What does it mean?

Remember this: Your knee jerk reaction tells me something about what your mental tendencies gravitate toward. 

Sometimes I have sleepless nights. I get on the social medias and visit what the general collective manic unconscious is doing and saying. The current crazy is Taylor Swift and a necklace she has put out as an offering. I could do some political think piece about war torn countries but that is a blot that will never subside. What can you do but talk, walk, rally, and have the police menace you for exercising your Constitutional Rights. 

This is going to be a short one. I am not telling you what to do. I am giving suggestions.

First off, if you are not sitting in the room with the people making the choices for jewelry construction for commercial production, maybe it is not a good idea that you start tacking your subjective surmises to its appearance in the world.  

Second, don't let your personal dislikes, that add a negative connotation, lead you down the wanton road of distain and contempt for a person because you think they are and have had a better deal than you in the Olympic Games of life. 

Third, get better acquainted with the use of signs and symbols. Carl Jung wrote a whole book on that topic. It might be a good idea that you sit down with some actual literature or take a literature class that shows you how to appreciate the written word in whatever form it should take. Do not make yourself look stupid in public. It is easy to do. 

Fourth, don't blow a dog whistle or listen for one when the content and context of that whistle is leading you down an erroneous path. That path is going to make you look shallow, uninformed and well; it illustrates your lack of critical thinking skills and the nuances of a low tier Mastermind at best. 

Fifth, when in doubt, do not act. That keeps you from making yourself look dumb in front of your peers, or strangers, whatever your vibe is for the night. 

Sixth, always remember you do not have every vantage point to speak from. Speaking from a vantage point while holding up a greasy monocle over your one good eye is ridiculous. 

I am sure I can go on but moving along. 

Looks like a perfectly good not overworked necklace. Zeus and Thor would be proud. The necklace is as follows: 

How did the general population come to the conclusion this was Nazi work? Did you not investigate who the maker was? Where did the ideas come from? Why does it have to have meaning? Did anyone check to see if it was metal or plastic? Was it appropriated from a stone wall somewhere? 

I buy stuff all the time that has no meaning except that I like it and it is pretty. If it resonant with something in your spirit, you are going to get it even if it is a whim, or trend buy. An alien may dig it off of a piece of rock in outer space one dark space night because Earth blew up and there it is.  I can only image what that alien is going to be thinking.

To add my two cents of unsolicited advice and observation, this is what I offer up to you as fat to chew in your journey to discover the meaning of Taylor Swift's Voynich necklace. Certainly, in time this mystery will be cleared up but just so it puts you in a sense of emotional crisis of your own choosing, I hope you get closure. 

What does this have to do with hunting? Nothing. Sometimes you find yourself chasing after something that makes no sense. 

At this point, she is pulling a Jack Sparrow. 

Here is what I put forth as gasoline. 

Taylor Swift is a lyrist that uses the spoken word, Easter eggs, signs symbols, and visual aids to keep her audience challenged and engaged. It appears the visual of lightning bolts and something that looks like a star can be confusing, but I believe it is a maritime compass used for navigation.

When you juxtaposition a lightning bolt and a navigational compass together you combine the symbols of chaotic, destructive, and divine power with the human search for guidance, order, and purpose. This creates tension between explosive inspiration and deliberate guided action. 

The Lightning Bolt

The lightning bolt could be interpreted as a sudden, powerful and divine intervention that can bring about destruction, creation, or joining of things not likely to happen. The lightning bolt can be a quick jolting creative force. If you think of the saying, "a bolt from the blue", could be interpreted as a life-changing event, moment of profound clarity, or making way for the new and removing the old. 

The Compass

Sometimes on a navigation compass the magnetic needle will be shaped like a thunderbolt.  That little piece will point True North or tell you in what direction you are heading. 

When you put the two together, the compass represents a reliable wayfinding tool. It symbolizes staying on the right path, finding one's way, and to a specific destination. As a inner moral compass, it's used as a metaphor for reminding you to trust your instincts and stay true to your values, even amid confusion.

Sailors would get tattoos for protection and good luck to encourage adventure and exploration for safe travels. 

