Hi Tweets,

Don Baccus writes in, um, forthright rebuttal, let's say, to Debbie Feinman:

>And I'm sure you profusely thank the hunters you occasionally meet for
>funding these refuges that you've been able to enjoy free of charge?
>
>If not, you're an ingrate. A welfare birder, in a sense, living off the
>largesse of those who fund the purchase and maintenance of these lands (no,
>I've never hunted, but I know where the money comes from).

I think Don's right---nonononono, not that Debbie's an ingrate; nobody could
have a signature block as cool as her funny raven quote and be an
ingrate--but that birders usually--heck, almost always--ride on the work of
conservationists and hunters for many of our best birding areas. We have
seen what is often the best birding land bought by hunters and/or
off-road-vehicle or offleash dog-owners or industrial and residential
development or whatever, and developed by those groups for their own use, or
seen waaayyyy-better organised hunting and other groups and organisations
politically persuade government to sequester the best land for *their* use,
subject to regulation, and we birders continue to sit, collectively, on our
thumbs moaning about how it's all disappearing and those nasty hunters etc.
have the rest and that they call the, ahem, shots. Sorry.

This will go on as long as birders would rather be used as human shields by
the Khmer Rouge than organise to protect and further our own interests,
raise money for *birding* land to be used for *birding*, or refuse to
organise into lobbies, whether state, provincial, or federal in either
country, and continue to look for the free ride, and let everyone else beat
us to the draw on increasingly scarce land because we're too damn moral and
'nice' (yichhh) to get involved either in politics or the cold economics of
our activity. It's a case of 'Get with the tour, Bunky, or get left on the
sidewalk.'

The solution to this problem is conceptually simple: buy good birding land,
or organise into sufficiently powerful lobbies to persuade government, or
lose it as ausual to competing interests, though often much smaller but far
more aggressive and focussed. Most every birder I know personally would
rather chew off a leg than be, to use the word they themselves use,
'confrontational'. I'd like to point out that it's time and past for those
birders to learn the distinction between actual confrontation and simple
self-assertion of one's rights and interests instead of the usual 'The meek
shall inherit the earth. May we have it now, please?' approach.

But the point is, after all, to enjoy ourselves. Well, I'd like to reiterate
my suggestion that taxes and licences, being the children of bureaucrats,
are not exactly feel-good ways to make money even if one could be assured
that the money goes where one hopes. That if hunters can raise money through
a stamp program, what kind of dough could *birders*--who are much more
numerous--raise in that way? There are good bird artists behind every second
tree, it seems: surely to heaven there's some who'd leap at the chance for a
good stamp-design competition, who must be fed up with doing waterfowl by
now. It doesn't have to be a stamp program, just some kind of low-cost,
high-turnover good that anyone, man, woman, child, whole families,
societies, organisations, groups of any kind, what*ever*, can buy in any
quantity with a little money or a lot. People feel better if they get a
goodie every time they spend something, so appeal--as the hunters have done,
they're the experts at this--to the 'kid at the penny candy rack' that's
still there, if buried, in all of us.

Michael Price We aren't flying...we're falling with style!
Vancouver BC Canada -Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story
mprice at mindlink.net