A Little Mystery
It seems that recently I've found myself in the middle of lots of conversations about smartphones, Google and artificial intelligence. I don't usually start the conversations, but somehow I end up in the middle of them. In all honesty, I'd rather not waste my time talking about everyone's addiction, but here I am, writing about it (on my phone) in my blog. Which of course makes me just as guilty as everyone else for encouraging the negative talk and thoughts about phone usage and where the younger generation is headed. But phones aren't all bad. The world has been using them to talk to each other for the past eighty years or so. Only now they've become more than just a phone and we use them for all kinds of things besides just verbally talking on them. We love having knowledge at our fingertips and most of us would agree that knowledge is a good thing. If you don't believe me, just Google it.
This past week I was listening to a podcast, on my phone of course. And, you guessed it, it was about hunting. It was an interview with Tom Clumb who owns Rocky Mountain Specialty Gear. Tom is a traditional bow hunter fanatic who loves to go into the backcountry to hunt. He was saying something down the lines of how today is so different than it was forty years ago, mainly because of technology. It used to be that you poured over maps and planned your trip and then headed to where you hoped there would be elk, leaving all access to the outside world behind. Nowadays you can pull out your phone and with one of the apps, look and see where the elk densities are, where water holes are, how steep the slopes are, where the forest fires were and what year they happened, all the while looking at the little dot on the screen and knowing exactly where you are in the picture. It doesn't guarantee you an elk, but in Tom's words, “it takes a lot of the mystery out of the hunt.”
Mystery. Now that is something everyone is interested in. We're all a curious bunch. The last vacation we were on, we paid money to solve a puzzle that would give us the clues to let us out of a locked room that we paid someone to lock us in. The only rule was that we couldn't use our phone. Oh, was it ever fun!
I think Tom Clumb is on to something. We miss out on so much just because we have this instant knowledge at our fingertips. But yet we all crave mystery. We read mystery books and watch mystery movies. I'm pretty sure it's why I hunt and why most men don't read directions.
One morning last week, I went turkey hunting with Aiyana. I always love the challenge of finding a turkey gobbler and trying to get him to come to my call. According to Google, it's pretty easy. Here's the response that I got when I googled, “how do you call a turkey gobbler”. You can call in a gobbler by imitating the hen's vocalizations.
Well sorry Google, but it's not quite that easy. Will they come in or won't they? Should I call again or wait? It's always those uncertainties that make it fun. Is it this or is it that? There's always a little bit of mystery, a little bit of trying to figure out what the gobbler is thinking. Anyways, we were calling in one spot and hadn't gotten any responses and so we decided to move a quarter mile and try again. We were following an old logging road and it crossed a power line, and right when we entered the power line, I saw a bird flit out of the grass. The first thing that came to mind was, “it's got a nest.” I made a beeline to the spot the bird had vacated and sure enough, there were four bright blue eggs tucked into a little nest under a tuft of grass. It wasn't a towhee nest. I find them occasionally when I'm hunting in the spring. Their eggs are cream colored with little brownish speckles. But these were bright blue. The bird that flitted off looked like some kind of a sparrow. I probably could have google searched the nest but I didn't. There's something about the joy that inquisitiveness brings. What, when, where, why and how. Inquisitiveness is one of my favorite human characteristics. We can take the shortcut and look things up on our phones, or we can take a minute to wait, watch and observe. Either one will solve the mystery. But oftentimes, at least if we take the long route, while we're in the process of cracking a mystery we discover another one. Just like finding that bird nest while turkey hunting.
I'm hoping to get back out there soon with my binoculars. I want to figure out what kind of bird nest that is. If I don't see the bird, or if the nest has been destroyed by a predator, well I guess it will remain a mystery.
Or, maybe at that point, I'll just Google it.
