Set sprinklers to water the lawn or garden only - not the street or sidewalk.
Use the microwave to cook small meals. (It uses less power than an oven.)
Purchase "Green Power" for your home's electricity. (Contact your power supplier to see where and if it is available.)
Scrape, rather than rinse, dishes before loading into the dishwasher; wash only full loads.
Cut back on air conditioning and heating use if you can.
Turn off appliances and lights when you leave the room.
GREEN POND, S.C. -- Volunteers counted nearly 400,000 birds in a protected wilderness area along South Carolina's coast -- ten times more than the previous year.
But at a time when bird populations are declining nationwide, one expert is reluctant to make too much of the National Audubon Society's annual bird count last month.
Numbers can fluctuate depending on the weather, how many volunteers take part and where they are watching from.
"You just can't judge by one year what's going on. You have to look at trends over the years," said Ann Shahid, of Audubon South Carolina.
Still, the 400,000 birds is the most counted at any time in the last 10 years at the ACE Basin, a 350,000-acre area of conserved land between Charleston and Beaufort. It is named for the three rivers that drain the basin -- the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto.
Volunteers saw everything from blackbirds, grackles and short-eared owls to black-bellied whistling ducks and yellow warblers.
They also counted two breeding pairs of the rare whooping crane, a species that was all but wiped out 60 years ago by hunters.
An estimated 260,000 of the birds counted last month were red-winged blackbirds. According to the Audubon Society, South Carolina has lost 75 percent of its red-winged blackbirds during the past 40 years.
And while experts are not ready to make too much of this year's count, they say it shows the importance of preserving wilderness areas.
"In so many areas, the habitats have become so fragmented. You can't just have green space. You have to have corridors so the birds can move about," Shahid said.
The ACE basin is located along bird migration paths and offers a variety of habitats including forests, plantation fields and marsh.
