Acorn woodpeckers: Please sign petition asking Rossmoor NOT to kill them
By Gary Bogue
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 6:36 am in Acorn woodpeckers, Rossmoor Retirement Community.
Acorn woodpecker by Brian Murphy, Walnut Creek, Calif.
In case you haven’t already noticed, there’s a problem with acorn woodpeckers in Walnut Creek’s Rossmoor Retirement Community.
The acorn woodpeckers are pecking holes in some of the buildings. This is a common problem when you construct buildings in the middle of an oak woodland open space area. Unfortunately, Rossmoor wants to kill up to 50 of these birds, rather than use some of the non-fatal solutions that are available to them.
A committee formed of members of our own local Mt. Diablo Audubon Society, using resources from a collection of renowned acorn woodpecker authorities from Cornell University, UC-Berkeley and UC-Davis, has volunteered to help Rossmoor solve their problem. And a volunteer from the Walnut Creek Open Space Association has also volunteered to set up artificial acorn woodpecker granaries around the problem areas to attract the woodpeckers AWAY from the buildings.
Killing the woodpeckers won’t solve the problem. New woodpeckers will simply move into the area to replace woodpeckers that are killed. That’s how the natural world works.
Instead, Rossmoor needs to listen to the experts and work with local volunteers to REALLY solve the problem WITHOUT killing any birds.
Please sign petition:
There’s a new Web site that has lots more details about Rossmoor and the acorn woodpeckers PLUS a petition that you can sign asking Rossmoor NOT TO KILL THE WOODPECKERS. Please sign it:
http://help4wildlife.wordpress.com
Thanks for caring. /Gary
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December 10th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Signed! Hope many more do the same!
December 12th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
I hope and pray that Rossmoor will not kill the woodpeckers. I find it very difficult to comprehend that “we – humans” want to live in “their” natural environment, yet when “they” get in “our way” we decide to kill them. How ghastly unfair to the creature. They never asked that we invade their territory. Please Rossmoor, work with the professionals and please don’t kill the woodpeckers. I thought I heard that you also a professional killer for the wild turkeys, what’s next, hunting, killing old people.
December 13th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Destroying wildlife when there are other solutions is short sighted and creates a void in the ecology of our planet. Don’t do it! Us better methods than killing acorn woodpeckers to solve this problem!
December 18th, 2008 at 7:35 am
These birds are beautiful! They are most welcome here in Martinez, where we have an abundance of cork oaks.
December 18th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Really! Why do the Rossmoreans insist on killing the woodpeckers, by gun no less, when the Audubon Society and others tell them this does NOTHING to solve the problem, just kill a bunch of birds. Really. What is with these people. Are they senile or something?
December 21st, 2008 at 11:06 am
That may be true, Kit. I think it’s worse than that, though. I think they are spiritually dead and hopelessly rigid. It’s unfortunate. I see some elderly people who have become expansive and brave in their old age. That doesn’t seem to be the case in Rossmoor. Instead, they want a parklike setting; but, they don’t want any real animals to live there. I imagine that the whole place is lacquered with pesticides, so they don’t have to worry about a single bug jumping on them as they hobble around. It’s a sign of their times – the age when asbestos and pesticides were good things and nature was to be conquered and destroyed. Let’s hope there are enough real human beings over there to override this hideous “final solution.” There are a number of genuinely kind solutions to this dilemma.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
I’m going to broad brush selfish developers and development management. If they left the dead trees alone and built the structures out of durable materials not styrofoam. The woodpeckers are a positive asset. ps aren’t they protected by the Migratory Bird Act? The developers may be rich how do they trump this international treaty?