Subject: Re: barn roosting/nesting 'Spotted Owls'
Date: Feb 05 07:58:23 1998
From: Don Baccus - dhogaza at pacifier.com


At 10:08 PM 2/4/98 EST, PAGODROMA at aol.com wrote:

>Then, sometime in February 1996 (2/28/96 to be exact -- I've dredged all this
>information up out of my personal filing cabinet -- I just couldn't delete
>these mind-boggling classic tales), Rush Limbaugh was on one of his anti-
>environmental tirades and claimed his experts told him that spotted owls nest
>in K-mart signs in Oregon and Washington.

Yeah, I debated this one in Usenet probably a half-dozen times. It's really
hilarious. One person from your fine state (remember, I'm sane enough to live
in Oregon) posted that he knew where spotted owls nested on power poles
visible
from I5 somewhere near Centralia. He claimed they hung out on power lines
around
the freeeway, and that "everyone" in central Washington knows about them,
including
wildlife officials.

I of course pointed out how ridiculous this was, and thus began a long and
unfruitful argument.

I explained to him that I make a (small) part of my income from nature
photography,
and that my marketing instincts told me I could make a killing with a
publishable
photo of these owls, that I could sell and resell them to news magazines, AP,
and every conservative dribble rag published in the country.

So, I made him a public offer of $200 to take me there IF he'd agree to pay me
$200 if they were really something else, like red-tailed hawks. I offered to
let John McCarthy, noted Computer Scientist and right-wing extremist (member
of the Hoover Institute at Stanford) and anti-environmentalist, act as banker.

This turkey never posted to the environmental discussion newsgroups again.

I think most readers of the groups- even McCarthy - got the point.




- Don Baccus, Portland OR <dhogaza at pacifier.com>
Nature photos, on-line guides, and other goodies at
http://donb.photo.net