I love your passion Gary and Connie and I feel your hurt! if every birder
felt this way something would be done about it much quicker than we do now,
as I said in a post not long ago about the dawn chorus, it has steadily been
getting quieter than I remembered when I was a kid, birds/animals are
finding comfort zones harder to find while property developer get greedier
by the day.

Hunting practices too add to the ever growing quietness that surrounds us,
what do these idiots do when all has been shot, do they turn the guns on us?
I saw a couple of statistic when I got here in 1996; America occupies
something like 5% of the globe yet uses 50% of its recourses! There are 2%
of the old-growth forests left in Northern America, this is down from 45%
just 40 years ago and out of the 2%, 2% is protected.

We do not learn from our mistakes, watching extinction happen in front of
your very eyes is painful, we spend too much time wondering about dinosaurs
yet we will not protect that which is here!
Those people on this list who get offended by these comments should not be
here in my mind, they can not love what they are looking through binoculars
enough or they would do something about it, if they do not like it there is
always a delete key in front of them.
I get private e-mails from some wonderful caring people who want to voice
out on what they love, I also get a few who criticize what I say and tell me
this is not the group to bring this subject up on, those in my opinion are
the ones who are not passionate about mother nature as I am..

When the animals come to us,
Asking for our help,
Will we know what they are saying?

When the plants speak to us
In their delicate, beautiful language,
Will we be able to answer them?

When the planet herself
Sings to us in our dreams,
Will we be able to wake ourselves, and act?

-Gary Lawless



Martyn


Martyn Stewart
Bird and Animal Sounds Digitally Recorded at:
http://www.naturesound.org
N47.65543 W121.98428
Redmond. Washington. USA
Make every Garden a wildlife Habitat!

The Spring is cum
The grass is riz
I wonder where the birdies is?

The birdies on the wing!
Nah, that's absoid
D' wing is on d' boid!
..........................

-----Original Message-----
From: TWEETERS-owner at u.washington.edu
[mailto:TWEETERS-owner at u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Gary Bletsch
Sent: Sunday, April 11, 2004 11:09 PM
To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
Subject: human overpopulation thread

Dear Tweeters,

Ouch. This thread touches a nerve with me. Everywhere
I go I see the buildings going up. It's always the
same thing.

The hayfield west of my house has a huge new
three-storey "barn" going up on its edge. The building
will house some big RV's, I think. It's on the edge of
the field, but it won't take much more nibbling at the
edges before meadowlarks stop feeling comfortable out
there in the shrinking middle.

Out on the Butler Flats (Skagit County), there are all
kinds of new houses and other structures being built
on the edges of the farm fields. Those are acres lost
to agriculture, and acres lost to birds, not counting
HOSP, HOFI, and EUST (apologies to
anti-acronymonians). The big Whimbrel flocks are no
longer stopping in those fields as it is. Last year I
think the biggest Whimbrel flock I saw had eleven
birds, max. Again, it won't take much more before they
just skip those fields altogether.

All of this is just the same stuff I started noticing
as a little kid back in the sixties. I would read
things like "Silent Spring" and wonder, why don't
people stop doing all this stuff? I read Thor
Heyerdahl's warnings about ocean pollution back then,
too, how his Ra Expedtion crew found all these blobs
of oil way out in the mid-Atlantic. Today we have
whole dead zones appearing in the seas. We could see
those dead zones coming at us forty years ago.

It is all falling into place, decade by decade, the
transformation into ugliness. Luckily, it happens
relatively slowly, even by the reckoning of a human
lifetime, so it is possible to forget the horror of it
all for days at a stretch.

Slowly, that is, except when one has an experience as
I did three nights ago. I took a walk and ran right
into a clearcut that had appeared with no warning.
Boom! and it's gone. Guess I won't see Great Horned
Owl fledglings in there any more.

Most of the time, though, even we who appreciate birds
and the wild Earth live each day, noticing our Curlews
and our Grosbeaks, and forgetting the onslaught that
surrounds us and our avian friends. It is just too
painful to dwell on it for very long.

One of the frequent contributors to our list signs off
with something like this: "Once we were few and they
were many; now we are many and they are few." It is a
charming quotation--from Confucius if I recall
aright--but I don't think it applies to this shambles
we are making of the Earth. The many who perform the
destructive acts far outnumber the few who decry them.


I hate to be so pessimistic, fellow Tweeters, but the
indelible-ink handwriting is on the wall.

=====

Yours truly,

Gary Bletsch

near Lyman (Skagit County), Washington

garybletsch at yahoo.com


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