Michael:

No flame from me, just solid agreement.

I too find it very frustrating that it is virtually impossible to get
birders to fight for wildlife species and habitat in our local
communities, let alone actually organize to try to save habitat. There
are so few birders who are actually willing to interject themselves in
difficult political issues, that the ones who do get burned out very
quickly and feel particularly isolated and frankly confused. I often
wonder if there are so few people (ie birders) out there who really care
about wildlife and wildlife habitat. Perhaps it is just not that
important. Those birders who do work hard on wildlife issues may be a
real minority and may only be speaking for themselves and not the
birding community as a whole.

My experience has been that most political fights are left to local
staff of conservation organizations and because there are so few of
them, they have to pick and choose the issues that they feel are the
most important or are of particular interest to their organization.

Giving money to conservation organization is very important, but giving
time to try to protect local wildlife is also important. We are all out
in the field a great deal of the time, but what do we see beside the
birds we are chasing? Do we block out the tremendous destruction and
degradation of wildlife habitat all around us? Do we see it and say how
awful--then go home and write down all the birds we saw that day? I
would think that we would be despairing about what is happening in our
local communities.

I would like to know what would motivate birders to get involved on a
personal level or at least why birders are not a voice in their local
communities. We seem to have an inordinate amount of time and often
money to spend pursuing our hobby, but no time to make our voices heard.

Well, there's a big storm heading my way - perhaps from more directions
than the west.

Janet
--
Janet Carroll
Everett WA
jrc at jrc.seanet.com
--------------------------------------------------------
"The frog never drinks up the pond in which it lives."
--------------------------------------------------------