Red Rock Audubon Field Trip to Basin and Range National Monument Memorial Day Weekend

Originally posted on by Jim Boone on Bird & Hike
Audubon members participated in a successful mining claim marker take-down and trash pick-up field trip, helping save birds and bees and removing trash from our shared public lands.

Red Rock Audubon teamed up with BirdAndHike.com, and six birders headed three hours north to Basin and Range National Monument, one of the new national monuments in Nevada. Our goal was to go camping and do a bit of birding, but mainly to knock down a bunch of illegal, abandoned, bird-killing hollow-pipe mining claim markers. These hollow-pipes act as traps for cavity nesting birds and other creatures that seek hollow cavities (e.g., old woodpecker holes in a Joshua tree, rotten holes in old cottonwood trees, etc.). Birds go into the pipes to inspect the “cavity” for nesting, but then can’t get out. Birds, lizards, chipmunks, bats, and insects of all kinds become trapped in the pipes and die from thirst or starvation. Read more...