THEY STILL DON'T GET IT

OR MAYBE THEY DO.  The environmentalist groups, that is.  I have said in the past, and I will say again here, that I am an environmentalist. In the respect that I believe in protecting the land and the air and the water. But the environmental groups that I have mentioned in previous posts just don't understand that. They have an agenda that is contrary to actually protecting the land. A few decades ago I took a picture of a cabin on the San Francisco River that had been there for decades.  Then these groups made the BLM and the USFS remove all cattle from public land, to protect the river, they said.  Now the river is grown over with scrub trees and brush that it is choking the river bed and there is no way that this cabin can be seen. Even in the winter time when the leaves fall.  Then, because they made the uneducated politics in the East pass laws that made logging public forests illegal and running cattle on them illegal and now the forests have grown so thick with brush and new trees and dead grass that when there is a fire, it grows and grows to catastrophic measures. They just don't realize that logging trees and running cattle help keep the forest healthy.  Now, they have proposed that 546,335 acres of stream side habitat in nine western states be set aside for the protection of the yellow billed cuckoo. this is a bird that lives along streams. The reason is to protect the rivers and streams in the named states. The rivers are the Sacramento, the Eel and the Kern in California, The Gila, the Colorado, the Verde and the San Pedro in Arizona, The Gila and the Rio Grande in New Mexico as well as rivers in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada and Texas. Michael Robinson an official with the Center for Biological Diversity said this was a victory for the cuckoo as well as the rivers and streams.  The cuckoo's decline is representative of the poor job we've done caring for our waterways, so this is a big step toward being better stewards of our rivers and steams, he said. Protecting these stream side habitats will also protect healthy water quality for people.
So, as I said, they just don't get it.  The unhealthy conditions of the streams and the forest started when they began to remove those from using these land and water areas and it has just gone downhill ever since.  Yep, As Mr. Robinson said, we have done a poor job of caring for the rivers and streams, and if they keep "protecting" these water ways for the purpose of a bird or a little fish or something that has existed in these waterways for century's, then the waterways will disappear along with the "protected" species.
There is definitely something cuckoo here, and it is not the yellow billed bird.
AND THAT'S THE VIEW FROM THE DITCH BANK