Subject: Fir Island 4/10
Date: Apr 10 20:44:48 2004
From: Stuart MacKay - stuart at blarg.net


A couple of things of note up on Fir Island this afternoon:

2 long-billed curlews
3 american pipits.

I noticed also that most of the grass fields have been plowed over and
a lot of the snow geese are feeding out on the grasses along the edge
of the shore. Does anybody know whether this is a new management policy
to keep the geese under control - either by forcing them to eat more
'natural' fare compared to spring wheat or whether this is to placate
farmers who regularly get their fields mown down to bare earth by the
geese. Research has shown that winter grazing in Texas has been one of
the main factors in the explosion of the east coast population and I
wonder if my observation this afternoon is somehow related ?


Stuart
--
Stuart MacKay, Seattle, WA, USA