Dede just passed along to me an item she ran across in the New York Times. (That’s her homepage; mine is the lowbrow AT&T/Yahoo, where this morning’s headline was “Drew Barrymore’s double fashion fiasco.”) Anyway, it seems that the Con Ed guys in Queens and Brooklyn have a tricky problem: how to protect their power equipment from monk parakeet nests on their utility poles.
By blocking ventilation and trapping heat, the huge nests are particularly destructive to an expensive piece of equipment called a “feeder reclosure.” One operator complained of having had to replace the $20,000 device five times in two years. Solution: the birds can be scared off by a battery-powered owl that hoots and swivels its head. Complication: the parakeets are quick to return when the batteries run out.
You know, if you step back and take a little perspective, you see that this whole man-versus-animal problem has a relatively short history (a couple of centuries) but a limitless future. In reading about the parakeets, I was reminded of the story from a few months ago–about the U.S Airways jet that swallowed some Canada geese and ended up in the Hudson River. Good thing everybody survived the emergency landing, or geese far and wide might have been cooked in retaliation.
It’s true that, down here in Georgia anyway, there are more Canada geese than there used to be. When they start taking down our airplanes, lots of folks are going to say there are too many. Well, not this armchair birder. He can generally be counted on to take the pre-industrial view in these matters. No, there are not too many Canada geese, or too many monk parakeets either.
What we’ve got is too many people, trying to get too many places, too fast. According to reports from the National Institute for Urban Wildlife and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 50 to 100 million birds are killed by automobiles every year. How many do you suppose have ever been killed by people on horses, or on bicycles, or on foot?
(Next time: off the soapbox and back to the armchair. Meanwhile, the “Armchair Birder 2009 World Tour” stops this weekend in Asheville, NC, for a Sunday, 3:00, signing at Malaprops Bookstore. Looking forward to checking out the lucky birds that inhabit the Biltmore House.)
