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Hello and welcome to the American Burning podcast from the American Burning Association.

I am your host, Nate Swick.

We talk sometimes here about how important it is for people to have what I call nature literacy

and how birding is an excellent contributor to that, not least of which, because if you're

going to be a person making decisions about policies

that impact birds and wildlife, it helps to have the right sort of information. Because,

as birders know, as much as anyone, there's a lot of bad information about birds out there.

And making decisions based on bad information leads to bad laws,

bad policies, or at least an extremely embarrassing situation. This is all preamble to recent news

out of Kentucky where a state senator Gary Boswell introduced Senate Bill 59 last week called the hawk bill, wherein it would

prohibit the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife from enforcing and imposing fines on the

taking, by that I mean shooting or poisoning, of Cooper's hawks or red-tailed hawks and only

Cooper's hawks and red-Tailed Hawks. These birds are

obviously protected, as are all native bird species in the U.S. and Canada, by the Migratory Bird

Treaty Act. Violators are potentially subject to fines in jail time. The latter is rarely

...