A 56-year-old New York City activist saw a photograph in 1930 and bought a mountain to stop a slaughter.
Her name was Rosalie Edge. She was a suffragist with no scientific training. The photograph she saw showed hundreds of dead hawks lined up on the forest floor in eastern Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania's 1929 bounty on goshawks had turned a ridge of the Kittatinny Mountains into a recreational shooting site where men gathered every autumn to kill migrating raptors by the thousand.
In 1934, Edge borrowed $500 from a friend and leased 1,400 acres of Hawk Mountain. She hired two wardens, Maurice and Irma Broun, who lived on the property and kept the hunters off. Within a single migration season, observers recorded dramatic increases in the numbers of raptors passing the ridge as the shooting ended.
In 1938 she bought the land outright and deeded it to a new nonprofit. Hawk Mountain Sanctuary is now the world's first refuge for birds of prey. It still runs raptor migration counts that began in 1934, the longest-running such record on Earth.
The penalties get worse with repeat offenses.
First offense is $500 and 8 hours of litter cleanup community service.
Second offense is $900 and 20 hours of litter cleanup community service.
Third offense is a $2,500 fine and 80 hours of litter cleanup community service, as well as a one-year driver's license suspension.
News: Louisiana just became the latest state to ban intentional balloon releases, starting August 1, following the passage of House Bill 851 (Act 196). It treats a release as littering with a $500 fine for a first offense.
A balloon let go for a memorial or a graduation travels for miles, loses its lift, and falls into a marsh, a field, or the ocean. A deflated latex balloon looks almost exactly like a jellyfish or a squid to a sea turtle or a seabird, and they eat it, and it blocks the gut.
The ribbon is arguably worse. It tangles around legs, wings, and necks, and it doesn't rot. Birds even try to build it into their nests. The shiny Mylar kind has a second trick, conducting electricity, and it knocks out power for thousands of people when it drifts into a line.
The wish to send something upward for someone you've lost is one of the most human things there is. It's just that what goes up comes down somewhere, and the results are devastating for wildlife.