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Health & Fitness

A Birder's View of the Shutdown

The government shutdown has closed "nonessential" services including the national parks that refresh us as a nation.

On October 1, the 123rd anniversary of the opening of Yosemite National Park (a fact noted by Google's doodle), the new fiscal year began for the U.S. government with no budget approved by Congress.

Thousands of government employees were put on unpaid furlough. Only "essential" services are being kept open while the mad men (and a few women) in the Congress try to work out a budget deal that doesn't gut a health care law that has barely started.

Among those "nonessential" services closed were the national parks, including Yosemite and the Statue of Liberty.

And not just the national parks. Anything that has "national" in its name, including national wildlife refuges and national wildlife management areas, were immediately closed.

Another sad coincidence besides Google celebrating Yosemite on the day it is forced shut: I received an email from New Jersey Audubon with its calendar of October events. Half of them are going to have to be cancelled.

October is an important month for bird watchers because the southbound migration is underway. Birds of the woods and seashore are on the move to get out of here before winter. They will be going to the very places the government has shut down as "unessential."

Here are a few:

Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, more familiarly known in the birding community as Brigantine, or Brig

Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge

Sandy Hook

Jockey Hollow

Walkill River National Wildlife Refuge

And that's just in New Jersey. Sandy Hook is part of the Gateway National Park system, as are New York's Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge and Shawangunk Grasslands National Wildlife Refuge plus the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

I would give provide links to these parks but you would get this notice of the closure from the government. Why bother going when it is closed?

Except these places are not closed. Most of them are sitting out there with very little in the way of keeping a determined birdwatcher, hunter, hiker or worse out. Some parks, such as Liberty Island or places with one main road in such as Sandy Hook, may be easier to block than others. But who's going to enforce that rule - one ranger in all that acreage? Get real.

I don't know if determined birders will be foolish enough to report what they see from closed areas to the New Jersey bird list, but it wouldn't surprise me. I've seen far worse behavior when these places have been open legally.

Luckily, state, county and local parks will not be affected by this lunacy in Washington, and those who can't do their birding at Brig or Sandy Hook will descend on other birding hotspots such as Cape May with its state park and areas run by either NJ Audubon or the Nature Conservancy.

I will be at a state park closer to home this weekend because, as I said, manmade disasters such as an inability to compromise or an attempt to sabotage an enacted law do not stop the birds that need to get south in a hurry and have to stop somewhere at dawn to feed and rest.

The birds face a lot of stress during migration: traveling long distances, finding food, trying to avoid predators, staying out of storms.

But as a society we face tons of stress, too. National parks may be "nonessential" to the budget guys and gals in Washington but they are our safety valve, the places where we let off steam from a daily grind that has gotten worse as our world gets more complicated and dangerous.

These places are refuges for us as well as the birds, and are very essential. Washington should not have gotten to the point where the parks or any other government agency that affects the lives of Americans are closed or severely limited.

Our elected "leaders" should've stepped back from the ideological abyss and done more to find common ground. Until recent years, that is what federal legislators did. But after years of gridlock, voters have become apathetic at the very time we must become more active.

Birders vote, and we should remember those who forced the government to shut down the national parks and vote them out.












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