When you combine the lightning bolt and the compass you get the following:

• Divine guidance vs human will
• Intuition and purpose
• Adapting to chaos

Pairing the two creates a powerful tension between fate and free will. The lightning bolt is destiny imposed by a higher power, while the compass represents the individual's freedom and intention to choose their direction. 

Together they represent finding one's path as the lightning bolt is a eureka moment and the compass is the tool used to pursue the sudden insight deliberately. It symbolizes both radical vision and the discipline action needed to achieve it. 

In regard to adapting to chaos, the lightning bolt represents unpredictable chaos of life, and the compass symbolizes being grounded and oriented despite the external turmoil. It is a symbol of resilience of using one's inner wisdom to navigate the storms of existence. 

Yet, beware. Magnetism from a lightning strike can cause your compass to go awry. It has the ability to change the properties of the alloy effectively changing the metallurgy of the component. 

If you look at Taylor Swift's life and her roadies, her life appears to be exciting and grandiose, but she is inside of a machine that rolls based on execution of time and precision, so she doesn't have much time for else when she is in its throws. You could imagine her feelings of being on the Hamster Wheel of Entertainment. It would be like an addict stuck in their addiction living out the same day, day in and day out. That would eventually crush your soul because you would assimilate to be like the machine that your habitat and ecosystem have trapped you in. That is a closed system, a fish tank. One thing gets out of balance the whole tank dies. The only thing you have to look for is collapse and demise. 

Most people don't think about how their life is lived in a plethora of ecosystems, open and closed. 

When you look at the timeline of her life struggles while the obnoxious voices in the back say she is entitled. No. She has suffered. She tells you in songs of her treatment and people buy her pain, joy, melancholy, etc. No one ever stops the problems of what she is in and affected by. Its entertainment.

When you see people online attack her for a necklace and use Nazi crap, you can see why our country is like it is. You can see why human beings are so messed up. It's like watching lemmings with gas and matches running off a cliff into a pile of dry wood while screaming, "Death to the invaders." The mindset of destruction will never make sense to me. Right now, there seem to be a lot of people trying as hard as they can to bring her down. That is a lot of effort for one person. She must be awesome to instill that much fear and hate. and equal parts love and loyalty.

You have to think now that she has met a partner that will set her on a journey where it will change courses and the unexpected will be on every horizon. She will not be able to do the same Hamster wheel she has been stuck in. Life is a changing for her. She might be a little off right now because she got hit by lightning. Her compass is pointing in many directions but only the one that is her heart's desire, as Jack Sparrow says will fix her True North and carry her in the direction that will make all the difference and sense in the world, for fair or foul.

Would you look at that?

 

The Deer Were Strange

Image by Adam Zubek-Nizol

Remember this: Never underestimate one's ability to level up in their deviltry. If you do not know what it is, do not diagnose it. 

Given the recent events in the political arena with the current administration, I think its time for Spooky Tales of Horror. Turn down the lights, get a cup of cocoa and light a candle. Lean in. 

In my previous blog about Chronic Wasting Disease, I put forth the idea of birds being a possible vector in how the deer became strange. I am neglecting EHD, rabies, brain abscesses, etc.

As I was falling down rabbits holes, I fell into the biological weapons hole. Yeah, more angst. 

Lets start in the 30s and the 40s when countries were running around being bad little kids trying to figure out how to get their lick backs.

But first, lets keep this in mind. I wondered if there was another time where the deer acted strange. I couldn't really find anything except the Kaibab deer crisis in the 1900s. It was said that Teddy Roosevelt wanted to eliminate the natural predators and so he did. Yet, on the Kaibab Plateau region of Arizona a consequence of this was the usual deer population explosion which was thought to lead to mass starvation yet something was causing the deer to act abnormal in search for food. What did this mean act abnormal in search of food?

I have yet to find any documentation on this time in history.

Let us carry on....

Chronic wasting disease is noted to incubate over 2-5 years before symptoms appear. Once symptoms manifest, the disease can progress rapidly  with death in a few months. I am just using this one because it was the indicator in the 1967 incident. That could be a hallmark for possible biological weaponry.

