MISGUIDED POLITICAL RETRIBUTION?

A House committee cut about a fifth of Amtrak’s funding on a party line vote the day after the fatal Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia. Presumably this was meant to punish Amtrak for the horrific accident that killed 8 and injured more than 200 with some in critical condition.

The problem with this pretzel logic is that Congress voted in 2008 to implement Positive Train Control (PTC), a computerized system that would have slowed this runaway train.  Sadly, however, Congress has never actually funded PTC. Does that mean all this blood is actually on the hands of Congress?

All the other civilized/industrialized nations (China now included) understand the value of a modern rail system, and they’ve put their money where their mouths are.  Meanwhile, the US continues to underwrite air travel with billions of dollars in subsidies … but won’t spend a few million on rail safety technology that would save lives.

Follow ups:

Has a train engineer ever used a passenger train to commit suicide a la the co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525?

Has Congress ever stopped the billions in tax dollars that subsidize air travel in this country (more than $155 billion as of 1999 according to a secret Congressional report)?


Federal Direct Spending on Aviation, 1918 to 1998

Oregon 2020 ... Oh, so that's what all those empty "Hotspots" are about

Baker County blitz crew, after finding 189 species and 
generating 675 checklists for eBird and the Oregon 2020 
project, in a single weekend in June, 2014

Oregon 2020: A Benchmark Survey Built on eBird

Humans change the land, sea, and climate. Birds respond to such changes. We are the first generation of humans to realize we are partly responsible for climate change, to know that we are altering the habitat of Earth’s biodiversity, and to have the technological capability to map, measure, instantly share, and electronically archive our observations of nature.

The Oregon 2020 project recognizes our unique position in history and uses eBird to create a benchmark survey of Oregon’s birds. Oregon 2020 aims to provide high quality data on the distribution and abundance of birds across Oregon as we approach the year 2020. Working together, we create an information legacy that will allow future citizens and scientists, decades and centuries from now, to compare bird populations in their time with those today.

Oregon 2020 relies on contributions from birders using eBird and the eBird Northwest portal. Birders have amazing skills that provide useful data when they simply collect and archive their observations. eBird is about more than managing our own species lists. It is about legacy. We want that legacy of data to be high quality. To support that, Oregon 2020 is conducting workshops and creating online tutorials to train birders in best practices when identifying, counting, and mapping birds and we coordinate County Blitzes on long weekends to socialize, explore, and count birds in relatively poorly studied portions of our state.

County blitzes are a lot like a Christmas Bird Count, except we count during the breeding season. The areas each person or team covers fall within a county. Each team visits 2 to 4 of our Hotspot Squares during the day, in addition to birding wherever they want. Then we rendezvous at the end of the day and share results and stories. In 2015, we have scheduled five breeding-season County Blitzes – join us here:

23 and 24 May: Sherman and Gilliam counties
30 and 31 May: Columbia and Clatsop counties
6 and 7 June: Wheeler County
13 and 14 June: northern Malheur County
27 and 28 June: Wallowa County

If you don’t like exploring too far from home, there is probably a Hotspot Square near you. Observations any time of year are valuable. So if you are headed out to your favorite local birding spot, check to see if there is a Hotspot Square nearby and make a few counts there, too. Even contributions of feeder birds are valuable. Most of us discount the value of our daily observations of common birds. Consider this: if you knew someone had counted birds at your favorite hotspot or in your current yard 300 years ago, would you take a look at those data to see how things have changed? Of course, you would! eBird allows us to make our observations today available to future birders. What’s normal and boring to you now may be very interesting in the not-so-distant future. Just log into eBird Northwest and report your observations.

Please contact us at Oregon2021@gmail.com (yes, that’s Oregon2021, not a typo) or visit our web site (Oregon2020.com) if you are interested.

Article by  W Douglas Robinson

Urban Crows

A recent report on Oregon Birding On-line (OBOL) about an urban Peregrine Falcon in Salem, Oregon got me to thinking about an urban PEFA we were lucky enough to spot in downtown Portland, Oregon in early December of 2014.

It seems beyond ironic that as the population of PEFAs seemed to have rebounded, the American Crow seems to have has replaced the feral pigeon as the most common urban bird in many American cities.

Here's an interesting 2001 UW article on the subject by John M. Marzluff, Kevin J. McGowan, Roarke Donnelly and Richard L. Knight.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/crows/Marzluff%20et%20al%202001%20Avian%20Urb%20Ecol.pdf

To the extent that the American Crow seems far too large and aggressive to provide good aerial prey for PEFAs, the odds of seeing these amazing predators in places like downtown Portland seems less likely than ever.

Here's a nighttime picture of just a few of the thousands of AMCRs that were roosting on SW 6th in Portland in early December 2014:

https://flic.kr/p/qi8Y9A

Undisclosed Location

Mike Patterson makes an excellent case for why it's not a God-given constitutional right for birders to invade people's neighborhoods, post their addresses, and generally make asses of themselves (and all other birders by reference).

But a word of warning.  Birders -- especially those of the Big Year ilk -- don't like to hear this message.  I innocently suggested the same idea a few years ago on the infamous (and now defunct) San Diego Bird listserve when hordes of birders had invaded yet another quiet residential neighborhood in search of some rarity. 

All I managed to accomplish then was to set off a torrent of seething vitriol that led me to quit posting anything on that listserve.  Or on any birding listserve for that matter.  Who needs the grief and kickback?

Nowadays I list all our birds -- from mundane to uber-rare -- on eBird.  If someone's looking for such a bird, the data is there for them to access.   But the last thing I want to do is to enable some self-serving fool who may jump in their car and blaze across the state, hoping to tick off that bird on their Big Year list.