President's February 2012 Message
By Tim Manns
Sometimes I’ve wished we lived on bigger property near forest or water, but central Mount Vernon has its advantages. For one, there’s the rare privilege of hearing Trumpeter Swans traveling on winter days at dusk and dawn between sleeping and feeding places. Even ardent non-birders stop and watch these gleaming giants pass overhead, close enough to hear wing beats.
Our towns can seem like islands isolated from the wild world, but birds remind us how permeated with wildness the places we live really are - permeated and connected to vast wilderness, as the places where Trumpeters summer in Alaska and Canada and where Tundra Swans and this winter’s Snowy Owls return even further north.
Trumpeter Swans passing the house were the first birds I noted in 2012, calling to each other as they flew over on January 1st even before I was up. Their presence is always an antidote to the disheartening things we read in the media, where slander, exaggeration, and worse substitute for reasoned debate and too often elevate the trivial or tragic above all else. Renewing and maintaining contact with the natural world offer escape or, better, a rebalanced perspective.
Birds are not immune to the effects of politically-charged subjects like land use and energy policy. In the morning the Trumpeters are bound for farm fields where they’ll glean spilled corn and frozen potatoes. Those fields and the bays provide habitat abundant enough for Skagit County to host more wintering Trumpeters than anywhere else. Farms and bays are also the key to the presence of those flashing clouds of Dunlin that Peregrines and Merlins pursue.
At January’s Audubon meeting, Ruth Milner described how Dunlin and other shorebirds use Port Susan and Skagit Bay mudflats at low tide, but depend on the bayside fields for high tide feeding and resting. However Skagit County may have looked long ago, it now presents birds and people with a great diversity of habitats, some good for them and us, some not. As people interested in the wider world of living things, it’s appropriate for us to be especially attentive to preserving and enhancing what makes this a good place for both people and wild creatures.
As I write this, a legislative committee in Olympia is considering a bill to eliminate the Growth Management Hearings Board and significantly reduce the effectiveness of the Growth Management Act. Without its protections, the habitats on which Swans, Dunlin, and many other species depend would be severely at risk, and that’s just one of many bills being introduced attacking the Act.
Also in the news lately is the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, unfortunately not entirely dead yet despite the many environmental threats the pipeline and tar sands oil extraction pose. Mining tar sands in Alberta directly reduces the boreal forest which supports an estimated 60% of Canada’s landbirds, almost 30% of all landbirds in the U.S. and Canada combined, and millions of waterfowl, and that is only part of the problem. The price of the avian wonders we enjoy in Skagit County is our constant vigilance and readiness to protect them.
