Writing this column gives me a great sense of freedom. The genesis of this euphoria is the fact I expect no one to read the column this week. Ergo, I can write whatever I wish and no one will complain.

The basis of my prediction is simple. At last count there were more than a dozen major professional sports games being aired on Sunday, not including professional wrestling, NASCAR events or bull riding. The problem is we have allowed economic considerations to win out without regard for the traditional seasonality of individual sports. Finally this caused baseball, football, basketball and hockey to all slop over each other's airspace in the fall.

From a personal perspective, I am delighted. For some reason, perhaps a genetic defect on my Y chromosome, once I stopped playing a particular sport myself, I seemed to also lose interest in watching other people play. Therefore, my math becomes - the more people sitting home mesmerized by the TV, the fewer running around outdoors and getting in my way.

This makes things work smoothly. I go hunting, come home, clean up the dog, take Dr. Wifey to lunch, take a nap and then go hunting again. In other households, there is less tranquility. I have heard of one such domicile on Lohret Road where this Sunday is likely to generate a fabulous swivet.

Simply having a Giants game coterminous with a Yankees game means two TVs operating in different rooms with scores and various exhortations bellowed from room to room. Cheers or lamentations echo through the walls depending on the bumbles of the baseball bullies or gigantic football foibles.

Imagine the chaos that will ensue in the face of a dozen different games from midmorning to dark of night - on the same day we have switched back to standard time. Sports overload coupled with chaotic circadian cycles - given the disposition of the distaff member of the family, I hold little hope of the day passing without the assistance of emergency services.

However, like the dog that actually catches the car, now that I am in the presence of perfect journalistic freedom, I find myself dithering about what to do with it.

A few things are so obvious as to be unappealing.

I could say that global warming is a natural process that has been going on for centuries, humans have nothing to do with it and the whole climate change hoorah is simply a clever scam to make a cadre of people rich selling carbon credits on the commodity market.

Or I could contend that evolution, game theory, quantum analysis and fractal mathematics are sufficient to explain everything we see in the universe so all that is necessary to believe in creationism is to believe that those four things were what was created.

However, those are grounders and not worth spending this opportunity on, especially when there are so many skunks being killed on the highway.

We have become complacent about dead skunks in the middle of the road, primarily because skunks, like virtually every other form of life, change population numbers in cycles. The pre-Socratic Greek who coined the term "balance of nature" should have been given a hemlock enema.

Wildlife, particularly mammals, exist in a very dynamic imbalance, that is they go through periods of great abundance, dwindle to near extinction, then explode again. It is easiest to see with small, rapidly reproducing animals like lemmings or gray squirrels but skunks have a pretty visible one also. There are even some historical accounts of skunk mass migrations, much like lemmings.

Right now we are seeing the upslope of the skunk cycle. It is interesting that exactly the same thing is being reported from North Dakota to Florida at the same time.

In this area, we are getting a double dose because we are also at the upslope of the rabies cycle.

Rabies is a density dependent disease; its spread increases geometrically as the population increases. At a population high, it can effect well in excess of 90 percent of the animals within a 12 month period. The effect is that it causes the lows to be much lower, i.e., we go through periods of seeing no skunks at all.

Predictably, rabies becomes quite rare until the population hits another high, then it explodes again. We experienced a rabies-induced population crash about 10 years ago. Rabies came into the area and, within a couple years it caused massive population collapse of many predator species, particularly skunks and raccoons. Low population density and abundant habitat stimulates geometric growth and all of a sudden we have population densities of three or four skunks per square mile, tremendous squishage on the highway and all sorts of dogs getting sprayed.

Within a year or two, there will be another rabies epizootic heralding the beginning of another terrific crash.

Unfortunately, since no one is going to read this, it will probably be blamed on global warming or string theory.

Bob Henke writes a regular Outdoors column for The Post-Star.