Don’t know whether you saw today’s story

about the Community Preservation Act being passed in both state houses for Westchester and Putnam County. It allows the towns and cities – not villages – within those two counties to decide whether they want to charge real estate fees to fund the purchase of open space, farmland or historic property within their borders. It has to be passed in each community after a public referendum and after local leaders devise a master plan for the land acquisitioin, but it give residents a chance to control their quality of life a little more if they’re willing to pay for it.

Adam Bradley and Vinnie Leibell are your state lawmakers to boo or cheer on this, depending on your opinion.

Is Long Island Sound or the Hudson River a big part of your life? Do you
swim often at local beaches? Do you fish or sail on the sound or the river?

If so, we want to hear from you.

How is the water now compared with years
ago? How is the fishing? What sea life and birds have you seen in recent
years that hadn’t been there for a while?

Let us know. Comment here or contact us.

For Long Island Sound: Staff writer Ken Valenti at klvalent@lohud.com or 914-696-8255.

For the Hudson River: Staff writer Laura Incalcaterra at lincalca@lohud.com or 845-578-2486.

The state Assembly has passed a bill designed to let Westchester and Putnam communities voluntarily establish community preservation funds to protect the region’s natural resources from overdevelopment, according to Assemblyman Adam Bradley, a White Plains Democrat.

The idea is to let communities charge a transfer tax on real estate sales of up to 2 percent and decide which types of land should be purchased to protect open space.

The legislation, which still must be approved the state Senate, is modeled after the Peconic Bay Community Preservation Fund on Long Island. That fund started in the 1990s and according to Bradley has helped preserve hundreds of millions of dollars of land. It is made up of five towns and protects the east end of Long Island’s open spaces.

Anyone walking into Kent Town Hall these days may notice a collection of bird droppings littering the building’s front porch in two spots. Well, if you look up you will find two nests, each home to some busy barn swallows. The nests are tucked up in two corners of the portico that overhangs the steps.

The adult birds spend their days arcing through the air in front of the Town Hall, catching insects on the wing to bring back to their kids. One nest is chock-full of young ‘uns. I couldn’t tell who was home on the other.

And, according to this tidbit from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, size apparently does matter for these birds.

“The long tail of a Barn Swallow may indicate the quality of the individual bird. Females prefer to mate with males that have the longest and most symmetrical tails.”

I saw a ruby-throated hummingbird flit by this morning, stopping briefly in the flower garden in the front of my house to see what offerings were in bloom. Flit (to move lightly and swiftly; fly, dart, or skim along), I think, is such a good verb for these tiny birds that look more like they’re being pulled on a string through the air rather than flying.

Many times when I see one, I don’t realize it until I replay the scene over in my head. They zip by so quick that it doesn’t register for a second or two. There is one plant in the garden that the hummingbirds seem to favor. It eventually sprouts tiny red flowers on long stalks. Knowing birds better than I do plants, that’s about the extent of my flora description.

Anyway, more on hummingbirds can be found here.

Congress, as we blog, is working on the 2007 Farm Bill, a massive piece of legislation that touches upon food, energy, trade, anti-poverty policy and, yes, environmental issues.

The Farm Bill, advocates stress, can provide incentives for farmers and other landowners to conserve land – staving off sprawl and protecting various ecosystems.

Want to keep up on the debate as work on the Farm Bill progresses? Then check out The Ruminant, a blog by Environmental Defense focused on that debate. If nothing else, it’s a cool blog title. . .

If you hold a state fishing license, you may soon receive a questionnaire as part of the state’s first freshwater angler survey since 1996. The survey is meant to get input from anglers on the state of the state’s fisheries resource and on the Department of Environmental Conservation’s efforts to manage it.

“New York has an extremely diverse freshwater fishery, providing a wide range of angling opportunities,” DEC Commissioner Pete Grannis said. “Surveys such as these provide anglers with the opportunity to tell us what their preferences are, what we can do to better manage our freshwater fishery resources, and how we can improve the opportunities these resources provide. We hope that those anglers who receive a survey take the time to carefully review, complete and return it.”

Cornell University is conducting the survey and 17,000 questionnaires will be sent out in three phases beginning this month and also in October and December. A total of 54,000 anglers were randomly selected from the state’s computerized records of license holders.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species — referred to as CITES — has approved the sale of ivory by four African nations.

International ivory sales were first banned by this group in 1989, but some nations with elephants have sought to open up the ivory trade.

CITES is an international agreement between governments. It works to ensure that international trade in wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival.

Yes, to get the ivory you kill the elephants.

CITES said in a press release today that there were good reasons to once again allow the ivory sales.

A new analysis released today by the National Audubon Society shows there have have been significant — the organization used the word “alarming� — declines of some of the nation’s most common and beloved birds.

Audubon names development, loss of habitat and global warming as the culprits.

The organization combined data from the longest-running uninterrupted bird census — Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count — with information from the Breeding Bird Survey to study how populations of all common North American species routinely encountered in these surveys have fared during the past 40 years.

The Christmas Bird Count is the product of swarms of volunteers — citizen scientists — who counted birds every winter and submitted their reports to Audubon.

The Breeding Bird Survey is a standardized morning count of birds along roadsides organized by the U.S. Geological Survey and conducted by volunteers from May into July.

Among the birds that have declined the most since 1967 are the boreal chickadee, the Eastern meadowlark, several species of sparrow, the whip-poor-will, and the little blue heron.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation today released its 2007 list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.

Among the entries are Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront, a World War II internment camp and historic places in states where new power lines are proposed.

The trouble facing most places is mostly due to two things:
• the sites are in areas being redeveloped and face being torn down.
• the sites are in remote areas and are being neglected.