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Hummer invasion, legislative updates, and then...



Hi c-birders,

Just a quick check-in between trips out of town. I came back to find my 
hummingbird feeder bone dry, and groaned that my housemates had forgotten 
its weekly cleaning and refill. So I cleaned and refilled it myself. I 
returned two days later and found it already empty! Back in early June, 
when I left town, a single refill was lasting for more than a week. I 
filled it again and watched a dizzying battle of hummers, nearly all 
female/immature types, fighting over the sugar water. Wish I could stay 
and keep filling it every other day, but duty calls...

Speaking of duties, it sounds like Congress is doing theirs for a change. 
To start with, CARA - which has been discussed extensively here and on 
most birding listservs - passed both the house and senate. This means 
that the Land and Water Conservation Fund will be set up soon, providing 
money to purchase land for conservation at both federal and state levels. 
I watched the House debate this bill on CSPAN for a while, and while 
various folks (mostly Idaho rep. Helen Chenoweth) tried to attatch 
amendments to weaken the bill, virtually all of them failed. According to 
a post on another list, a similar debate over amendments to CARA will be 
going on today in the senate, but I won't have time to watch this one.

Also, some of you might remember Sidney Maddox' post back in May about 
Jessie Helms' attempt to waste over $100 million of our tax dollars on 
two huge jetties at Oregon Inlet, destroying large areas of coastal 
shore- and wading bird habitat. It also had the potential of causing 
erosion that would threaten Highway 12, our route to Pea Island NWR and 
Cape Hatteras. To do this he needed to attatch a rider stealing the land 
away from Pea Island NWR and Cape Hatteras National Seashore and giving 
it to the Army Corps of Engineers. Sidney's e-mail concerned his attempt 
to attatch this rider to the Agricultural Appropriations Bill. Apparently 
this failed. Now, a brief report in the Duke Chronicle 
<http://www.chronicle.duke.edu/chronicle/2000/07/19/16Verdictmay.html>
details that both Helms in the senate and US Representative Walter Jones 
in the house tried to attatch this rider to a Hurricane Floyd relief 
package. According to the report, they both failed! Maybe our government 
*does* know what they are doing, now and then...

Okay, back to field research, with a little stop on the way to visit 
those Scissor-tailed Flycatchers that everyone's talking about. See y'all 
in about a month!

Good birding,

Josh



Joshua S. Rose
Duke University
Department of Zoology

jsr6@acpub.duke.edu
http://www.duke.edu/~jsr6/