Hi Mary and all,
Of course there may be people who enjoy birding with all the features offered
by the latest gadgets. Whether this "brings people closer to nature" (the goal
stated by one of the principals of the Terra venture) is debatable and perhaps
best left as a matter of individual taste.
My main concern with this development, as I expressed in the main part of my
original posting, is how it portends removal of human biologists from on-site
monitoring. Bob O'Brien picked up on one aspect of this in his reply (the
potential loss of seasonal jobs for young wildlife biologists). The other
aspect that concerns me is the loss of access by people who have the ability to
recognize other types of threatened species, in the course of doing bird
monitoring for baseline studies or environmental impact assessments.
We were all conditioned from an early age, by our national culture, to believe
that that technological innovation by clever people can solve whatever problems
are created by human innovation. But as a "last-generation farmer," after
watching for 50 years now how innovations in agricultural technology have
tended to just accelerate trends toward consolidation and industrialization of
farms, accompanied by decline and decay in the economic and cultural fabric of
small towns, I no longer trust those platitudes.
In my next step at a career as a young engineering graduate student, still
believing that technology could solve the world's problems, I was part of a
research effort that developed some of the fundamental ideas behind hydraulic
fracturing and other "enhanced" drilling and mining methods. That approach
eventually did succeed in solving one perceived problem at that time (our
national dependence on OPEC for oil). I'd like to think that we also managed to
get a few coal and hard-rock miners out of very dangerous work environments by
innovations that helped to automate mining equipment. But over time I came to
realize that we had caused other problems, including birds whose habitat is now
threatened by the "fracking" boom.
Turning back to the Terra "listening" system specifically, I agree, this type
of development in technology seems almost inevitable. The core technologies
that make this type of device and network possible have all been under
development for at least 15 years (when I talked to a mutual engineering friend
in Corvallis who was working on some ideas for automated bird-song
identification using the latest signal-processing technology).
Is resistance futile? Perhaps, but that doesn't mean that we need to hasten the
arrival of these systems by donating to kickstarter campaigns -- especially
knowing that the two other principals in this venture are respectively the CEO
and COO of a tracking-device company that stands to make a mint as the supplier
of these devices, if this initiative takes hold and gives them dominant market
share.
True, the kickstarter funds go to a "non-profit," but from what information I
could find on their website, it appears to be a back-pocket sort of non-profit,
set up just 5 years ago and with very few projects that don't directly involve
the for-profit company as a "partner." I could not find any financial
disclosures on the websites either for the for-profit company, or for the
non-profit. Count me as "skeptical" of the whole operation.
All the best,
Joel
--
Joel Geier
Camp Adair area north of Corvallis
