Gassing Geese

I was startled and rather disturbed to read an article today about the ongoing annual goose slaughter in New York City, aimed at reducing aircraft accidents such as the widely-reported "Miracle on the Hudson" incident.

I can somewhat understand the fears and concerns about human safety that have driven the city to adopt this approach, but should it not at least strike us as sad that such is the world we must live in? No, sir.  Instead, this article from CBS News instructs us on how we should perceive this state of affairs: "The initiative seems to be a success, with government officials reporting the lowest total of geese killed this summer of any year since the roundups started."  What a grand victory for humans versus nature! Worth celebrating indeed. 

An article by Mary Lou Simms from earlier this month in the Birmingham news titled "Geese roundups around airports are for profit, not safety," offers a balancing viewpoint.

I am left rather dumb-struck by this revelation in her article:

"Wildlife Services -- the agency responsible -- is the USDA's dirty little secret... taxpayers are subsidizing a $126.5 million program that exterminates more than 5 million wild animals annually, including thousands of community geese... More than half of the agency's overall budget comes from "killing" contracts, such as the $100,000 highly controversial New York City roundups every summer."

Are there really a few million wild animals inconveniencing us each year? 

Another article by Mary Lou Simms from last year discusses a related issue. Even if we must "manage" populations of wild birds, can this not be done in a more humane fashion rather than gassing them en masse? I am encouraged to find that there is an effort along these lines called GeesePeace , which advocates a much more ethically-grounded approach to reducing Geese populations, using well-thought-out protocols that include "coating eggs with corn oil, egg replacement and strategic nest destruction."

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Resources for Additional Information

• This "case study" provides an accounting of the explosive growth of Canada Goose populations adapted to human environments, their adverse economic impact on some business including Golf courses, and some of the legal issues surrounding their management.
• Canadageese.org is an informational site maintained by an advocacy group aiming to "prevent the destruction of Canada Geese".

The cowbird situation

I came across an interesting sight at the Ballona Freshwater Marsh. The bird on the right was going around following and begging the little bird on the left for food. And that bird on the left, a male Common Yellowthroat, was dashing frantically all over, finding morsels to put in its mouth. Now, it should be obvious from the size mismatch that they are completely different species! Turns out the brown bird is an immature brown-headed cowbird (see also the second picture below), one of the most notorious brood parasites. It has grown up in the Yellowthroat's nest this year, where its mother dropped off the egg (while getting rid of one of the host's original eggs). It's not good to anthropomorphize birds too much perhaps, but I found the close relationship between these two sad and sweet at the same time.

An article titled "Brown-headed Cowbirds in California: Historical Perspectives and Management Opportunities in Riparian Habitats", by S. A. Laymon documents the steady increase of brown-headed cowbirds in California over the past century, and their devastating impact on host populations of small birds; As a remedy, it advocates trapping and killing them, a possibly necessary act of intervention, but one that I nevertheless find rather troubling. This growth in cowbirds has been linked to human activities such as deforestation.

There is also some interesting information about this at the Griffith Wildlife Biology's page about Cowbird control:   "when a cowbird parasitizes a small species like the vireo, flycatcher, or gnatcatcher, these smaller hosts are able to raise only the cowbird and none of their own young – a short route to extinction." Sigh.

Bird Book Review

I am mesmerized by these beautiful words in a review of birding books, by Laura Jacob, in the Wall Street Journal:

It is wonder that brings young people into birding and wonder that holds older people there. All levels of passion have a place. There are, for instance, backyard birders watching the feeder through the window over the sink; there are compulsive birders, collectors who drop everything to drive or fly to the next new bird for their list; and there are cowboy birders, young men who can identify teeny warblers in silhouette at dawn, all based on a bird's flight call or tail length. They're doing calculus while the rest of us are doing basic math, listening every spring to tapes of warbler song, poring endlessly over the imperceptible differences of Empids—those difficult little flycatchers. 

The pursuit of such mastery must eventually make room for what Keats called "negative capability," an aptitude for "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact." The cyclical nature of birding, its concentration on the horizon and the sky, its unanswered questions about migration, speak to unknowns, to the unthinkables in life: time and loss and life span. Birds bring us these complex questions of existence, but quietly, dressed in feathers and flight. 

"A good ornithologist," writes Gilbert White, the author of the 18th-century classic "The Natural History of Selbourne," "should be able to distinguish birds by their air." Such is the transcendence that birders work toward, the moment when experience becomes instinct. Deep beneath the social, competitive, aesthetic and poetic attractions of birding is a longing, not for Eden, where nothing was yet named and knowledge was unnecessary, but for a role in nature's mystery play, where to tell a hawk from a handsaw is a matter of life and death.