Nature film showing tonight at library

To the editor:

Readers, I want you to consider the voices of those that you do not hear, to listen for the sounds of nature that are diminishing or no longer there. They have been waning for decades and in one century alone, have disappeared forever from the planet.

During this summer, I kept my eye on the telephone wire near my house where at least three or more mourning doves sat each day. Sometime in very early September, the little group of doves was suddenly gone. However, it was still very warm out and so too early to fly south for the winter, but I knew this interesting variable that most have forgotten: the mourning dove hunting season had begun on Sept. 1.

Republicans, the NRA and one strong Democrat, pushed this legislation for dove hunting through (actually snuck it through) this spring without the opportunity for public comment or protest. What most people do not realize is the high numbers of doves that are killed in a hunting season. In my home state of Wisconsin, the first year this same legislation was passed, a quarter of a million doves of peace were killed, stripping us of their beauty and cooing sounds.

The famed conservationist and ecologist, Aldo Leopold, was an environmental leader in the 1920s, ?30s and ?40s. He kept track of the numbers of birds and animals in a given territory each week of the year. During those decades, he documented the presence and disappearance of thousands of wolves, waterfowl and other wildlife; and as a hunter, he spent a great deal of time in the field noticing and recording these changes that occurred over his lifetime.  

A skyscape barren of beautiful bird species, is not a happy place to live in ? too much beauty is lost, not to be replaced. I wish I could have lived 100 years ago, when the skies were actually darkened with flocks of birds. In the last century, so many of these sites and sounds of nature have disappeared from the planet forever.      

If you care about nature as I do, and want to preserve what we have, please attend the 7:30 p.m. showing today at the Fairfield Public Library of a documentary film about the legacy of Aldo Leopold. This beautiful film, ?Green Fire,? is sponsored by the southeast chapter of the Sierra Club-The Leopold Group. Please take the time to learn about the work and conservation efforts of Aldo Leopold, author of ?A Sand County Almanac.?

? Susan Chapin, Fairfield