 

A rather novel credo: Expose, Infect, Deflect, Deny

Lets look at the short list of times countries thought it was a good idea to put a booger on the person they dislike. This tended to be brucellosis, anthrax, bubonic plague, glanders, rinderpest, smallpox, tularemia, etc.

Let us start "The List":

1900 Germ theory in bacteriology

1925 Geneva Protocol-prohibited the first use of chemical and BW against enemy nationals in the international armed conflicts

1932 first BW research facility established at Army medical school in Tokyo. The next year there was brutal human testing near Manchuria. Just go research Ishii Shiro. He was trying to be a one man Hydra. 

1934 Italy, Rome. They were doing something with BW but it never took traction.

1937 Canada was using this projectile called a British Mark 1, which was a 4 lb bomblet (I like this word. Rolls off the tongue). It was filled with tularemia and brucellosis. They used Anthrax as well.

Somewhere in here Hungarians were exploring their version of a charcuterie biological weapon in the form of glass bombs but it didn't achieve aerosols and was problematic.

1940 Japanese Army Air Force bombed Ningbo with ceramic bombs full of bubonic carrying fleas

1942 Operation Vegetarian aka Britain Cattle Cakes. Britain used anthrax laced linseed cakes laced with spores to attack German soldiers.

1942 1700 Japanese troops died from a rebound attack that killed their own forces

1945 Japan planned a plague attack on San Diego, Ca during operation Cherry Blossums at Night. It was never executed due to Japan's surrender.

1948-1992 there is a place called Vozrozhdenie Island aka Rebirth island that was once in the Aral Sea. The sea began to shrink. This place was infamous for being a Secret Soviet Union Biological Weapons testing facility. Pathogens such as anthrax, smallpox, and others were tested and weaponized in the open air. The island is now a contaminated area with abundant wildlife. It has abandoned labs and toxic burial sites. 

2019-2020 Covid. I still think its strange that Biden appeared to me to know there was something bad coming. How is it that the common cold per Merck's manual becomes this thing that kills a lot of people in high population areas. It is said that it came from the Wuhan animal slaughter markets, or escaped a lab. 

I read one article by Jin Hong Yoo, "On the Controversies Surrounding the Lab-Leak Theory of Covid 19,in the Journal of Korean Medical Science, that states, "The third hypothesis is that the virus was deliberately engineered by the Chinese government or military as a biological weapon. This theory, however lacks scientific credibility for multiple reasons. Most notably, if the virus were indeed developed as a bioweapon, there should have been a pre-developed vaccine or antidote to protect the developer's own population, which is a fundamental principle in biological warfare. In reality, China suffered massive losses during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is implausible to assume that any government would orchestrate such a self-destructive act."

I wondered if this is like 1940s Asian biological warfare where the government would take the loss in the population because they got to many people anyway. It keeps them from looking guilty and accountable. It is called abnegation. Governments have been known in the past to turn on its own constituents.

We can see that biological warfare makes its birth in hospitals, laboratories, inside many creaturas, schools, etc.

 

The reason for someone to produce such a thing is diabolical but when you are fighting a war, its justified in some way. 

Long games are played all the time in history on political stages and in secret. What if someone either on purpose, or not, made a situation where the deer acting strange is just a long game to destroy the wild herd and take away the one thing hunters quest after. Its like a tiered system. Take out the most loved to kill the weapons. Kill the commercial feeder animals to attack the food supply. Destroy the farmer so he can no longer plant the grain. Once you stop the food supply, you have rendered people helpless to a degree. Remove the natural places where there is nothing left of the soul of a country.

We saw it in a Movie, "Leave the World Behind", where the deer are a sign of impending natural disaster. There was the cargo ship shoring itself on the beach. I am not saying this is true, but its odd. I am saying a lot of things are odd. 

Its like dominos; quiet dominos that you can't see falling because it is a slow process like decay and decline. You don't know its manmade because everyone is telling you that its the natural process. Yet something in your soul says revolt.

It could be Nature throwing out an event that isn't influenced by man but what if it were a possibility? And who is the guilty culprit(s)? 

