The farce continues. I hope someone is working on a musical comedy about all of this….
Dwight Hammond
Birders are not pleased
One of the best pieces to come out of the occupation at the Malheur wildlife sanctuary is a warning from wildlife photographer Kevin Vang, writing on Daily KOS as Norwegian Chef:
Just a friendly warning from the birding and wildlife photography community to the Oregon terrorists. We are watching your every move, and we have been watching you for a long time. And yes absolutely you are domestic terrorists of the worst kind, and the truth about your decades of constant poaching of protected wildlife around Malheur and other wildlife refuges, national parks, national forests and BLM lands has been well-documented. For years those of us who are wildlife photographers, birdwatchers and carers of wildlife, have been documenting the activities of you poachers and criminals around many of our nation’s wildlife refuges. With our powerful cameras, and ability to move unseen in the wilderness, we have found and documented your illegal hunts, your illegal traps and all sorts of illicit activities, and are constantly feeding that information to law enforcement, and we have finally got many of you poachers on the run and into jails. And I for one am a westerner sick to death of you welfare queens and cheats living off of BLM land, illegally gutting our wilderness and our wildlife. Malheur, Hart Mountain, Klamath Marsh, Yellowstone, Glacier, Yosemite etc etc, they all belong to us, we the American people, and no small group of armed thugs is going to destroy the great wildlife and national park system that our great Republican President Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir put in place over a century ago. Wildlife photographers and wildlife/bird watchers now number some 40 million people in the USA, and feed many rural western economies with our tourism dollars, and we will not stand for your sedition.
As Oregon’s Congressman Earl Blumenauer just stated, “Armed insurrection is terrorism. The situation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge shouldn’t be allowed to fester but should be dealt with firmly, swiftly and fairly. The continued disruption to the community of Burns and occupation of a federal facility is unacceptable. Those involved should be arrested and prosecuted”
Those of us who are international wildlife and nature photographers regularly face charging elephants, attacking lions and grizzlies, hidden crocodiles, massive storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, the hottest, coldest and windiest conditions, and all kinds of poisonous snakes and bugs in our work, and we know the outdoors and wilderness from desert to jungle to sea to mountain to tundra from pole to equator better than any poacher or criminal or yee-haw yokel ever will, and we are not afraid to protect it. We have a just fear of nature from experience, but we don’t fear you gun-toting thugs in the least. You will never see us, but we and our cameras will always see you. We will #takebackmalheur from you terrorists, and will not rest until every one of you thugs and poachers is behind bars where they belong. You may think that your communities support you, but the majority do not and as many as support you, many more despise you, and your every move is being documented in great detail. The birding networks are ablaze right now about everything going on in Malheur. We know the nearby trailer park, who is supplying you with food, and a tourist boycott of them is already in the works for all birders for this upcoming bird season. We know who everyone is coming in and out, and why, and every shred of information is going straight to law enforcement and across every birding network in America.
And for those of us who are also lawyers (I for example just happen to have a law degree of U of Oregon), whether the Feds prosecute you or not (and we will do all in our power to ensure they do), we will put every civil suit against you and God knows you have given us plenty to work with, so you will know once and for all that your odious actions have real consequences.
We stand now and forever with wildlife, and you seditionists and terrorists are about to find out that’s there is a natural law of karma that vindictive people, who go out and poach innocent animals, will never be able to outrun or hide from.
We are watching you and our years of birding photography have made us endlessly patient and determined.
It was a couple guys like Kevin Vang who were largely responsible for establishment of the refuge in the first place, more than a century ago.
Wildlife photographer and naturalist William L. Finley and his childhood friend and photography partner, Herman T. Bohlman, visited the lake to investigate recovery of egret populations. The “white heron” had been wiped out a dacade earlier by plume hunters. The pair’s hand-colored photos and the backing of the Oregon Audubon Society helped convinced President Theodore Roosevelt to create the Lake Malheur reservation “as a preserve and breeding ground for native birds.”

Finley estimated that several thousand birds had been killed so their feathers could be used to decorate hats.
Finley/Bohlman photos courtesy Oregon Audubon Society & NPR
Malheur means misfortune
The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was aptly named; since the mid-19th century, the area has been the scene of tragedy, adversity and misfortune—meanings of malheur, the name some trappers applied after disappearance of their cache. I don’t know for sure about the several thousands of years when native Americans roamed, hunted, fished and farmed the area—before they were rounded up and moved away—but I’d bet they had their share of bad times here long before Europeans arrived.
A short History of US Western land policy
John Freemuth is a professor of public policy and senior fellow at the Cecil Andrus Center for Public Policy, Boise State University.
