LADWP causes bird loss in Silver Lake.

Great blue herons kicked out of Silver Lake.

I went over to Silver Lake right before I got sick, to take some photos of the lake as it was refilling. I had seen this sign up on the fence a couple of days earlier; SOMEONE took it down since I took the photo. It has the name of the photographer on the side: J. M. Harrison, and it was posted, not surprisingly, at the street corners of Hawick and West Silverlake Drive.

I understand what Mr. or Ms. Harrison was trying to do: very subtly tell the community that because Silver Lake was drained during the nesting and migrating season of thousands of birds, now there are no Great Blue Herons in the lake. (We have no way of knowing if they will ever come back, either, since they either didn’t reproduce this year, or went elsewhere.)

Thank you so much for alerting us to this, J. M. Harrison. Herons are very smart, sexy birds. And I like your clever takeoff on Missing Dog posters. But this is the dwp, people. I am all for subtlety in many many things, but why be indirect when a hammer is called for?

Could be that’s why JM is a photographer, and I’m a cartoonist.