US-11625 Erwin Wilder WMA

The father and son had bagged one pheasant, and the young boy was excited to show it to me, a beautiful male. It was a reminder that WMAs are set aside for both wildlife management and hunting. Three more hunters were in the process of gearing up to head in to the fields.

I would group Erwin Wilder with other nearby WMAs into something I call 'suburban hunting areas'. E-W is right next to a busy six-lane highway, the parking area, just a mile from the exit ramp. There are several other WMAs nearby, and a few recreational lakes. This is a place where folks who work in Boston come home to in the evening. I've always found it weird to be in one of these spaces, seeing someone taking a shot at a pheasant when just past them I can see a residential area.

Parking is right off the road, down a small unpaved lane, and is well-marked. There are plenty of spaces available, and even a few tall trees right next to the lot that you could tie a line to for a wire antenna. The field adjacent to the parking area would be a nice spot to set up, no one is shooting there, and you'll get a bit of solitude.

Erwin Wilder is primarily set aside for game-bird hunting, and it is arranged as a series of fields intertwined by stands of hardwoods and pine. A two-mile flat path winds around the fields and apparently it is a popular dog-walking destination. I saw several dogs out with their owners on the path, none of them wearing orange blaze. Walking in, there was a guy in full camo carrying a shotgun in front of me, and a fully bedecked transvestite walking a poodle passing him on the way out. It was a little surreal.

I walked to the top of the loop, about a mile. The paths are wide, winding through both plowed fields near the entrance and then hay fields and grass meadows farther in. Like many WMAs around eastern Massachusetts, this was a farm, and you can still find quite a few relics of those days out in the woods. Here's what might have been a root cellar dug into a small hill, not far from the parking area:

If you aren't familiar with pheasant and grouse hunting, around here it is done in large grassy fields that have been allowed to grow long, a few feet tall typically. Dogs run through the tall grass, trailing a scent, and when they encounter a bird it startles and flies up into the air, whereupon the hunter unloads his or her shotgun in the general direction of the noise. It's important not to sound like a grouse on the air in these spots.

I picked a small stand of trees not far off the path and set up my EFHW. It was chilly, but we've been getting these beautiful 50ºF sunny days in New England for a few weeks now and it's just impossible not to go out and enjoy them. As I often do, I set the rig up on a stone wall, and spent about 45 minutes working mainly 20m CW. It was a pretty normal activation, a few friends dropped in when they saw my spot, and I had a very nice sandwich in between contacts. I thought the SWR on 20m was a touch high but didn't worry about it.

As I was setting up I saw a glint of metal in the adjacent field and went over to take a look. From the Things You Don't Expect to See In the Woods file, it was a short tower with several VHF/UHF antennas hanging on it!

It was a MOTUS station, one of about a dozen scattered around Massachusetts and surrounding states, part of a project to tag and track a large variety of wildlife as they migrate. There are about 2,000 stations worldwide, mainly in North America and Europe, running at 434.000 MHz and 166.38 MHz. You can look up tracking data on the MOTUS.org website. The link takes you to data for this receiver, which has heard a nighthawk, a bobolink, and a wood thrush recently.

Not gonna lie, the first thing I did when I saw the tower was to check POTA.app for spots to see if anyone else was in the park! Although it was tempting, I didn't tie off on the tower. What if one of the shotgun guys was there to guard it?

This was an easy, relaxed activation. You can do this park on foot if you like, and the parking area has several spots that would be appropriate to operate from. The two-mile loop is an easy walk if you want to stretch your legs, and you never know what wonders might await just off the path...