I agree with everything you said in that post, except the trees. This is based on what I have heard, and I have no way to verify it, but I understand that in the West, where I live, there are so many more trees than there used to be, that it dwarfs deforestation in other parts of the world. This area (from California, into Oregon, Washington and Canada) is supposed to be the largest, or second largest rain forest on the planet (the Amazon would be the other) with tree populations around 10 times what they used to be on average. (Funny, it doesn't seem like a rainforest when it is cold and rainy, seems like it should be warm.) I have no way to verify this, but then again, it is not only the trees, but the kind of trees (some faster growing ones should produce a lot more water vapor than slower growing ones), the size of the trees, the water available to their root systems, etc. But, if this is true, a 10 times overpopulation in a very large rainforest like this could easily mean more trees world wide. 9 (normally populated) forests the exact same size would have to be eliminated just to make the worldwide tree population "even".





Except for the woodpeckers, I am familiar with all the birds mentioned in the clip below, I used to regularly observe these when hiking.--when I had more free time and wasn't raising animals for a living!--LOL.



But we should also recognize the negative effects of overcrowded forests on wildlife and the widespread need for active forest management.



White-crowned sparrows, western bluebirds, rufous hummingbirds, white-headed woodpeckers, Lewis's woodpeckers and other forest birds historically common to the West are being pushed out of many forests. Their problem isn't too few trees, it's too many trees.



These birds need the relatively open forests that greeted Lewis and Clark, but a century of fire suppression has left western forests overgrown, in many places 15 times denser and choked with undergrowth. As a result, populations of such birds are much lower in these forests than in other areas where foresters have maintained a natural density of trees and brush through either prescribed burns or thinning.



The whole article



www.doi.gov/news/opeds/fire.htm



While looking for data on tree populations, I ran across this also, it's very funny.



zapatopi.net/treeoctopus.html



Rodney

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