What I am saying is, when an organism comes down with a disease be it viral, bacterial, or other, busy little hands can take it to a lab and try to repackage it as Marvin the Martian's little ray gun and aim it at all of us under the sun. This is why I think it is a bad idea to colonize space. People don't have any sense down here. Its not going to change up there. It will be all about Death Star 47 and no planet will be safe. Think about it.

With technology being created and its ability to read an animals genome, gene-editing, people on secret boats in international waters, scientists in their lab trying to discovery every mystique and kill it from asshole to appetite, why do we think human hands can't collect the new mutation and edit, add, or delete a new horror and throw it back into the human fishing pond?

The Audacity!

How is that for a conspiracy theory?

Citation and useful links:

https://theanimalecho.woah.org/en/

https://theanimalecho.woah.org/en/biosecurity-for-sustainable-development/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12040609/

Southern Gothic Festival 2025

 

Remember this: "Terror made me cruel." ~Emily Bronte~

I went to the local Southern Gothic Festival in Camden, South Carolina over the weekend.  I am side questing. The weather was showing out with its dismal dreary rain that overcast the Historic Camden Revolutionary War Park. I am out looking for scary moments and ghosts in old wartime haunts. This is a free literature festival with several names so next year pen it down and come out. 

I met Kassidy Plyler of the Catawba Cultural Center. Her talk, Catawba Stories & The Trickster Spirit-History, Folklore, and the Unseen, is an overview of Catawban folklore and storytelling traditions centered around the trickster. Miss Plyler reflected on oral histories, mythologies and cultural resilience and how it shapes indigenous identity. She is an absolutely wonderful person to talk to. 

I tried to use my time wisely due to the overlap in different speakers giving their talks in different buildings on the campus.  

The next panel I sat down for is Folklore, Fear and the Family, Crafting the Modern Southern Gothic. The authors speaking are Allison Gunn and Emily Carpenter. Their talk is centered around how inherited myths, haunted landscapes, and family legacies continue to shape Southern Gothic.  Allison Gunn drew from Appalachian and Deep South folklore. Both authors were referencing generational and regional storytelling through the lens of trauma and how it creates a framework for writing on the line between fear and inheritance and how it is evolving with each new generation of Southern Gothic writer. 

Allison Gunn is debuting her novel, Nowhere. Emily Carpenter has been tapped to have her novel, Gothictown, turned into an AMC television show, so that is in the works. Their panel talk is very informative and encouraging to the new writer to Southern Gothic. Great questions were asked in reference to how each went about their process for developing the driver of the stories. 

I did sit in for the panel, Spirits of the South-Religion, Ritual, and the Southern Gothic Imagination. Dr. Jeffrey E. Anderson, Professor of History at University of Louisiana-Monroe, did bring a lot of clarification to the different questions that were asked. His book, Hoodoo, Voodoo, and Conjure: A Handbook, focuses on black southern communities, resistance traditions and African American spiritual practices. 

The practitioner, Tayannah Lee McQuillar, on the panel wasn't helpful due to lack of verbal content. Her input would have been better if she would have separated her sacred practice and spoke more on the use of impostor Hoodoo and other cultural practices to develop story and ambiance without sacrificing personal practices. If she would have spoken from that perspective she would have been more engaging for the audience. Her tarot card deck is, The Hoodoo Tarot and The Sibyls Oraculum. Her stance as I was hearing her talk in short sentences is one of a person that believes different races have a separate supernatural world and we are all divided up based on race when we die but then maybe not but that is how it came across. I don't subscribe to that train of thought. I respect her point of view as it pertains to her. 

There was a third speaker on this panel, Dr. Heather Freeman, who is a Professor of Communications and Media Studies and creator of the podcast, Magic in the United States. She explores esoteric and spiritual  traditions across American history through media, storytelling, and scholarship. She didn't speak much either but some of the questions were not address to her. I guess everyone is into Voodoo? 

Image by Yulia Gapeenko

The best of all the speakers was Dr. Abigail Lundelius Smith. She current serves as instructor of Rhetoric and Literature at New Aberdeen College in Charlotte. Dr. Lundelius's talk is Flannery O' Connor-See the Sacred In the Grotesque. Flannery O'Connor used the grotesque to uncover that point between the sacred and the profane where redemption is hiding around every page, or corner. 

