Whatever else can be said about the practice field the U.S. Navy intends to build near Plymouth -- and there's plenty of food for discussion -- this swatch of Washington County boondocks is likely to draw people who get a kick out of watching high-performance aircraft.

No telling how close gawkers will be able to get to the strip where F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets will be put through their paces as pilots hone the skills they need for that most formidable of maneuvers: landing on a carrier. But even if we civilians have to stay outside the gates and well clear of the action, there figures to be enough of those hot planes around to give sightseers a thrill.

According to the "Record of Decision" released last week by the Navy to announce its plans, an estimated 31,650 carrier landing practice "operations" will be conducted at the Washington County site annually.

If an operation means a single landing or takeoff, which seems to be the case, that works out to approximately 87 practice landings or takeoffs during each 24 hours.

Of course it's likely the flights will be bunched into certain parts of the day (and night, since night carrier landings are both commonly required and especially challenging). So during times when the outlying landing field -- or OLF, to use the acronym that's become familiar to just about every resident of northeastern North Carolina -- is in use, it seems there will be no shortage of big bad birds on the wing. Wow, didja see that one? Impressive!

Funny...but that's what they've been saying for years about birds on the wing, or whole flocks of them, just down the road.

And that brings up a main reason why the Navy has had to go to considerable lengths to justify its OLF plans. Birds, birds and more birds, enjoying nearby hospitality .

The Navy's Final Environmental Impact Statement for its Super Hornet initiative (1,000-plus pages) says the OLF site lies about 5 miles from the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge's Pungo Unit.

The document goes on to note that the unit "was established specifically as an inviolate waterfowl sanctuary and attracts more than 100,000 birds during the winter, with peak numbers of tundra swans (20,000) and snow geese (44,000) reported in 2001-02." It's hardly any surprise that the National Audubon Society sees the Washington County OLF as posing a risk to "pilots, birds and a national treasure." Neither is the U.S. Department of the Interior enthused about an OLF near the refuge it oversees.

Our Navy friends certainly understand that putting a practice field near a sanctuary for swans and geese raises the unpleasant BASH issue (let's nominate this one for acronym of the year -- it stands for Bird/Animal Strike Hazard). No pilot wants to fly through what might as well be a flock of Butterballs, or have one gobbled up by an engine.

To satisfy itself that it could live with the Washington County site -- one of six under scrutiny -- despite BASH concerns, the Navy conducted radar studies of birds in the nearby airspace.

In a nutshell, what it says it found was that bird movements in and around the wildlife refuge are both fairly predictable and easily detectable. So flight operations can be scheduled and routed to keep BASH risks to a decent minimum, Navy officials contend.

How about effects on the birds of all those roaring jets? Not a problem for birds over by Pungo and Phelps Lakes, says the Navy; planes will be too high to bother them. As for birds that now fly to the site's fields to forage, there are ways to discourage them from coming around -- habitat management (less food), and dispersal techniques (scaring 'em away).

We're hardly under the illusion that bird welfare is all that has led various politicos to join folks who live near the OLF in opposing the project.

People object to the displacement of families and to the noise. And noise elsewhere turns out to be the Navy's key concern -- along with what it says is the need for another practice field to train for sudden and sizeable carrier deployments.

With the new OLF, the number of operations at the current Fentress auxiliary field near Virginia Beach is expected to decrease by 58 percent. That will help address complaints about noise in an area where nearby development is rampant.

North Carolinians perhaps can't be blamed for wondering why they should pay the price for the Navy's inability to keep new houses away from its Virginia field. And if somebody were to say that the Navy cooked up its plan to base two of 10 Super Hornet squadrons at Cherry Point (the other eight will fly out of Virginia Beach) mainly to provide an excuse to put an OLF in the Tar Heel countryside, that would be a difficult theory flatly to disprove.

Could political opposition persuade the Navy to change course? At least, it conceivably might result in other possible OLF sites, such as the one in Craven County northeast of New Bern, getting another look. That site is said to be full of protected wetlands -- but even filling some wetlands might be better than worrying about a BASH.