Not quite what The Sierra Club wanted

[pwd72s]

Rare Woodpecker Sends Town Running for Chain Saws

BOILING SPRING LAKES, N.C., (Sept. 24) -- Over the past six months, landowners here have been clear-cutting thousands of trees to keep them from becoming homes for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker.

The chain saws started in February, when the federal Fish and Wildlife Service put Boiling Spring Lakes on notice that rapid development threatened to squeeze out the woodpecker.

The agency issued a map marking 15 active woodpecker “clusters,” and announced it was working on a new one that could potentially designate whole neighborhoods of this town in southeastern North Carolina as protected habitat, subject to more-stringent building restrictions.

Hoping to beat the mapmakers, landowners swarmed City Hall to apply for lot-clearing permits. Treeless land, after all, would not need to be set aside for woodpeckers. Since February, the city has issued 368 logging permits, a vast majority without accompanying building permits.

The results can be seen all over town. Along the roadsides, scattered brown bark is all that is left of pine stands. Mayor Joan Kinney has watched with dismay as waterfront lots across from her home on Big Lake have been stripped down to sandy wasteland.

“It’s ruined the beauty of our city,” Ms. Kinney said. To stop the rash of cutting, city commissioners have proposed a one-year moratorium on lot-clearing permits.

The red-cockaded woodpecker was once abundant in the vast longleaf pine forests that stretched from New Jersey to Florida, but now numbers as few as 15,000. The bird is unusual among North American woodpeckers because it nests exclusively in living trees.

In a quirk of history, human activity has made this town of about 4,100 almost irresistible to the bird.

Long before there was a town, locals carved V-shaped notches in the pines, collecting the sap in buckets to make turpentine. These wounds allowed fungus to infiltrate the tree’s core, making it easier for the woodpecker to excavate its nest hole and probe for the beetles, spiders and wood-boring insects it prefers.

“And, voilà! You have a perfect woodpecker habitat,” said Dan Bell, project director for the Nature Conservancy in nearby Wilmington.

The woodpecker gouges a series of holes around the tree, creating “sap runs” to discourage the egg-gobbling black snake, the bird’s chief enemy. Because it can take up to six years to excavate a single nest hole, the birds fiercely defend their territory, said Susan Miller, a biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service. “They’re passed from generation to generation, because it’s such a major investment in time to create one cavity,” Ms. Miller said.

Like the woodpeckers, humans are also looking to defend their nest eggs.

Bonner Stiller has been holding on to two wooded half-acre lakefront lots for 23 years. He stripped both lots of longleaf pines before the government could issue its new map.

“They have finally developed a value,” said Mr. Stiller, a Republican member of the state General Assembly. “And then to have that taken away from you?”

Landowners have overreacted, says Pete Benjamin, supervisor of the federal agency’s Raleigh office.

Having a woodpecker tree on a piece of property does not necessarily mean a house cannot be built there, Mr. Benjamin said. A landowner can even get permission to cut down a cavity tree, as long as an alternative habitat can be found.

“For the most part, we’ve found ways to work with most folks,” he said.




Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

[widebody911]

What a bunch of peckerheads!

[legion]

The law of unintended consequences at work.

If the Sierra Club and their green buddies weren't such Nazis (completely non-compromising on their views), these kinds of things wouldn't happen. Instead, a town faced with essentially a complete economic shutdown, does what it can to survive.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by widebody911
What a bunch of peckerheads!

You can't trust the federal government, who by the way, has no Constitutional authority of any kind over privately owned land.

Still, I'd do the same thing here if I found out any government agency had plans for forced control of my land.

Fouch 'em.

[pwd72s]

Me too...I'd advertise free firewood in a heartbeat. That despite having planted my trees some 3 decades ago & feeling an attachment of sorts.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by pwd72s
Me too...I'd advertise free firewood in a heartbeat. That despite having planted my trees some 3 decades ago & feeling an attachment of sorts.

I didn't plant my 100'+ oaks and 130'+ Tulip Poplar's, and other tree's; but they're completely mine (and my wife's ), not the neighbor's and certainly not the government's.

This is one reason, not the biggest but close, for my having no regrets about leaving California; it's much worse out there.

[competentone]

In the late 1970's when all the "wet lands" legislation was being enacted, my parents had 7 lots on Lake Michigan -- they had purchased them a few years earlier for investment reasons.

An owner of some of the neighboring land was filling his property (it wasn't "swamp" but just low land) and warned my parents that they had better take action with their land if they wanted it to maintain its value. The neighbor was a lot more "tuned in" to the political changes than my parents were.

Unfortunately my parents didn't take the neighbor's advice. My mother sold the land in the 1990s for a fraction of what the lake-front property should have been worth. The government deemed that there was one buildable site on all seven lots; the rest of it was "protected" wet lands that could not be disturbed.