She talks about O'Connor picking up the baton of gothic horror by Edgar Allen Poe, who was a walking embellishment of all things descriptive that could happen to a character in the gothic genre.

Even though Flannery O'Connor had lupus she went on to live to 39 before she exited the world. One of her best quotes is, "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." She has several works to read from such as, "The Complete Stories" and "The Habit of Being."

The final speaker of the day is Dick Harpootlian, the prosecutor of Pee Wee Gaskins. Harpootlian's talk is on his release of his book "Dig Me A Grave." Pee Wee Gaskins was a notorious serial killer from South Carolina. I remember he once pulled up to the gas pump at my grandfather's store and he was driving his hearse. People would always ask him what was in the coffin in the back. Terribly enough, it was probably a victim of his. Harpootlian spoke of how charismatic Pee Wee was and how he somehow could talk people into doing things for him such as blowing up a law office with C4, and reaching out to Harpootlian himself to speak to him and subsequently try and plan the kidnap, ransom, and murder of his daughter by having his son do the reaching from jail for Pee Wee. Pee Wee was a hot mess. He would burn down his father's tobacco barns and lurk around hunting victims. There was one moment where Harpootlian stated that Pee Wee Gaskins had took the officers out to a location to lead them to the body. When they got there, the officers found a group of men waiting. They felt like somehow Pee Wee had communicated to the outside and those men were there to help him escape. This made me ponder, if those men were willing to help him escape, then it wouldn't be to far of a jump that those same men, who were privy of his killings, were probably in on it with him, or at least were complicent in his dastardly deeds.

If you would like to ready more about this case try Harpootlian's book. There are other books you can reference for this period in South Carolina history.

Overall, it was a great time. I ended it with a seafood boil and hit the road back home. 

Wonder what else I can get into?  

The Transmission: Nancy Drewing CWD Part I

Remember this: Sometimes where you get that itchy twitch of intuition that something is not right-you have to go with it. 

I am on a research bender one night at a job I was experiencing. This job was an eight hour stint of watching Barneys in the woods, phone calls, coloring, and a lot of free time looking at all things wildlife. The nature of the rabbit hole I am free-diving into is rabies. After swimming around that paddling pool, I decided I had a bad case of the lets-go-look-sees.

I began to read about Chronic Wasting Disease. It was a thing during another job I worked over a season at a wildlife processing facility and brain samples were being turned in to local wildlife agencies for their biologists to examine and study on the hunter time-dime. 

Much like any other online Nancy Drew, I started the old keyboard up and pulled up more tabs with different reseach and ideas that my screen started to look like a dating application. Read-click the X-goodbye info.

I began to follow the trail. This began my reading into the Adventures of the Suspicious Researchers of 1967's Colorado Division of Wildlife's Foothills Wildlife Research Facility a.k.a. The National Wildlife Research Center (NWRC). All I can say is vague. There is no real definitive paper on this burp in time. 

Let me set the scene. 1967 Fort Collins, Colorado is the origin story or legend of where this went down. Some captive Mule Deer were taken from the wild in Northeastern Colorado to a specific facility  as part of a winter survival and nutrition research study. The deer appeared in good health per researchers. They get put in with some sheep and disaster ensues.

It took an act of Congress to find the human suspects: Mike, Terry and I. Mind you, when I look for these three people in other research you can't find them. It is like they are part of some secret military operation where whatever happened has been buried somewhere, never to be seen again. Infect, Deflect, and Deny. 

I perused an article entitled, "Chronic Wasting linked to Fort Collins for 50 years", by Miles Blumhardt on The Coloradoan website. The person Blumhardt initial fingers as the guy is Gene Schooveld. Schooveld is a retired Colorado Division of Wildlife Senior Wildlife biologist who lived in Fort Collins.

