[obol] Re: speaking of woodpeckers... soapbox, slap my hands
- From: "judy" <jmeredit@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "obol" <obol@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2015 22:20:27 -0800
Some of you attended and assisted with an early central Oregon Woodpecker
Festival, organized in part by Steve Shunk. Nancy Tanner was his keynote.
Terrific presentation, with old photos, stories, her winning ways, and for
me, most memorable, was what she said about conservation. Paraphrasing, she
said there was nothing known about conservation back then, people didn't do
it, didn't understand it, it wasn't heard of and that her husband tried with
influential people from the east coast to get something like a Nature
Conservancy started, and he even got a few big donations, trying to save
the last of the big trees for the Ivory billed. No lawmakers would give him
their attention. The money he raised wasn't enough, people didn't
understand, and the next spring when he went back to the Singer tract to
study, he saw that the last of the trees had been felled, where he had found
Ivory billed the year before. The tree he had climbed to band a young Ivory
billed WP was gone. The last nest cavity? Perhaps we can all take a step
forward in our own patches and have discussions with folks, call attention
to a little bit of habitat here and there before the tree fellers and brush
cutters beat us to it.
I BROKE RULES by posting conservation so I need to include a bird note. Some
years in central Oregon we have gone a full year with no Pileated WP
reports. It used to be nearly impossible to find them in Deschutes County.
Our ECAS Wednesday group saw Pileated for 3 weeks in a row this year so far,
although none in Deschutes, but in Jefferson, Wallowa, and Klamath. They
are more regular now around Skyliner, west of Bend, in Deschutes.
I see in the past week that some local land "managers" cut a bunch of snags
in an important Lewis's Woodpecker area near Bend. I am going to track this
down. Several times on our OBOL list in the past year, birders have reported
on changes, seemingly disasters to us and birds, discovered too late to
impact solutions. Somehow we need to get AHEAD of things everywhere and
influence those decision makers. Try to be more like Mr. Tanner but be very
effective somehow. Judy, jmeredit@xxxxxxxxxxx
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