Hi Dennis, et al.,

Something similar happened at the San Joaquin River NWR outside Modesto, CA a couple years back. They had a huge amount of Tobacco trees on the property and just cut them all down at once, without bothering to put anything else out there in their place. Unfortunately, this has had a huge effect on the Black-chinned Hummingb irds that had been there in the thousands while the Tobacco trees had been there, feeding on the flowers. I'm assuming some were able to move elsewhere, but considering the overall lack of habitat in the CA Central Valley (it's all ag land), most of them probably starved or died sooner than they otherwise would have. Very few Black-chins to see unless you had a feeder out in that area. Sad that our government employees, whose salaries we pay, aren't any more foresighted than that. To be expected I guess, they are guvmint.

Brett A. Wolfe
Seattle, WA
m_lincolnii at yahoo.com

Dennis Paulson <dennispaulson at comcast.net> wrote:
To follow the Russian olive thread, I was shocked when I arrived at the Dry Tortugas last spring to find that the National Park Service had cut down all the Australian pines (Casuarina) on Loggerhead Key. Loggerhead is the largest island in the little archipelago and the one that usually has the most migrant birds on it. Casuarinas furnished a woodland on that key that provided habitat/cover for lots of tree-dwelling passerines and was usually full of birds during migration when I visited there years ago. There are no other trees of note on the island, just shrubs and a few scraggly small trees. Because it's not native, Casuarina had to go, another reduction in usable bird habitat because of a knee-jerk reaction. Worse, the NPS was talking about cutting down some of the large trees on the parade ground within Fort Jefferson on Garden Key because they're not native Florida trees. There aren't that many trees there, and every one serves as important habitat and presumably
food sources (leaf-eating insects) for migrants, but the park service has its protocol, and it must be followed to the letter, much like worker ants. It's hard to understand the reasoning of people who think only in absolutes.
-----
Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115
206-528-1382


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