Snowy Plovers Capture Oregon Beaches - Birds In, Humans and Predators Out

By Dennis M. Becklin
Publisher / SouthernOregonNews.com

Oregon - The latest assault on public access to American lands is in full swing...this time in the name of saving the Snowy Plover. Until one looks at the breadth of the assault on human access to public beaches from Washington to California, it's difficult to accept the fact that the Snowy Plover is about to dictate that Oregon's beaches are about to be denuded of humans and all of their trappings...and all of nature's predators, too.

If you haven't read anything except Oregon newsrag articles and editorials on this subject, you probably have reason to believe that the poor little snowy plovers are just about extinct. In fact, most of the published articles I've read during a recent internet search on this subject said almost the same thing about the "threatened" status of this bird under the Endangered Species Act.

Almost all articles that cite numbers of known nesting pairs of plovers in Oregon leave the dire indication that there are just a few left...maybe less than a hundred or so. Not so. http://www.americanbirding.org/programs/conscvp1.htm

The American Birding Association, in its 1996 report on Convention Conservation Programs indicated that approximately 4,500 plovers were living along the Pacific Coast from Southern Washington to the Yukatan Peninsula in Mexico to Western Florida.

BUT...The majority of the plover population, an additional 18,000 birds in 1996, breed at inland saline lakes in the Great Basin Desert and in the Midwest. Studies in the 1990's indicated that upwards of 10,000 plovers nested annually at Great Salt Lake.

So what's up here? The enviros have methodically moved against human use of beaches from Washington to Southern California. All you need to do to see the scope of the assault on human use of the beaches is to read some of the articles that are available from a Google search of the term "Snowy Plover Population".

http://www.google.com/search?q=snowy+plove...-8&start=0&sa=N

Fascinating. There are numerous websites that celebrate the progress made in protecting habitat for plovers at the expense of human use of public beaches...from Southern California to Washington.

Take a look at two photos of a beach in Southern California on the following website. The first is a photograph of the way the beach looked when those bad human beings were enjoying it. The second photograph is the after-human picture...the safe-for-plovers-and-bird-watchers picture. http://soundwaves.usgs.gov/2004/01/

And, if roping off miles of sandy beaches to prevent human use isn't sufficient...let's just poison all of the plover's predators along the Oregon coast. In 2003, on the Oregon coast, the snowy plover made real population gains...because the authorities poisoned hundreds of crows, ravens and red foxes. Success, at last... We'll just kill all of the bad birds and bad critters that eat those cute little plovers on Oregon's beaches...so we Oregonians can have an artificially large population of plovers and fewer of those bad predators.

Until...of course, the bad predators end up on the ESA "threatened" list...or enough people get angry about the wanton killing of these species to demand yet another change in "conservation" policy.

In case you don't already comprehend the obvious...This battle is not about the extinction of the Snowy Plover, which is not becoming extinct. The world's largest population of them are at the Great Salt Lake in Utah, but the birders apparently don't like to spend time on those beaches.

This battle is really about which humans control access to the ocean beaches...and the forests...and the deserts...and the rest of America's publicly owned lands - that means lands owned by you and me.

Given the continuing march of radical environmentalism, one day there will be few refuges left for humans...except concrete jungles to which they must someday be confined to protect the rest of Mother Earth. With vast areas of the national forests inaccessible to anyone except able-bodied hikers...with fewer miles of beach accessible to humans...etc.... etc...

Get used to being increasingly confined in tightly controlled spaces, unless there is sufficient demand by enough Americans to push back the policies of radical environmentalism. At least there is one effort underway in court to fight the Snowy Plover ESA listing.

http://www.sandmountain-nv.org/Snitz/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=928

For more information on the abuses employed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service when petitioning for ESA listing of the plover, check this website.

http://www.restoringamerica.org/archive/en...ting_abuse.html

The advice I offer to all of the apathetic humans amongst us is a lot like my advice on eating tofu instead of eating salmon and red meat. Get used to it, if you don't put up a fight to prevent it. Get used to being systematically prohibited from accessing more and more of your public lands. Get used to eating more tofu...a lot more tofu. By the time all of the radicals and their media pals have succeeded in scaring the salmon, meats and poultry out of your local grocery store...we may all be forced into vegetarianism. So, too, will your access to the American lands be denied.

Dennis M. Becklin, Publisher

http://www.applegateoregonnews.com/article...177444&cp=10963