On this website you can hear Mike Miller, Colorado Parks and Wildlife senior wildlife veterinarian is informing the reporter about the goings on. It does appear he isn't so clear on the retelling of historical events, probably due to the absence of info. He does go on to say that the deer dying kept ruining good research experiments. This made me think that they must have re-upped with a couple more clutches of deer before hair pulling and gnashing of teeth ensued from the frustration. If you watch the video provided you see that it is an area with grass set against hills and some protection from the elements. The area appears to be unproblematic as shown. We don't know what the conditions were at the time of the research. 

My understanding there were twelve deer in with unnumbered sheep. You don't know how long these deer were alive but if it takes 1.5 to 2-2.5 years for Chronic Wasting to bring an animal to its end, how is it that these deer died so fast. Mike Miller states they appeared healthy. That would mean that those deer were infected in 1965-66 because this is noted as an event in 1967. The research was suppose to be on nutrition over wintering and natural deer history. Upon closer inspection, it reads like an ill-handled scientific inquiry where the ball was fumbled for lack of a better word. 

What areas specifically did these sample deer come from? How did they bring them to the facility? Were they in a cattle trailer that wasn't sanitary? Was there no physical exam? Why were they not quarantined from other species due to their designation as a sample group? What were the researchers feeding those animals that was suppose to help them over winter? What exactly was the structure of the research? What happened to the sheep that was being used by CSU to conduct Scrapie research? What was really going on there? Why is it that in 2025 you can look at a map and it still a hotbed of eyestrain? What is everyone missing like the nose on their face? 

Here look at this (click on it to make it bigger):

I sat back and thought there is someone out there doing the dissection and sample collecting for sampling but what about the other factors that go into solving this mystery? There is no location except Fort Collins. If they are stating the deer came from different areas of northeastern Colorado then one of the deer had CWD. Their exposure comingling with the sheep, human hand, or some other unknown could have caused the exposure. Were the deer there long enough to indicate the CWD gobbled them up after they were put together in the pen with the sheep. Information lost to history or in the annals of the NWRC.

This situation moved through time and space to that map above. I am going to tell you now this is where my research car goes off the road into a rabbit hole(s). 

I looked at the above map and thought, it is still there like a blazing field of red poppies. Why? The only thing I could think of is birds. Think about it. The mass migration of birds that appear in spring leading up to winter. Then you have the pockets of CWD far away places like Norway that had a reindeer infected, Canada, and South Korea. There is even an article from the Coloradoan that is about the mass migration of birds from all over. 

I wondered what birds could migrate from Norway or South Korea and what about those areas around Canada? 

The examples are the Black-faced Spoonbill and artic tern:

Arctic Tern

Blackfaced Spoonbill

 

These are marsh or shore birds and require to some degree a water body.

The birds that are around Fort Collins as an example are Common goldeneye, American tree sparrow, and lesser scaup.

Lesser Scaup

 

Common Goldeneye

American tree Sparrow

My first untested hypothesis is that somewhere in these birds migratory plans, something might be contributing to the CWD. Stopover locations that give migratory birds a pitstop are subject to scrutiny. There is the idea of migratory birds that practice fecal sac business. My research on this is there is not a lot of testing done. The birds either gobble it or dispose of it outside of the nest at some location. The reason I state this is, "For example, the widely held belief that all CWD occurrences can be traced back to a single Colorado research facility has precluded wildlife and animal health professionals from considering that some outbreaks may be arising from unrecognized exposure events that occur repeatedly over time." (e.g., Williams & Miller 2003, Greenlee et al. 2015) 

My second untested hypothesis is during the 1967 research shenanigans something was done or not done that elicited a situation where the twelve mule deer met with a moment of destiny that has changed the course of cervids history either through poor research practices or secret research practices of the military and biological warfare plot twist. Trust me that crazy rabbit hole exists to the Nth power. 

Because the word transmit is used for the mobility of the prion, something within or outside of the life of the ungulate is making it susceptible for infection even though this is a sub-viral protein. Sub-viral meaning agent are pathogenic, can cause disease but lack viral properties. Subviral agents are satellites, viroids, prions, defective interfering particles, viriforms, and obelisk. 

I most likely will revisit this because I am still researching on the topic. Strange things are definitely happening at Fort Collins. If its not the deer, it is the rabbits. What is next?

