Dear Tweeters,
Driving down 15th South on Beacon Hill saw a tussle and put on the brakes in
time to see a crow finally getting a good hold on an adult House Sparrow, then
fly off with it. Another Sparrow on the scene protested loudly but couldn't
do anything about it. Also, another NASHVILLE WARBLER today in the yard.
On another topic, it kind of saddens me that anyone wants to take the
politics, and even the contention, out of tweeters, although I'm all for
kindness. Obviously bird sightings constitute the backbone and the
attraction of Tweeters. But there's an issue of intellectuality here: Are
our interests broad and wide-ranging or only narrow and limited? I learned a
lot I never knew about spiders one day on Tweeters, and would be the poorer if
someone had thought, "This is a bird line, so I better not post a long
discussion about spiders on it"? Secondly, you can take the bird out of the
politics, but you can't take the politics out of the bird, or something like
that. John James Audubon was so depressed about the destruction of the
environment that he never took his last trip out west. Ted Parker worried
that he wasn't being a pure naturalist, but eventually decided he had to offer
his birding ability in service to the cause of environmentalism. You can and
probably should argue endlessly about what kind of environmentalism is best
but if you care about birds, I'm sorry, you've already waded pretty deep into
the swirling waters of politics.
-Shade-coffee drinking Eddy Newbold, Seattle (newboldwildlife at netscape.net)


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