Tomorrow, Friday, June 27, the 2008-2009 duck stamp goes on sale.

The stamp is one of the best conservation tools we have. It’s been supporting birds of all kinds for 75 years now. All birders should buy one.

Duck stamps pump big-time money into conservation of many of the birds you love, be they ducks or not. Waterfowl hunters must buy the stamp if they’re going to hunt. You can do it as an inexpensive and readily available conservation effort.

Stamps are sold at most post offices, at some sporting-goods stores, including Wal-Mart, I believe, and over the Internet.

Stamp money – 98 cents of every dollar – is used by the federal government to buy or lease wetland habitat for protection in the national wildlife refuge system.

Many, many non-game bird species benefit from refuge land. They needn’t be ducks. This is a no-brainer for me. I’ll be at my local post office tomorrow morning with $15 in hand (the cost of the stamp). I’ll bring it home and tape it to the front of my Sibley bird guide, where my earlier stamps reside.

Joe Hautman of Plymouth painted this stamp, showing a pair of pintails. The 2009-2010 contest to choose the next stamp painting will be held in Bloomington in October. There will be several public events.

Stay tuned. When you buy your stamp, do you display it? How?

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 8:15 am and is filed under Bird conservation, Go places to go birding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.