New York Plans Mass Killings of Geese

tybird wrote:

Jeanwah wrote:

StillHere wrote:

why would it be a problem?
we can build higher fences
we can use deer deflectors alongside the roadways

ok if you need food for your family
then go ahead and hunt

if you want a trophy on your rec room wall
stay home
or get into paper mache for pete's sake
make a nice looking elk head or whatever

otherwise, as in everything else in this world
mother nature will take care of things
in her own way
in her own time

i know most of you probably disagree vehemently

but that's how i roll

i'm not vegan, not even vegetarian

just believe that we should not take more
from nature than we need

Ask the large number of people (who are still alive) who've hit deer with their car, and that's with hunting being LEGAL, if they think that hunting should be outlawed. There would be many more fatalities without hunting. (that's the deer being killed, too) Deer simply don't stay behind fencing; they're wild animals. They will find a way. And you really think fencing is good for them any way?

In a neighboring city, they have an overpopulation of ducks, because people feel the need to FEED THEM, forcing them to multiply and overflow into busy city streets. And that's with signs everywhere stating NOT to feed the ducks. Animals do best when eating their natural food, but people just can't help but feed them food that's not good for their digestive systems. I actually have said to people feeding them, that if they care about these animals, they wouldn't feed them "people" food.

I had a beaver problem on my property last summer. It damned up my pond which flooded the area. What do I do? I call the DEC and ask for a humane way of moving the pest. They tell me to shoot it because there is no "safe" place to move it. Beavers cause destruction everywhere. And when there's an overpopulation of them, it doesn't help people, nor the animals themselves. It's a double-edged sword. And that goes for human overpopulation, too. We'll soon find out.

Several things.....We removed the wolf and the mountain lion from east of the Mississippi....long before any of us were even born....no wolf and no puma (aka mountain lion) is good news/bad news for the white-tailed deer population....unchecked reproduction....until they scrub the local area clean of vegetation....which can lead to starvation, unhealthy living conditions and outbreaks of disease....which can drive a population to zero faster than any humans with guns. In fact, this is similar to what happened at the end of the 19th and onset of the 20th century....white-tailed deer were almost extinct in the eastern US....until game management laws were enacted..yes, this means regulated hunting.....this management has lead to a deer population that is dangerously high in some regions, but it beats the alternative.

Canada Geese.....that icon of avian fall migration.....those beautiful vee formations honking their way through the crisp autumn air....well, they have discovered the post-WWII suburban landscape....and guess what...it's optimal conditions for them....so, fewer and fewer geese are migrating every year....because they are becoming year-round residents in areas where they were uncommon in the past. Check the Audubon Society Christmas Bird Counts....more and more and more Canada Geese are being counted in late December in places where they would have left in years past. This combined with a decrease in hunting has lead to this issue of too many Canada Geese in many locations. It sucks that so many have to die in these slaughters...but something has to be done to avoid conditions that lead to a complete crash in the population (e.g. disease out-break).

Beavers....another game management success story...once on the edge of extinction...now seemingly everywhere.....near impossible to trap and remove according to everyone I have talked to about the critters...too smart for human traps

Tenzing N. wrote:

Hello all- a liitle late to the topic but as a pilot I'd like to add some things.

First, there's really nothing that can be done to the planes to make them less susceptable to bird strikes. There are some pretty dramatic things you could do but it would be way too costly and no aircraft maker would ever do it. You could never really screen the engines for instance. Currently the only method in use is to paint the spinners on the engines a spiral pattern which supposedly alerts the birds sooner but I don't know if it really works that well.

The only promising new technology is a new type of radar that can detect larger birds or large flocks of small birds and the controllers can divert the planes around/above/below them. If the bird strike problem is severe enough this might actually be put into use.

And the Hudson birds were geese. They have a very extensive library of feathers that they can match to an accident to determine what type of bird it was.

The real problem with birds is that they're just not equipped to avoid the planes. Typically small birds will dive out of the way and large birds will either roll or quickly change direction to avoid an attack. They all perceive an airplane to be an attacking predator and try to get away but with the closure rates being so high they simply don't have time to see, decide, and act.

From my point of view I would rather see some type of balance between avaoidance and route management as opposed to threat abolishment (bird killing).

Tenzing N. wrote:

I'd like to add that the actual Hudson bird strike did occur within five miles of the takeoff point and that although the article states there were 78 bird strikes in the last 10 years this figure can not be correct. There may have been 78 strikes to one type of operator during one type of operation. I would estimate that in the New York area in the last ten years there were closer to 1000 to 2000 bird strikes, most of which were not reported. I myself have had ten bird strikes that I know of, three of which were large birds (hawk or larger). Only small damage, no danger but also no engine injestion.

This article seems fishy to me. The feds don't really care too much about wildlife mitigation outside of the airport boundary and to imply that all the bird removals were due to possible bird strikes doesn't sit with me. If anything I would say someone is adding this to help justify the removal for another reason that wouldn't sit as well with the public. Geese can be extremely damaging to park lands and are also very mean. This is not good for tourism- for instance.