Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 19:03:17 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Katrina Knight Subject: Re: Disrespectful Behavior of Sandhill Crane Watchers In-Reply-To: <200008031647.MAA24735@umd5.umd.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed On 12:38 PM 8/3/00 Gail Mackiernan wrote: > and if you >see someone acting inappropriately, for Heaven's sake SPEAK UP. >EVERYONE THERE >SPEAK UP -- and LOUDLY! "Hey you, get off the grass! Park on the >road!" >Whatever. Don't be a wuss. If everyone who is present joins in, the >offender will almost certainly retreat. Don't count on it. I have attempted to stop people from going where they shouldn't at a certain birding location near me. It often doesn't do much good. The spot in question has a knee-high stone wall and many no trespassing signs. Even my warnings that the fine for being caught on the wrong side of the wall is fairly large and the local police drive by frequently don't sway the offenders. Some people just 'have' to be on the other side of the barrier. (In truth, they aren't actually harming anything by being there, but the rules are the rules and I didn't make them and I want birders to obey them.) >Unless birders behave responsibly, we will not learn about rarities. >In Britain >many rare birds are "suppressed" because the site simply cannot handle >the >number of twitchers who show up, and with so many birders, even a very >small >percent of bad apples is a substantive number. One bad apple is too many. I figure that 90-some percent of the birders that show up usually behave properly. A few of the others are just being stupid and failing to think about what they are doing. The others are being willfully unreasonable. The ones who don't think can usually be talked into better behavior fairly quickly. The others are another matter. I have talked to people who pretty much think they have a god-given right to see every bird they want to see, whether or not they can get legal access to the site and whether or not they are disturbing the bird. These people are ruining things for the rest of us. Even if we all refuse to pass information directly to them, we can't stop them from finding out through mailing lists and web sites unless we want to stop announcing what we see and create an elite group of people that we tell individually. We need to find a way to punish the offenders in a way that hurts them personally. Which then brings up the questions of who is going to decide which bahavior is a bad enough offense to punish and who is going to decide if the person in question actually committed the offense. This is the stuff of nightmares. -- Katrina Knight kknight@epix.net Reading, PA ========================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ========================================================================== ==========================================================================