I feel confident in agreeing that it has definitely gotten better in the USA. There are still groups making a fuss, but if you look at the numbers we have more forest in the USA than we have since the 1930s, and it keeps increasing. As mentioned before, we don't have to manage the soil PH to counteract pollution anymore. And there are a lot more of certain types of animals, too. There are way way way more deer and bear here than when I was a kid. There are fewer squirrels and rabbits, but there are also /far/ more raptors than there used to be, and I think they are eating all of the small game, hehe. The raptors have definitely recovered from the DDT thing in the 1980s! Indeed, I think it has gotten to the point where they ought to reclassify chickenhawks as a nuisance species like crows and starlings and coyotes, but I doubt that will ever happen, hehe.

I guess not many people eat wild critters anymore, so many folk don't notice all the hawks and the lack of small game.

Since I am sitting at work killing some time until the next thing breaks, I will tell a funny hawk story! (Or at least I think it's funny, but I have been accused of being a weidro, lol.)

I work for a small local independent telephone company. One day we had a line down, and had to trek back to a pole way back in the woods, climb the pole, and fix the line.

When I got the to pole, there was a great big rattlesnake coiled up at the bottom of the pole. They are extremely poisonous and very mean if you corner them, so I tossed a pebble at him from a distance of perhaps 5 meters to try to scare him away so that I could climb the pole without getting bitten.

Apparently the snake was in a very grumpy mood, or he was hungry for some Mr. Polecat or something (one can never account for taste, I reckon; I would expect that I am not very tasty...), because instead of running away (as they always do; this is the only one I've ever seen act differently), he came towards me and struck and tried to bite me! Fortunately I was wearing heavy boots and he narrowly bit into my boot instead of through my pants and into my leg. So I shook him off of my foot and, though I am loathe to shoot critters on other people's property (it's just not a neighborly thing to do), I drew my little pistol and shot the snake in the head as he was coiling to strike again, so as to not get bitten and possibly die before they could drag me out of the woods to where I could be gotten to the hospital.

Anyway, I think rattlesnakes are pretty cool (when they are not attacking me, anyway), so this made me a little bit sad. But they are also VERY tasty. So we decided to take the snake back to the office, skin him out, and try to cook him on an old George Foreman grill for lunch.

So I put him inside my hardhat and we went back to the office, where I laid him out on a big propane tank so that he could finish draining before we prepared him.

Anyway, no sooner than I had walked a few paces away, a darned chickenhawk dove down, grabbed our snake, and took him away. >:O

So after all that excitement, we did not get to have any tasty snake for lunch that day. :( We had also completely forgotten about repairing the line!