Now there's a Plover Lover

A staple of the right-wing blog commentariat is an odd duck named Spurwing Plover, although he goes under other names. I've never spotted him around here, though I did pick him out at Patterico's under the name "krazy kagu". Anyway, he's a card. I was thinking about him when I saw this odd tale of pro-plover violence by a sharpshooting militant birdwatcher:

The night was last Nov. 7. Tiring of the election returns, Mr. Stevenson drove to the beach, 15 minutes from his house. His headlights picked up a pod of piping plovers, an endangered shore bird. They were asleep, and a lame cat was creeping up on them. Mr. Stevenson flushed the birds. The cat skittered into the dunes.

He drove home and went online. Galveston's city code required pets to have tags. It banned them from the beaches. That cat had no tags and it was on the beach. Texas penal law made it a crime to kill animals, but only those "belonging to another." Mr. Stevenson slept on it. Next morning, he picked up his .22-caliber rifle, got into his Ornithological Society van, and went cat hunting.

Not for the first time. A bird-watcher's bird watcher, Mr. Stevenson has 5,000 species on his life list. He moved here from Florida in 1996 to lead bird tours, put out a bird newspaper and write bird books. He built a house in a copse where birds find food -- and so do bird-eating cats. On his own property, and therefore within the law, he has picked off at least a dozen.

"Point blank, right in the ear," Mr. Stevenson says.

On that morning, as he tells it, it only took a minute for him to spot the limping cat under the bridge. He rolled down his van window part way, rested the rifle barrel on the edge of the glass, and squeezed off a shot. "That cat dropped like a rock," says Mr. Stevenson, who then heard a "spewing of profane language" from up on the bridge.

It was the toll taker, John Newland. Mr. Newland, who is 69 and a former real-estate broker, picks up the story: "I ran out and hollered," he says. And while another toll taker called the cops, "that idiot took off. I said, 'I'm gonna get him. So I jumped into my truck and ran him down all the way to Jamaica Beach." Which is where Mr. Stevenson was met by four police cars.

Mr. Newland is now the prosecution's star witness. The grand-jury indictment, handed up in April, identifies him as the "owner of said cat," Mr. Stevenson's victim. Under Texas law, killing somebody else's animal without permission, no matter how, can buy two years in the pen. But the state's case depends on proving that the cats under the San Luis Pass bridge are Mr. Newland's pets.

And also, is shooting a cat cruel? In Texas, maybe not:

...when the legislature passed the cruelty law in 2001 it was only after somebody gouged out a puppy's eyeballs. In toughening the law this year, members said they were mainly thinking of the sort of person who might run over a cat with a lawnmower.

"In the minds of Texans," says Shannon Edmonds, a lobbyist for state prosecutors who helped draft the statute, "if you shoot something, that's not being cruel."