Janet: I think the Great Egret you remember was the one that showed up
for several successive winters in Percival Cove, a satellite of Capitol
Lake. My guess is that 10 years have passed since it succumbed to some
fish *net*, not "fish line". The distinction is important because the
fish net was part of a salmon rearing project run by the then Department
of Fisheries (I think with some help from a local salmon club). That
beautiful egret was therefore a "bicatch victim" of the project, which
also took the lives of many other birds, including cormorants, gulls, and
mergansers. One morning I counted 42 Hooded Mergansers on the body of
water; when I returned the next morning, with my students, there were
only 2, and they were dead, having been shot. Their skins now reside in
The Evergreen State College Museum of Natural History. Subsequent to
that discovery I challenged the appropriateness of the shooting, and a
Fisheries official testified that any curtailment of the shooting would
spell an end to the salmon sport fishery in Puget Sound. With some
students, I investigated the precision with which the Fisheries
Department was estimating the number of salmon taken by birds, and found
that they had overestimated by one or two orders of magnitude.
Furthermore, they behaved dishonestly during our efforts to count fish
taken by birds.

The project was subsequently much diminished, and there was an effort to
use alternate means to reduce the predation (which was real, but *much*
lower than they claimed). A flood washed out pens and other facilities
eventually. Driving by there yesterday, I did see some folks out in a
boat, but I decided not to stop and investigate the possibility that they
were shooting birds. Someone else may want to investigate that possibility.

The extent to which birds -and especially fish- and shellfish-eating
birds- are legally killed in this area is probably not known to many of us
who value birds for their aesthetic qualities. I apologize for going off
on this tangerine, but I am motivated in part by the knowledge that the
same man who testified so dishonestly on this issue to the Olympia City
Council, those many years ago, is an even loftier official in the newly
coagulated state Department of Fish & Wildlife, and he is one of the
cadre of deceptors who are working hard to keep destructive cattle on
Sagebrush Flat, the largest remaining remnant of deep-soiled
Sagebrush /grass habitat in eastern Washington. This 4000 acre site,
which many Tweeters subscribers wrote Jennifer Belcher about last year
when I posted the data, is apparently scheduled to be further degraded by
the abusive grazing of privately owned cattle. It is the home of the
only significant population of the Endangered Pygmy Rabbit, and host also
to a number of other uniquely Shrubsteppe birds, mammals, and reptiles.
It has been a favorite project of mine, and your post reminded me that
there are patterns to the behavior of persons who fail to defend the
resources we pay them to defend.

I miss that egret, and I will miss the ecological community apparently
destined for destruction at Sagebrush Flat.

Steve Herman

On Fri, 29 Dec 1995, Janet Partlow wrote:

> I have seen a Great Egret who wintered regularly on Capitol Lake in
> Olympia, WA for several years until it got tangled and strangled by some
> fishing line. Two years ago a Great Egret spent two weeks one fall on a
> pond in Olympia, and there are regular sightings of Great Egrets in the
> freshwater ponds out on the road to Ocean Shores. While quite uncommon,
> they appear to be regular here. Janet Partlow
>