go on Saturday and you can call it a date

a couple years ago I posted this about the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s annual nationwide bird count. it’s coming around again this weekend; this year it starts on Friday and goes through Monday (February 13-16).

it’s pretty straightforward and you can go to the website for answers to other questions. questions like: why count birds?

another answer to that why? comes recently from the Associated Press.



for those of us hurriedly skimming through blogs at work, trying to catch up and letting our “fingers do the walking,” the National Wildlife Federation has put together a very accessible little brief that tries to answer the larger, trickier question: “why care about birds?”
the report shies away from the well, they’re alive. like us. answer and goes for something they’re hoping we can better relate to: “birdwatching makes a significant contribution to Utah’s economy.” here's something your car dealer who moonlights at the state legislature might pause to consider, once his intern has highlighted it for him: “$237 million in 1996.” the remaining net value of Utah songbirds gets summed up more or less as, “boy, but they sure are handy as moth eaters and mascots.”

and if birds still don’t get our attention, there’s always climate change’s gadfly equivalent of al-Qaeda and the four horsemen of the apocalypse: Killer Bees!

related: all your fishbase are belong to EOL