Thursday, September 13, 2007

Letter from Robb Hamilton

Reader Robb Hamilton, who served on the California Bird
Records Committee from 1998 to 2001, emailed me this yesterday:
Yesterday I submitted the attached comments to the USFWS, and since they will become part of the public record I figure now's as good a time as any to stop lurking and add my name to the list of public skeptics. Feel free to publish this letter in any way you see fit -- maybe it will inspire others to write something to the Service before the deadline for comments.

I think you've done a real service to ornithology by keeping this story from sinking into the background of many peoples' consciousness. Your blog has been my constant source of information and updates, and without it I expect that I would have largely lost touch with the saga long ago. My only suggestion would be to consider adding one centralized page that provides links to the IbWo papers that have been published online, starting with the first one by Fitzpatrick et al. in Science (unless there are earlier ones that are relevant and that can be found on the web). I hope you'll ignore this suggestion if adding this page would entail cost or considerable work -- I just know that when I was putting this letter together it would have been great to have "one-stop-shopping" for all the relevant electronic publications (including those that the Service failed to cite in the recovery plan).

Thanks!
Robb Hamilton
Long Beach, CA
Robb attached this letter (PDF).

At Robb's request, I'll post a page of links to recent IBWO papers, etc. This will be available under "Links" at the upper right-hand corner of this blog.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you Robb for so clearly expressing your well-informed views. I will be sure to mention and fully endorse your excellent comments when I submit my own comments to the USFWS, using my real name of course.

Anonymous said...

tom, since for some reason you've decided to expand your horizons - an effort that I'm skeptical about for reasons related to fish and ponds, I'd like comment, to you and your readers.

I feel like it is proper to thank you for all the work you've done over the years.

So thank you tom, you have done us all a service. I appreciate your work. I've contributed in my own way, and I'm sad that you've decided to move on to carbon and climate instead of being what you were ... and from reading your "state of the blog post" I'm not sure you understand just how big you are.

What is it like to be on the radar of the secretary of interior, or for that matter in this case of the secretary of treasury (who used to fly Fitzpatrick down to AR), or the president of cornell, or a household name in the ranks of top birders ...

why you would choose the moment of your vindication to change tack eludes me ... but I wish you well.

Best regards,

a loyal fan

Anonymous said...

Good job, Robb.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous Marcus Ben Karkis wrote:

Well written Robb.

And thanks more to Tom Nelson, like I said years ago; at first I hated this web site, you killed my hopes and dreams.

Now I see that 100's or even 1000's of people are exploiting this false claim for money,fame, jobs, ego, god knows what reason.