Subject: [Tweeters] fireworks -- West Seattle like a war zone
Date: Jul 5 10:57:50 2006
From: Brett Wolfe - m_lincolnii at yahoo.com


Yea, the birds woke me up bright and early this morning in the U-District as they always do. And I live at Brooklyn & Pacific - not too far from Gasworks. Sorry about what you saw in West Seattle, but I think that it was somewhat isolated in extent.

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

camelama at speakeasy.net wrote:

I didn't have as much as West Seattle seems to have had, but plenty of personally-purchased fireworks were set off on a street near me - folks from surrounding streets come to light off near my place as one of my neighbors is quite the pyromaniac and always has a selection - but is also VERY SAFE about it, so neighbors gather there to have him set off theirs. Still illegal, but at least we don't have to worry about neighbors setting our houses on fire or blowing their hands off, if they're doing fireworks with him.

This morning in Ballard my feeders were as busy as normal for this time of year which is: I had plenty o' starlings and house sparrows and nothing much else.

The flickers were calling as usual from the tops of the wooden light pole across from my driveway. The robins were in the manicured lawn down the street. Even the hummingbirds came through the neighbor's yard as usual on their morning constitutional.

Susan
camelama at speakeasy.net
Seattle, WA (Ballard neighborhood)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Suzanne Krom [mailto:szkrom at drizzle.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 5, 2006 04:24 PM
> To: 'Tweeters'
> Subject: [Tweeters] fireworks -- West Seattle like a war zone
>
> I don't remember a year like this one for fireworks. It was like being in the middle of a war zone here in the heart of West Seattle, with no safe refuges for birds. When there was still some light in the sky, I watched them flying frantically from tree to tree trying to escape this year's free-for-all.
>
> People were shooting off the same fireworks I see at the Gasworks and Ivar's displays -- huge, ongoing explosions and cascades of sparks ending with booms that shook my windows and sent shock waves through my home.
>
> I contacted the Seattle police to verify if fireworks are still illegal in the city limits and the answer was a definite yes. The officer said this year was far worse than any other he had seen previously and encouraged me to call 911 next year, although he added that there are always many more reports than they can respond to. That sounds like an exercise in futility to me. He told me that, unfortunately, the reservations sell everything that the largest commercial displays use to anyone willing to pay for them. I had plenty of those blasting around me.
>
> So far this morning, no goldfinch have come to my feeders where normally there are four regular visitors this year, and only one bird has visited my black oil sunflower feeder although I haven't seen who it is. I've been seeing up to ten chickadees and house finches at that feeder. With bird extinction rates up, it seems Seattleites did far too much last night to contribute to the reduction of our local bird populations.
>
> So Tweets, did you have a similar experience in your neighborhoods? If so, are some of you interested in working together to establish a campaign. We would work as a group to identify the result we want to accomplish, whether it's to encourage enforcement of the law or something else. Do we approach this from the standpoint of the impacts on birds and other animals, or other means? Is this a Seattle effort, since fireworks are already banned here, or do we make this bigger? We need a combination of good strategic minds and worker bees. What do you all think?
> Suzanne Krom
> West Seattle
> szkrom at drizzle dot com
>


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