This one’s for the birds, but I hope you will take it seriously and do the right thing.
The solutions seem so simple as to make this act of corporate environmental stewardship seem nearly a no-brainer.
“It is not far-fetched to predict that annual tower kills across North America will soon exceed 5 million songbirds a year,” said Bill Evans, a biologist at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology, Ithaca, N.Y.
Evans was quoted in the latest edition of “Audubon,” the bimonthly magazine for The National Audubon Society, Washington, D.C., of which I am a member.
“Television broadcasters and wireless telephone firms often build their towers on ridges and mountaintops where they act as steel obstacle courses for migrating birds … The birds often are decapitated by the thin, taut guy wires on the tall towers,” the article goes on to say.
Audubon cites Federal Communications Commission estimates of 75,000 such towers across the United States. Before the FCC authorizes the additional towers planned for construction within a year, the Audubon Society has asked it first to conduct an environmental impact study.
Is this really necessary? It wouldn’t be if the telecommunications industry would contact the agricultural, aviation and electric power industries to find out about those bird deterrents that work well and cheaply, and then use them.
Anyone who has ever been to a zoo aviary must have read that our feathered friends have better eyesight in many respects and by orders of magnitude than humans. We got the better brains and with them the obligation for visionary thinking.
Let me close with this prayer and legacy from my late grandfather, who was a Utah sheep rancher. “Thank you, Lord, for giving us one more day to prove we’re not the jackasses you think we are.”
