A Nipppy and Rainy May

It's already may now and normally you can go swimming at this time of the year. But this year it's still nippy and rainy. 

But I am not to worried about that because we have a country saying about a nippy and rainy may will cause rich crops. And as April was quite chilly too this year I expect a long, hot summer, at least if this silly vulcano on Iceland won't generally chill the weather with its ashes.

A chilly spring here in Western Europe often leads to a hot summer and if it's too warm too early like it was in 2007 you often will get not much of a summer. This has to do with the continent warming up too early will cause a pull that brings moist air from the Atlantic Ocean all summer long. If it`s chilly in spring the Atlantic Ocean will be warmer than the continent in summer and this results in dry wind from the east and hot weather.

The pictures here are impressions from a walk we had last sunday in the Welland, an area north of Aalen between the Swabian Alb and the Swabian Forest

Although I know the weather is ok for this season I'm a bit annoyed too: I got me a notebook computer recently that makes me able to settle with my office in the garden. I tried this last year lending out my daughter's notebook and found it very nice. No that I have one of my own I could do so whenever I want if only the weather would be better.

A great german hunter died

Actually I`m quite busy wuth a lot  of things and have not much time to read my favourite German hunting magazine "Wild und Hund". Yesterday I happened to have a look at the issue from April 1st of this year and found a piece of news which made me quite sad: Heribert Kalchreuter died already on March 14th when he was on holydays in the Dominican Republic, just the day after his 71st birthday.

Heribert Kalchreuter was well known among German hunters and an important gamekeeping scientist who wrote several books about the subject. Among others he wrote "Die Sache mit der Jagd" which was an important book for me in building my opinion about sense and entitlement of hunting nowadays. I got to read this book for the first time many years ago, even before I started to get my own hunting license. When I found out that he was born in the same town as I, I wrote an article about him for one of the two local newspapers of our mutual birthplace Heidenheim.

I never met Heribert Kalchreuter personally but I talked to him on phone when I was writing the article about him. He really was a nice man and he sent me one of his books, "Zurück in die Wildnis" in which he tells about things he experienced all over the world such as hunting in Alaska and training young game keepers in Africa.

I planned to contact him again not at least to prouldy tell him that I had become a hunter too in the meantime and looked forward to talk about hunting which much more knowledge on my side now. Unfortunately I didn't do so yet - and know it's to late.

A sad thing, the more 71 isn't really old nowadays and Heribert Kalchreuter wasn't really retired at all. Probably one could expect to still hear from him. But even if he hadt to die  a bit early, he has had a successful life and I guess hunters will never forget him.