do with Maryland hunting and wildlife management.
I covered and interviewed Maryland’s wildlife biologists from Joe Shugars to Brian Eyler. In between were people such as Ed Golden, Tom Mathews, Josh Sandt, Karina Stonesifer, Bob Beyer, Harry Spiker, Doug Hotton, Paul Peditto and Clarissa Harris. I never caught one of these individuals in a falsehood. There may have been a time or two when certain pieces of information were provided reluctantly. That’s just a fact of word-warrior life.
During my tenure as a full-time member of the working press, I did a small amount of public speaking. I was talking to a couple hundred hunters at a gathering when a man in the front row blurted, “You know the DNR makes up those kill numbers about deer,” he said.
It became quiet enough to hear a 209 primer drop on a blanket of pine needles.
“I don’t believe that,” I told the man. “But, if you can prove it to my satisfaction, I will gladly report it beneath a six-column headline that is a minimum of 72 points high.” I never heard from him again.
My offer still stands.
Although I report what the biologists say, I do a significant amount of fact checking and research about their answers.
So, what I’m saying is that the veracity of the state’s buck and bunny watchers seems solid to me. It has held up for hundreds of thousands of words that rolled out through my fingers whether they be about the state’s first bear hunt in 51 years or the legalization of crossbows for deer hunting or the efforts to deal with chronic wasting disease in whitetails.
I swear on a stack of hunting regulations that I am telling the truth.