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Community Corner

Big Birder Scours Sonoma Mountain

The illustrious Jonah Raskin profiles another illustrious Sonoma citizen, diplomat-birder Ted Eliot Jr.

There’s some sort of celebrity in town most people don’t even know about. Unless you, like Ted Eliot Jr., are a birder.

Jonah Raskin (formerly of SSU) profiled the lanky amateur ornithologist in this week’s Bay Nature magazine, with a story titled A “Big Birder” on Sonoma Mountain.

Like the proverbial postman who isn’t slowed or stopped from his appointed rounds by snow, sleet, or rain, nothing meteorological prevents Eliot from grabbing his binoculars and stepping outside his house on Sonoma Mountain to keep an eye on the local birdlife.  At last count, he’d recorded 3,818 different species of birds from locations around the world. That’s a heck of a lot of birds. Counting is a matter of pride.

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That’s a lot of birds for anyone, it’s true, making Eliot a perennial rumor for Birder of the Year status among the Roger Tory Peterson crowd.

What’s almost as impressive as the bird list is the retired diplomat’s career: a Harvard graduate, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan during the Ford and Carter administrations, the period when the Soviet Union was stuck in the mountainous tribal regions.

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Which has led him to write several guest editorials on foreign policy for the Press Democrat.

He also served nine years on the board of the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, now located in Petaluma.

"It's a big deal," Eliot said of PRBO’s move in 2005. "It's a feather in Sonoma County's hat."

Oh, these diplomats. Ever ready with a pun.

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