For those who haven't seen the July issue of Natl Geo... An extremely disheartening but informative article by the novelist/birder Jonathan Franzen about the demise of Eurasian/African migratory birds. http://bit.ly/1ba7y5U
Marty Wolf NW CO Spgs By Jonathan Franzen Photographs by David Guttenfelder >From glue-covered sticks in Egypt hang two lives, and one question: Can we >stop the slaughter of songbirds migrating across the Mediterranean? In a bird market in the Mediterranean tourist town of Marsa Matruh, Egypt, I was inspecting cages crowded with wild turtledoves and quail when one of the birdsellers saw the disapproval in my face and called out sarcastically, in Arabic: "You Americans feel bad about the birds, but you don't feel bad about dropping bombs on someone's homeland." I could have answered that it's possible to feel bad about both birds and bombs, that two wrongs don't make a right. But it seemed to me that the birdseller was saying something true about the problem of nature conservation in a world of human conflict, something not so easily refuted. He kissed his fingers to suggest how good the birds tasted, and I kept frowning at the cages. To a visitor from North America, where bird hunting is well regulated and only naughty farm boys shoot songbirds, the situation in the Mediterranean is appalling: Every year, from one end of it to the other, hundreds of millions of songbirds and larger migrants are killed for food, profit, sport, and general amusement. The killing is substantially indiscriminate, with heavy impact on species already battered by destruction or fragmentation of their breeding habitat. Mediterraneans shoot cranes, storks, and large raptors for which governments to the north have multimillion-euro conservation projects. All across Europe bird populations are in steep decline, and the slaughter in the Mediterranean is one of the causes. Read the full story online. This story was sent to you from the National Geographic iPad App. Download National Geographic for your iPad. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cobirds/290B358D-B878-4650-96B8-C443BF2A4917%40aol.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
