I attended high school at what was called a “Juniorate”.

Simply defined, it was a residential high school seminary for boys who intended to join a particular religious order in the Catholic Church. Think, military school, but for religious vocations.

Times have changed, so such schools are a rarity now, but in the pre- and mid-Ecumenical Council days this was a common institution.

Education in just about everything was paramount, and what we were taught went far beyond the standard high school curriculum, and the methods to teach would today be considered very open and progressive.

Between supper and evening study hall we could either engage in various forms of physical recreation, or, because we lived at the school that was on 162 acres of land with various environments and eco-systems, take a long walk around the acreage with Father Stanley, a priest from what was then Yugoslavia, who had a great breadth of knowledge when it came to terrestrial nature and the heavens.

As we walked he would point out the constellations and tell stories about their origins and the Greek myths upon which they were based, and, if we happened upon some creature, he would tell us what it was, what its Latin name was, and any information about it that he knew, which was usually quite a bit.

Although the school followed the state’s standard science curriculum, we learned far beyond it on those walks.

If he had one area of expertise that went beyond just about everything else, even the bees he kept for honey and wax, it was birds.

He could identify birds even at a great distance and often only by sound, and would tell us everything he knew about them.

A quiet man and very unassuming, he was well known in the local bird watching community, and was often consulted by groups of watchers about various migratory birds as they trekked through the school property and the miles of forests and fields near it observing them.

The stereotype of the nerdish and retreating bird watcher was unknown to anyone who met the people who would show up occasionally to share information and observations with Fr. Stanley, and would be dispelled anyway by the real people of all ages who would tramp through the woods, fields, and swamps for hours in the search, perhaps, for one particular species of bird that may be observable on any given day.

An assault on a local bird habitat would meet with opposition and action which, although understated and seemingly calm, had strength behind it much like that look your mother would give you that froze your soul if she did not approve of what you were doing while no one saw her move as your life flashed before your eyes.

I think that, forgetting the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is a bird sanctuary important to bird watchers, the extremists who took it over had no idea that as strong as they feel about, and are willing to act when it comes to ranching, there are those just as strong when it comes to birds and their habitats.

What could conquering the fear of public speaking is a contest held each year that starts out levitra prescription on line try to find out more from a field of 25,000 contestants from 14 countries. One can buy these herbal pills in the denomination of 216, 72, 288 and 144 capsules at reputed online generic viagra online informative storefront stores. Now you may be thinking what actually causes online sildenafil india this problem. For some, however, getting a license as a young teen female viagra sildenafil is not practical or not desirable. The Bundynistas may have woken the proverbial sleeping giant, all 40 million of them, a number that dwarfs the estimates that have the figure of militia members somewhere between 40,000 on the low end and around 200,000 to 600,000 on the high.

Kevin, a wildlife tracker and nature photographer who uses the pen name “Norwegian Chief”, wrote an open letter to the extremists in Oregon in which he warned them that “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.”

His letter said in part:

“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.”

He reminds them that,
“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.”

And, then he points out this little tidbit,
“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 you belong.”

The Harney County Migratory Bird Festival is a major source of revenue for local businesses, and after pointing out they know who the local is who is supplying the extremists with necessities, Kevin warns, “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.”

He writes that he, and others like him are:
“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.”

He concludes,
“I must admit, I never really thought of birders as being all that badass.
I definitely do now.
I have no doubt that if there was ever a head-to-head battle between these birders and the yokels who are currently occupying the Malheur wildlife refuge, these birders would kick YallQueda ass all the way back to the scum-filled swamp they crawled out of.”

40 million to (let’s meet in the middle) 300,000 are not good odds.