The environmental-terrorists are willing to protect the "rights" of every living creature, except for the rights of humans!

With this case in NC, I'm glad to see people taking action -- as best they can -- to try to maintain their rights to their property.

[cashflyer]

I think I would be bringing in a LOT of snakes.



...maybe by plane.

[mikester]

Originally posted by cashflyer
I think I would be bringing in a LOT of snakes.



...maybe by plane.

Nomination for best use of "snakes on a plane" comment for 2006.

[NICKG]

i hate the sierra club.

[stevepaa]

Well,
1) I don't see where Sierra Club is involved
2) I don't see a town in economic shutdown.

All I see is good old capitalist greed at work. "I got mine and the rest of the world can look after themselves."

[fastpat]

Originally posted by mikester
Nomination for best use of "snakes on a plane" comment for 2006.

Speaking of that, here's a story of a loss by the envirofascists in CA.

The State Fish & Game Dept., populated by environmental nut cases that are by and large opposed to the right to hunt and fish, decided to rid a lake north of the Bay area of a non-native species of fish, the Northern Pike if memory serves. To do so, they poisoned all the fish in the lake which entailed removing the dead fish, all at taxpayer's expense and putting several small businesses that catered to fishermen and boaters out of business permanently.

After they were done, some of the first fish taken from the lake to verify the the fish types in the lake were, you may have guessed, Northern Pike.

I have no idea how they got back into that lake. Neither does anyone else in the area. The dickheads at CA Fish & Game elected to not poison the lake a second time.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by stevepaa
Well,
1) I don't see where Sierra Club is involved
2) I don't see a town in economic shutdown.

All I see is good old capitalist greed at work. "I got mine and the rest of the world can look after themselves."

The Sierra Club in most states is an arm of The Wildlands Project, dangerous crackpots who would turn over 50% of the land area of North America into humanless wilderness at gunpoint.

There is no such thing as capitalist greed.

[Jeff Higgins]

The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Earth First!, Fund for Animals, PETA, The Humane Society of the United States, and other enviro-nazis have long put the welfare of animals and the environment above that of people. People are, in their view, no more than evil exploiters. There is a balance they do not understand; they are on the radical, rabid end of the spectrum. Unfortunately, government regulators listen to them. Regulators that are not directly accountable to us through the election process that determine (illegally) our use of private property.

With an already established track record of this kind of abuse directed towards citizens in other locales, with other protected species, plants, wetlands, forests, whatever, I cannot blame the landowners for their reaction. It's to be expected. If these environmental zealots had instead established a track record of working with landowners and such, these things would not backfire on them.

Years ago there was some little bird that caught their eye somewhere in California. The details are very fuzzy for me, as I didn't pay that much attention then, but maybe some one can help me out. It was apparently nesting in some particular kind of farm habitat. The enviro-nazis managed to get untold acres of farmland declared off-limits to its owners. In the end, rather than risk losing the use of affected fields or pastures, farmers adopted the "three S plan" - "shoot, shovel, and shut up". The birds all but dissapeared from the area; an area in which they once thrived in spite of (maybe because of) the farming.

[pwd72s]

The sad fact is, nobody "owns" real property these days. Use of property is restricted by the government. And the government collects"rent" in the form of property taxes. Property "owners" are in reality renters...with clear title, you rent from the Government.

[M.D. Holloway]

As long as the Gov keeps me and mine safe from the bad guys, the roads smooth, the schools safe and up to date - I have no problem wit dat and will serve my country well. Small price to pay for living the dream!

[stevepaa]

Originally posted by Jeff Higgins
The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Earth First!, Fund for Animals, PETA, The Humane Society of the United States, and other enviro-nazis have long put the welfare of animals and the environment above that of people. People are, in their view, no more than evil exploiters. There is a balance they do not understand; they are on the radical, rabid end of the spectrum.

Sorry, but it seems that the evil exploiters did show themselves in this case to be exactly that. There was no balance here.

The long term health of the environment is far more important than wealth making by a few individuals.

[pwd72s]

Originally posted by LubeMaster77
As long as the Gov keeps me and mine safe from the bad guys, the roads smooth, the schools safe and up to date - I have no problem wit dat and will serve my country well. Small price to pay for living the dream!

Was that a spotted owl's nest in the tree you cut down?

[bryanthompson]

Originally posted by Jeff Higgins
The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Earth First!, Fund for Animals, PETA, The Humane Society of the United States, and other enviro-nazis.....

Does it surprise anyone that these are also some of the main pushers of "global warming." They are fronts for anti-capitalists, endo story.

[pwd72s]

Originally posted by bryanthompson
Does it surprise anyone that these are also some of the main pushers of "global warming." They are fronts for anti-capitalists, endo story.

Famous professor of economics, Walter Williams, labels "greens" as "watermelons". Yeah, green on the outside, and in the middle...