I said it very loud and clear
I went and shouted in his ear.
Lewis Carrol
All the very best efforts of the Audubon Society and the Humane Society has done nothing to convince the Rossmorons that they must have their sacrifice of 50 acorn woodpeckers. Dennis Cuff reports in wednesday’s CC times that heads will role depite consultation of a major acorn woodpecker expert at UCBerkeley who says
“Killing the woodpeckers is a shortsighted and very short-term solution,” Eric Walters, an acorn woodpecker specialist at UC Berkeley’s Hastings nature reserve in Carmel Valley, wrote in an e-mail to the Times this week. “Unless they plan to wipe out the entire acorn woodpecker population, shooting birds is not going to do a darn thing to stop the damage to their retirement community.”
The Audobon society pledged to pay for Walters to come out and consult, and to provide materials for an artificial granary. Apparently the spirit of cooperation conveyed by their joint meeting with the property owners meant very little.
Diana Granados, chairwoman of a Mount Diablo Audubon task force on woodpeckers, said the shooting plan will fail because it will upset the unusual family structure of the acorn woodpecker, which typically limits breeding to two females in a group with other members sharing baby-sitting and feeding duties. If the females are killed, other birds will start breeding to offset the losses, Granados said.
In an update email received earlier this week, Diana wrote that the property owners had tersley instructed Laura Simon of HSUS to “send no more emails” about sparing the dastardly fiends. The feds were coming for Christmas and bringing their rifles with them. They were going to shoot them some ‘peckers and there was no use complaining. Twice “4 and twenty red and black birds baked in a pie”. There would be no mercy,
Just remember, “The Quality of Mercy is Not Strained”.
[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=UOji4H3Jgfw]
