Show some love to crows

This is a short reply to the June 28 column by Angie Vogt (“Angie, get your gun: Let’s shoot some crows”).

Perhaps Ms. Vogt’s recent tirade against crows needs to be addressed in order for her to better understand certain pertinent facts.

Crows are in the corvid family of birds, including not only crows, but ravens, jays and magpies. All native birds, including the above, are protects under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, and that means it is illegal to kill or shoot crows — period.

In addition, crows and their allies are known to have the highest intelligence of any of our native birds. While we may enjoy our backyard birds such as robins, chickadees, wrens and nuthatches, their intelligence is far below that of the corvids (crows).

Although frustration is the name of the game here, crows and their kin do us a tremendous service every day by helping to clean up the messes we humans make at fast-food places, at parks, beaches, campgrounds and wherever humans tend to gather.

Yes, they can be maddening to us humans with their raucous calls and increasing presence in our community and in our own comfort zone, just as we too keep increasing our numbers on this finite planet.

Thais Bock,

Federal Way

our nation’s energy crisis

I am worried. I am worried about the energy crisis.

I am worried, too, by the crisis in high cost of food that has been brought on by the foolish policy of our government to make fuel out of food (ethanol).

So I wrote a letter to our U.S. Senator, Maria Cantwell. She is on the Senate energy committee. I voiced my concerns and received a long two-page answer from her. Let me try to condense it.

She is working hard on trying to uncover market manipulators. She is working hard to develop more energy alternatives (i.e. wind, solar, etc.).

She is working on ways to conserve energy. She had not much to say about increasing the supply of energy. She said the U.S. owns only 3 percent of the world’s reserves.

She also said that drilling in Alaska (ANWR) would reduce the cost of gas at the pump by only one penny.

In 1950, I was in a class at Oregon State University where the professor said that the world had only a 20-year supply of oil. I was foolish then. I believed him. I don’t believe him anymore.

I also don’t believe Sen. Cantwell when she says we have only 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves and I don’t believe her claim that the price of gas would go down only a penny if we drilled in ANWR.

We need to become more energy self-sufficient. But it is a long road to get there from here. We need to work at all alternatives. The biggest ones are to drill for oil and build nuclear plants.

We should stop objecting to these efforts. Nuclear plants are being used safely all over the world. We can safely drill offshore.

Not a drop of oil was spilled in the Gulf of Mexico during Hurricane Katrina. The environment has not been harmed in Alaska.

We should remember that every barrel of oil we produce from our own resources is one barrel less that we have to buy from our enemies.

Leo J. Thoennes,

Federal Way