If you can learn anything from this it is building a sound research study with plenty of documentation and observations no matter how futile or stupid it might appear and communicating forward in time if the problem at hand becomes a persistent ghost in the future. If an exposure begins all it will do is spread. If you can't stop the spread, therein lies the problem because if Nature can't stop it on its own, then who or what will?

Citations:

Miller, M. W., and J. R. Fischer. 2016. The First Five (or More) Decades of Chronic Wasting Disease: Lessons for the Five Decades to Come. Transactions of the North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference 81: in press.

Chronic Wasting linked to Fort Collins for 50 years. 2018 August 30.The Coloradoan.https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2018/08/23/cdc-tse-mad-cow-chronic-wasting-disease-linked-fort-collins/878097002/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2680674/#ref-list1

https://www.defenceiq.com/air-land-and-sea-defence-services/articles/prions-as-bioweapons

https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/occasional/cswmd/CSWMD_OccasionalPaper-12.pdf

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/27449/chapter/3

2024 Duck Stamp Contest

Remember this: Talent can win more than once. Reading the directions are important.

Every year I follow the United States Fish and Wildlife Duck Stamp Competition. I usually follow Kira Sabin and her process as she selects the duck of choice to paint and her wins and struggles for getting to final shippable submission. She has sat as a judge for the juvenile duck stamp competition and provides excellent input. 

At first glance, you understand this is a lump of 300 or so entries that are of different levels of artistic ability and growth. In good purpose, giving someone the opportunity to attempt, and try again another day, is a learning curve of how not to give up but to come back to the drawing board and try again after improving one's skills as an artist, more so a wildlife artist.

Time and practice can cure a lot of problems. 

With that being said, a lot of the submissions were probably cut due to not reading the requirements. 

In the instructions, it stated something to the effect that you could choose from the migratory fowl, but you had to put in the conservation aspect and the habitat. Alot of these are migratory fowl swimming or suspended on water with some sprigs of grass. Its starts looking like a Sears portrait studio photo shoot. 

It views, "I am a beautiful duck, watch me swim."

2025 Winner by James Hautman 

Three Buffleheads

Here are some entries I wanted to review:

(Click on images to enlarge)

This image provided light and color and action with the above-below water line visuals. There is a hint of the cattails in the background. 

Several of these were hyper-realistic but lacked the conservation and habitat or action.

This image was camera worthy for realism but was portraiture with no story behind it.

This was a nice little photo with the underwater foot and bubble with the ripple of the reflection.

These two entries were cool neutral but still lacked conservation and habitat.

I thought this entry dabbled in the folklore and stop action imagery but had a suggested story, migratory fowl on the borderline of human habitation and industry. It looked intentionally different visually.

This entry was a great action shot with complimentary background.

These two entries I adored for the attention to detail and how much work it must have took.

This little entry right here was different. It is different to me because here you have the known and unknown where Conservation isn't always right there in your face. 

The questions to ask are:

Why is there a decoy present?

Is the decoy implemented for wildlife conservation science or active hunting?

What happens if the little fowl disappears forever from the landscape due to over hunting, disease, or limiting factors that will cause there to only be the remnants of floating fowl decoys that will drift till they get caught up in the mud, moor themselves in the grasses, or sink to the depths?

Will there be another image like this for the future or will this be a reminder reaching out from the past that illustrates the loss we will have as a country when a political pen swipes a paper and slowly but surely rubs it out like No 2 lead on paper? Because of revenge? Retribution? Religious fanaticism?

It is quite an image to ponder on. You travel from pristine, beautiful healthy fowl to what if it were to all end tomorrow?

These online events and competitions can bring people to love it and study on the greater ethos of Conservation and those creatures and landscapes within it and to those people that wake up and go to sleep every night with its past, present, and future always on their minds.

Go ahead and put it on your calendar for next year, practice and save up that entry fee. You will not regret it!

If you would like to view images click the link: 

2025 Federal Duck Stamp Contest Entries | Flickr

Federal Duck Stamp Contest & Event Information | U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

Adieu!

Footnote: All images are subject to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service copyright. Images used solely to support contest and spread awareness of wildlife conservation, conservation law, and public service awareness through education and learning.