Hi all,
The latest issue of High Country News landed in my mailbox today, with a
cover photo of AMERICAN AVOCETS on a dry lakebed.
The article is about our own Lake Abert, and Oregon's "terminal lakes"
in general. It's readable, and will introduce you to Craig Foster who
monitors birds at Abert for ODFW. It discusses some of the water
overallocation issues that have led to the disappearance of Abert in
recent years.
It's not up on the magazine's website yet, but keep checking www.hcn.org
if you're not a print subscriber.
Lake Abert is perhaps the biggest ongoing birding story in Oregon,
affecting migration habitat for literally millions of birds. Not just
any old birds, but cool birds like phalaropes and avocets.
Trent Seager has been trying to call attention to the ongoing crisis,
for well over a decade now. East Cascades Audubon has a project to do
bird counts. They go out and gather data, several times per season. The
numbers will knock your eyeballs out.
OSU's "Oregon 2020" project timed one of their "birding blitzes" to
coincide with peak numbers on Lake Abert, so they got some impressive
counts too. Cool to see those big numbers, lots of high-fives all
around.
But no one talks about going out there and finding basically no birds
except (as Craig Foster puts it), maybe five Ravens and six California
Gulls.
If you follow OBOL or COBOL, mostly it's "radio quiet" on one of
Oregon's biggest conservation disasters of our time.
Because if you want to talk about what's going wrong at Lake Abert, you
need to talk about things like WATER RIGHTS, BAD REGULATORY DECISIONS,
and CLIMATE CHANGE. All of these topics are implicitly "verboten" on
OBOL and even more so on COBOL.
This BOO list emerged as a byproduct of the Malheur occupation, so I can
understand that many subscribers mostly see it as a place for updates on
the Bundy Gang's latest follies.
But I'd like to see it turn into something bigger than that: A place
where Oregon birders can talk freely about bird-conservation issues that
we're not allowed to mention on OBOL or COBOL.
Lake Abert is one of the biggest issues staring us in the face right
now. We're talking about migration habitat for millions or at least
hundreds of thousands of PHALAROPES, AVOCETS, SHOVELERS and more. Let's
talk about it, and come up with an action plan.
Joel
--
Joel Geier
Camp Adair area north of Corvallis
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