Getting fifty is quite a number, and likely a bit exaggerated, but not out of the realm of reason — they are an peculiarly ‘dumb’ bird, and will sit in a tree thinking they are safe from predators below as their compatriots are picked off by a .22.

I’m sure those extra ptarmigan wouldn’t have gone to waste. Boucher’s grandmother would have made a good supper. Remaining carcasses would be frozen until being cooked up, their guts would have been used as bait on a trapline, or as food for the dogs.

This is not to say there wasn’t wasteful hunting/carnage by First Nations folks. I observed such a bit further north in the late 70s with the slaughter one winter of hundreds of caribou many of which would have tongues, hearts, and sometimes a hind quarter removed, with the rest of the carcass left behind. Young yahoos with too-fast snowmobiles and rifles and nothing of the supposed ‘harmony with nature’ ethic were to blame there. (Along with an attitude of ‘don’t tell-don’t investigate’ by the conservation officers who were overly mindful of the aboriginal hunting rights.)

So, even with that perspective, I still don’t think the killing of the ptarmigan was ‘merely for the fun of it’, and neither do I think it parallels the deaths of waterfowl that land on the tar sands tailings ponds.

Personally, I’ve wondered for years why the environmental lobby was so easy for so long on the tar sands industry. Anybody who has had the opportunity to be on the Athabasca River both upstream and downstream knows that there’s a significant deleterious impact on that watershed. Hopefully the later-built ponds are impervious to leakage, because the early ones were not. And flying over the work gives another dramatically evocative – a la National Geographic pictorial – view.

Yes, we need the energy from the tar sands, but those operations have been given an essentially free ride (PR-wise) for a long time. Dealing with some proverbial mud-on-their-face will likely result in more good than harm.