After seeing Marty Cassidy's response to my comments, I wanted to clarify
just a little and rebut just a little. I second Gene Hunn's thoughtful
statement completely but have more to add from my own standpoint. I am
certainly not advocating hanging around a curlew's nest and waving one's
arms to attract jaegers. In the first place, in no way will a predator come
to every nest you approach. The typical situation is not at all as you
portrayed in your first paragraph, Marty. Any parent who told you not to
look in birds' nests when you were a kid because something bad would happen
to the nest was, statistically, completely wrong. I studied nesting birds
at Cambridge Bay, Northwest Territories, one summer. We found over 100
nests, including all the species that occurred in the area. Not a single
one was taken by a predator, even though there were jaegers nesting all
around. So we're talking about "potential" here, nothing else. Sometimes it
happens, most of the time it doesn't. Obviously the more people who visit a
nest, the higher probability of it happening. I can only further point out
that bristle-thighed curlew nests are just about impossible to find.

My comments were intended more to convey a personal distaste for a fence
around the entire breeding range of the bristle-thighed curlew, for
example, with signs "birders stay out." Not everyone who comes to Alaska
and wants to see a bristle-thighed curlew is a "sport birder." Surely many
people just want to see a particular bird to experience it, to enlarge
their appreciation for and knowledge of nature. That's why I'm a birder....
Maybe they're someone who is studying the bird; researchers, as careful as
they try to be, of course have the potential to attract predators to their
subjects. We would know essentially nothing about bristle-thighed curlews
on their breeding grounds if the researchers weren't up there.

Marty writes "maybe sometimes the advance of man's knowledge is worth a
slight cost to nature." It sounds as if she may even begrudge this just a
little bit. But, and this is of course only my opinion, I think this is the
*only* excuse for a cost to nature, with the exception of survival
itself--you kill a ptarmigan, or an agouti, because you would starve to
death otherwise. It doesn't make sense to make either researchers, who
allow us to know about nature, or birders, who support the environmental
cause generously and who are typically environmentally conscious, the
"enemy" when in fact they do just about the *least* harm to our world (my
views on this were expressed in more detail in a previous edition of
WOSNEWS). I would want to put my energy into opposing developers and any
other segment of society who are changing the world and making it a less
fit place to be for *all* of our wildlife. The same people, I have to add,
who are making it possible for the rock doves and starlings that Marty
obviously cares about to take over the world.

Thus I feel that responsible behavior toward a species can involve
controlled access to where it lives. In this case, we can't station game
wardens on this wilderness road, and I think it's not only logistically
impossible but actually repugnant to keep people off the tundra entirely
just because their presence might threaten a nesting pair of a species of
which there probably several thousand nesting pairs. I would have a
completely different attitude toward a species with, say, 50 nesting pairs.
Small islands off New Zealand with the world's entire population of Chatham
Island snipes and shore plovers are off limits to birders, with which I
concur entirely. I feel justified at drawing that particular line, and I
would hope that the people who will eventually be "manageing" more and more
species of wildlife are able to do so.

Dennis Paulson