The desire to see more birds remains strong
During the 1930s, a drought afflicted much of the central and western U.S. The drought caused many wetlands to go dry. This climate situation overlapped with two human cultural factors: longterm over-hunting and large-scale water diversion, and the combined effect dramatically reduced certain bird populations.
In 1934 President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act, which established a protocol to raise revenue for the federal government to buy, preserve and protect wetland ecosystems vital to the survival of huntable waterbirds, notably ducks and geese.
Specifically, the law requires that anyone who hunts waterfowl must buy a stamp — now generally known as the “duck stamp” — as a validation to any state’s general hunting license. The money generated from the stamp sales can then be used to establish, manage and maintain what are now known as national wildlife refuges.
Stamp sales have generated just shy of a billion dollars that have been invested in protecting almost 6 million acres of wildlife habitat.
In 1943 duck stamp funds were used to purchase 2,088 acres of Rio
Grande floodplain near Mcallen, Texas, which became Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. Since that acquisition to protect wetlands essential for migratory waterfowl, cultural traditions have steadily changed.
Hunting no longer figures as prominently in the private lives of American citizenry as it once did, but engaging live animals has escalated and now constitutes “ecotourism.”
Many wildlife refuges now attract more wildlife watchers than hunters. Santa Ana’s three square miles support 393 bird species, several of which occur nowhere else in the U.S. Those are the birds that beckoned me.
I first learned of Santa Ana in the 1970s. My ongoing connection to birds kept Santa Ana a blinking light in that connection.
My friend, Jeff, finally convinced me we needed to go there so we did last month.
The recreational birder in me had been topped out at 492 birds for quite awhile. Seeing eight more species would bring me to 500, a much more gratifying round number.
We spent an afternoon walking around Pintail Lakes. The 80-degree heat favored resting in some shade at a place with a roof over a half dozen picnic tables. The one where we got the best shade was just 10 feet from a wall of shrubs and trees that encircled the picnic area.
Three chachalacas came near, so I picked up a couple animal crackers from the ground beneath our table and tossed them to the big birds. They charged in and gobbled them down.
Then I heard a rustling noise in the shrubs. I stood, walked closer, searched for the source of the sound and was hugely rewarded.
A long-billed thrasher came into plain view and presented itself to me as life bird number 500! And more: of 10 resident members of the thrasher family in the U.S., it was the last one for me to find.
But then I managed to find a hook-billed kite (501), a rose-throated becard (502), a neotropical cormorant (503) and a green kingfisher (504).
Seeing those birds filled me with genuine birding pleasure but also left me with an awkward sense of incompleteness. I mean, after all, 504 life birds is just as incomplete as was 492. I can see only one way to resolve this.
I need to go for 600!