Thought folks might be interested to know that the observers at
Bonney Butte (the site on Mt. Hood being monitored by Hawkwatch
Int'l) saw more than half of their season count of TVs early
last week (200+).

Despite discussion of secrecy among raptor groups, directions
to this site are freely available. I won't post them here as
they've been posted to OBOL, if anyone wants them e-mail me.
Or drop by the PAS bookstore, where they're being handed out.

Regarding FRG, I've heard similar comments about Bud and his
group - from other raptor people! Indeed, there's been some
friction over the Diamond Head site 'tween FRG, which doesn't
want to publicize the site, and Hawkwatch - we publicize all
of our sites. I don't know details, as I covered my ears
and said "I don't want to get involved!" when Steve Hoffman,
head of Hawkwatch, started to tell me about it.

I will say that raptor folks who become introduced to raptors
via falconry are a different breed of folk. Often, they have
little interest in birds (or biology) beyond raptors (and, in
particular, large falcons with perhaps the occasional gos
tossed in). They are single minded, and often arrogant. We've
had a couple of bad experiences with volunteers with this kind
of background, and in the past two years have quietly rejected
applications from "pure falconers" for the Goshutes project.

I don't think we're alone. I know a biologist working for the
BLM out of Klamath Falls, who was hiring folks to do spotted
owl/gos work for timber sale prep this spring. He was calling
because a Goshutes volunteer put me down as a reference, and though
he also knew her wanted an independent opinion (which was very
favorable). He also asked me if I knew another candidate, and
I went ballistic as the name mentioned was of one of our troubling
falconer types. After essentially saying "don't hire him", Andy
(my BLM friend) got thoughtful and commented that he, too, had
been unimpressed with the attitude which falconers they'd hired
to do field work displayed and that he had already put this guy
down to the lower end of the resume stack because of it.

Most of the folks I work with aren't unidimensional, and indeed
many go on to get MS or PhD degrees in wildlife biology. Of
co-workers who've done so, only one comes to mind who is working
with raptors. Most work with passerines - one of our top banders
from 1991-1993 is off doing his MS thesis on buff-breasted flycatcher,
for instance. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that may of
them got into raptor work via gos or spotted owl survey work over
the past few yers. Anyway, we all enjoy raptors but I see little
of the kind of attitude Dennis and others describe as being typical
of the raptor community - outside of the pure falconry community.
Within this community, there is indeed an almost worshipful attitude
towards the birds. For us, and other large-scale raptor migration
projects in the west, our bread-and-butter are sharpies and kestrels,
hardly birds to elevate the bander's testosterone level. Our radios
certainly crackle with excitement over a "prairie" merlin, or the
capture of an eagle, but they also crackle when we spot a varied
thrush (exceedingly unusual in the Great Basin) perched on a
mist-net pole.

My derogatory comments about a subset of the falconry community
shouldn't be taken to mean I feel all fit that mold. And, when
I speak of folks coming to raptor work via falconry, I'm explicitly
differentiating between that group of folks, and biologists/birders
who get involved with falconry as an adjunct to their general
interest. We've had several volunteers who fit this latter
profile, mostly from Evergreen, where many get introduced to
falconry as well as ornithology and Great Basin ecology by the
(dreaded?) Steve Herrman. These have been some of our best volunteers,
as they come with bird-handling skills and an appreciation of the
value of attention to detail during processing and other data-gathering
aspects of banding.

- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>