THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 3, 1995 TAG: 9510030261
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
Some folks whose company I most enjoy are bird-watchers.
Bird-watchers, an innocent lot, God wot, go around peering in trees at birds. How refreshing to watch them watch birds.
To my chagrin a month ago, listening to ``With Good Reason'' on WHRO Radio, I learned that a few watchers are disrupting the lives of rare birds. When they hear that one is about, they take along a tape recorder and play the song of the particular species they want to attract.
The bird in the bush hears the tape and comes to investigate. The watchers get a good look at it, then put its name on their life lists.
To fly requires a huge output of energy, so that a bird spends much time seeking food. To interrupt that busy being, whether it is eating, courting, building a nest or feeding offspring, is a disservice.
Surviving is hard enough without being at the beck of a tape.
Philip Shelton, biologist at Clinch Valley College, decried that practice with which people distract birds.
Interviewed by Carolyn Elliott, the host of ``With Good Reason,'' Shelton noted that he keeps track of rare birds atop Mount Rogers, Virginia's highest point at 5,729 feet. It adjoins neighboring White Top Mountain at 5,520, slumbering whales on the horizon.
Spruce and firs abound. Among them, in June and July, six to eight male Swainson's thrushes used to sing courtship songs. In the spring of 1994 and 1995 they were reduced to only three or four.
After two months, the Swainson's thrushes set out for South America, the hazard to their lives. ``Where they are going to winter might not be there anymore,'' Shelton told me by phone Monday.
South Americans ``are tearing up their continent as we did ours in the last century. It's hard for us to tell them not to tear it up since we already did ours,'' he said.
The hermit thrush, which hangs around all year, is doing fine and is spreading to other stands of spruce at high altitudes, he said.
Shelton hasn't seen a yellow-bellied flycatcher in eight years. He heard one about four years ago.
In 1970, frequent human visitors interfered with nesting flycatchers.
Where a population dwindles to a few birds of one species, each knows the songs of the other birds and, on hearing the taped song, wastes vital time in looking for the supposed newcomer, Shelton said.
``With Good Reason,'' fostered by a consortium of Virginia's state colleges and universities, airs interviews by Elliott on Monday at 1:30 p.m. on WHRO 89.5 FM. They are repeated Saturday at 10:30 a.m. on Norfolk State University's WNSB Radio, 91.1 FM.
Invariably they catch my interest, even those with a topic that, ordinarily, wouldn't hold me. Elliott is that appealing.
Next Monday's topic, ``A Nation of Victims,'' focuses on the proposed congressional caps on lawsuits and on the abuse excuse. ILLUSTRATION: [Color drawing]
The yello-bellied flycatcher
by CNB