The Woods

Muzzeloading 101

I've never owned or shot a muzzleloader, never got my tag. But I know a lot of real old timers and conservationist types love the whole muzzleloading scene after regular rifle season gets done.

Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation – Home Sweet Home – Elk Return to West Virigina

"West Virginia is known by many as the Mountain State. But for more than a century, those mountains lacked one of its long-time residentsβ€”the wild, free-ranging elk. Now, thanks to the efforts of cooperating state wildlife agencies, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and its fired-up volunteers, elk are back the ground on their historic West Virginia range. The latest group to arrive made it thanks to a cross-country trek and a pay-it-forward attitude from a fellow elk state some 1,000 miles away."

Cow Hell Swamp

It looks like it got the name due to the steep bank that cattle probably stumbled down into the muck and slowly but surely drowned in the muck.

Unbroken Natural Lands (Forest, Farmland) Over 10k Acres In New York

While more then 3/5th of the landmass in New York State is forested and roughly a quarter is farmed, many of the parcels are broken up by roads and houses. Even small gaps in natural cover can have significant impacts on wildlife. Most of state's largest parcels of unbroken cover is in the Adirondacks, though a few large parcels can be found in the Catskills and Allegany hills of Western NY. This data set also contains some data from watersheds in Northern Pennsylvania that feed into New York. From the New York Natural Heritage Program:

Although forests in the Northeastern US had been increasing in their extent since the early 1900s, more recently, we are starting to see this trend reverse,with development fragmenting and reducing the size of forests on our landscape. The objective of this project was to delineate road-less forest patches throughout New York State, based on the latest version of the National Land Cover Dataset(2016), and then to assess the condition of those patches within the Hudson River Estuary Watershed.

Data Source: New York Natural Heritage Program, New York Forest Patches, Natural Lands.