Good For A Few Smart People From Texas

Whooping cranes are Canada's most endangered species, with a population of fewer than 300. All of them nest in Wood Buffalo National Park.

The Aransas Project alleges birds starved to death because of diversions for industrial and municipal water use from the Guadalupe River, allowed by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

The group says those diversions raised the salinity in the bays and estuaries around the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge — the whooping cranes' only winter feeding grounds. As a result, two critical components in the crane's diet — blue crabs and wolfberries — are less common, a release from the organization said.

"We had birds staggering around and starving to death and falling down in front of people. And that's absolutely intolerable. That should be intolerable from the point of view of both countries," said Ron Outen, regional director for the Aransas Project.

America needs more people like the Texans with brains who are taking on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. (Now that is an oxymoron, since Texas & environmental quality just do not seem to go together. Legal murder, George Bu$hCo, & Texas, now that makes sense.) It appears that I am bashing Texas, well, I am bashing Texas. I've been there a couple of times. They have tanks, not lakes. Their whitetail deer are the size of Scottish Wolfhounds. (Those would be the normal deer, not the obscenely large antlered deer who are basically fed stuff to make the antlers grow. If you've every watched a hunting show on the teevee that has a Texas whitetail hunt, you know what I mean when I use the word obscenely.) & the worst of all, for the second biggest state in America, there is almost no public land. Texas is one example of the free market & private enterprise & private property run completely amok. Anyway, I'm glad that Texas may, I stress may, be held accountable for the horror of the starving whooping cranes. This story, & the sad news from Indiana, make me despair for America's ability to actually right the horrible wrongs we have committed.

Identified by her leg band, the bird shot was the mother of “Wild-1″, the only Whooping Crane chick successfully hatched and migrated from captivity in 2006.

My emphases.