The Twisted Roots of US Land Policy in the West
Misfortune at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon
For the past week or so, I’ve been commenting and posting information on my Facebook page about the ongoing occupation of the national bird sanctuary near Burns, Oregon, a couple hundred miles from my Boise, Idaho, home.
I thought it might be useful, or at least entertaining, to collect those posts here, along with the many links to other information and background about the militia takeover and some of those involved. I have long been interested in the power of agreement, a phrase I picked up from Paul Crockett, the desert sage who rescued several people from the Manson “family” in the late 1960s.
I am fascinated by the ways some among us are able, occasionally, to awaken from what Gurdjieff likened to the early stages of hypnosis, in which he found the vast majority of humans almost all of the time. We are terribly vulnerable and quite susceptible to having others shape what we consider to be the “real” world.
So, here goes the collection of my thoughts, and others’, about the events unfolding not far from here, in reverse chronological order—moving from recent to earlier events and postings.
Wednesday, Jan. 13
Mix Heather, Sage, and Boyle—what a brew:
Tuesday, Jan. 12
A picture worth a thousand words:
More details of the conspiracy leading up to the armed occupation of the Malheur NWR, followed by many eye-opening comments of both supporters & detractors:
Monday, Jan. 11
More backstory on the Hammonds’ and others’ law-breaking and intimidation of federal employees and their families in Harney County, Oregon. While there are a few minor inaccuracies in this story, it paints a pretty clear picture of a problem that has been festering there for decades. The Bundys are not the first troublemakers to target the area. Most of the article was published in the “Village Voice” in the mid-1990s:
wise words:
According to the Oregonian, Idaho state legislators Judy Boyle, Heather Scott and Sage Dixon were among a half-dozen out-of-state lawmakers who met with the Bundy gang on a “fact-finding mission” Saturday.
Beware the righteous man doing the bidding of his God.
Ammon Bundy tells how the Lord directed him: “I did exactly what he Lord asked me to do….I was to call all these people together….to participate in this wonderful thing that the Lord is about to accomplish.”
…and, oh, so, so sincere….
YOUTUBE.COM
Sunday, Jan. 10
Bundys’ anti-federal Mormonism has deep roots—Ammon, Capt. Moroni & modern-day, self-styled “Nephites”:
Capt. Moroni: https://youtu.be/1KHuOpE578M
Ammon: https://youtu.be/9E4Qr0ZkRKg
To folks who might think these kinds of beliefs are harmless, I strongly recommend Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven.”
and…
Jeffrey Lundgren & the Kirtland Temple: Another modern example of Mormon scriptural belief gone awry:
Friday, Jan. 8
The book of ‘Alma,’ chapters 17 ff, in the ‘Book of Mormon’ may offer clues to Ammon Bundy’s behavior.
Is he living out a convoluted interpretation of the life of his namesake? In Joseph Smith’s story, Ammon goes to the land of Ishmael, where he sees his chance to use the Lord’s power to win the hearts of the Lamanites. Then they would listen to his teachings:
In addition to the church of “latter-day saints” based at Salt Lake City, there are 70-some other Mormon sects. At least one fundamentalist group is based on the Arizona border, at Cedar City, Utah, where Ryan Bundy runs his construction company.
The Bundys’ seditious actions have been decried by the SLC church. To which Mormon Lord is Ammon Bundy listening?
Jon Krakauer, author of “Under the Banner of Heaven,” chimes in on the Bundys:
Thursday, Jan. 7
Laughter is the best medicine for the humorless jailbirds-to-be holed up at an Oregon bird sanctuary.
I like Robert Ehlert’s concluding comment of his editorial in today’s Idaho Statesman:
“The occupiers should take a clue from the tundra swans who visit in late fall and early winter at the refuge. They gather in the various ponds and their voices carry long distances. Though some stay, others know when it is time to move on.”
Wednesday, Jan. 6
Bill Kittredge, who grew up and ranched in southeastern Oregon’s Warner Valley, offers some deep insight into the myth of the West that is fueling much of the anti-government furor we’re seeing:
“…that old attitude from my childhood, the notion that my people live in a separate kingdom where they own it all, secure from the world, is still powerful and troublesome.”
Here is a link to an extended quotation from Bill Kittredge’s “Owning It All,” which captures the essence of the confusion about property that propels so much of the current anti-government, take-“back”-the-land nonsense:
The Ranch Dividians and their Republican supporters/apologists appear to be reading a constitution and listening to a god that don’t exist, except in a closed-off corner of their narrow minds:

Ammon Bundy arrives to address the media at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore., on Jan. 4, 2016. (Jim Urquhart/Reuters)
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