PJNet

So I am sitting in my backyard in Marietta, Georgia with my new spotting scope honed into the nest of a pair of Red-shouldered hawks. There are at least two baby hawks in the nest. I see what looks like fur covered golf balls with beaks occasionally pop up their heads, mostly for raw flesh ripped from the prey one of the parental pair feeds the two or more eyas.

So it got me thinking. What if I open my backyard up to anyone who loves birding and nature and then have an environmental journalist with an entrepreneurial spirit come to my backyard each day and build a community with these visiting nature lovers.

My contribution is my backyard with its straight-line view of the hawk. The nature lovers’ contribution, let’s say, $25 to $50 each to help underwrite the journalist so he or she can do pure environmental stories. Right from the beginning we would get input from the birders and other nature lovers on how to build this community supported journalism experiment.

I could check with the folks at Atlanta and Georgia public broadcasting stations to be sure they would edit and take the environmental journalist’s materials so we had wide distribution. Maybe the Atlanta Journal-Constitution would be willing too.

The biggest challenge: We don’t have a lot of time; those little fur covered golf balls are getting bigger by the minute. So if you know an environmental journalist in the Atlanta metro area, tell him or her to give me a call or send an email.

Want to see the hawk? This is a jerrybuilt video taken with my little point and shoot camera attached to my new Orion GoScope 350, a bottom of the line but nifty little spotting scope I bought yesterday. I will try to improve the shots and of course anyone with high-powered equipment is welcome to come to the backyard to get real great photos and video.

If you look closely in the first sequence, you can see those little fur covered golf balls.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.