Could've been residual smoke that was exiting my ears after my last short trip to the island when I fished my tail off for just about enough to make a fishwhich!
Kidding aside, Sandman you make some interesting points. Don't know much about the burns, but they talk about fire being a natural and cyclic event. Unfortunately, the state of the island is anything but natural, as we pull huge amounts of water out of the aquifers and dump nitrogen rich waste water back into the ground. More and more scrub gets cut for development. When you think about the State forest, there's nothing natural about those rows of white pines, space equidistant from one another, all the same height. Planting a mono-species seems like a pretty good way to insure some kind of blight will take hold.
New Haven, CT used to be called the Elm City, because we had these beautiful, towering, statuesque elms lining the city streets. Not any more.
Wow what a digression.... sorry
Lets go fishing while we can
ab
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