NYC authorities euthanize flock of 400 Canada geese - CTV News
Residents of New York City's Brooklyn borough learned Monday that a flock of about 400 Canada geese residing at a local park were captured and euthanized by wildlife authorities.
The geese were removed from Prospect Park on Thursday, The New York Times reported, and were later gassed with a fatal concentration of carbon dioxide.
Authorities in the city have been culling local populations of Canada's namesake goose since a U.S. Airways jetliner carrying 155 people was forced into an emergency landing on the Hudson River in January 2009. Two of the birds had been sucked into its engines, disabling the plane.
Since then authorities have been working to keep the iconic birds 11 kilometres away from the city's major airports, according to a wildlife official quoted by the newspaper. To that end about 1,200 Canada geese were captured in the area last summer.
"It's eerie to see a whole population gone," Anne-Katrin Titze, who fed the geese at Prospect Park every day, was quoted as saying. "There's not one goose on this lake. It looks as though they've been Photoshopped out."
One of the geese that disappeared from the park was known as Target because it had survived being struck by a crossbow bolt in June, and park authorities had been trying to capture it to treat the injury.
More than 100 Canada geese were also recently culled in the city of Bend, Oregon, on concerns that they were defecating in a local park.
The birds were placed in garbage cans and gassed with carbon dioxide, a local newspaper reported, before being served up as meals at local homeless shelters.
Residents of Bend planned to gather to mourn the birds last Thursday.
"I think a memorial like this will help people console each other," Foster Fell told a local newspaper. "I, myself, in the last few days have been nursing a tear in my eye and a lump in my throat."
I can understand reducing their population, but they just gassed an entire population and it sounds from those who visited the area often, that they wiped them all out......
.... all because of one incident of hitting a couple with a plane.... sure people could have died, but they didn't.
How many sea gulls do they hit?
How about Crows or other birds?
Pigeons??
Should they start wiping them all out as well?
Should take out a couple of them bald eagles too while they're at it... oh wait..... never mind.
Then you have another city wiping them all out because they don't like birds pooping in a park? Cripes....
I like how they use the word "Cull"
A cull is the act of removing animals from a larger group of those animals under certain criteria, usually removing undesirable traits from a group or to control a population to a manageable number..... as an example, the seal hunt is a cull because there is a set number allowed to be killed from the overall group during a limited period of time.
These people didn't cull, they killed every single bird they could find and wiped out entire flocks.
While this one action may not hold any serious damage to the overall species..... I'm a tad concerned about the possibility of them continually doing this annually with with little regulation except to snatch up as many as you can find and kill them without regard...... after a few years of this, and if more cities and States begin to do this to the Canadian Geese, there could be some serious problems.
I understand the concerns this pose to aircraft in certain areas, but this seems a little too excessive of a reaction if you ask me.... I mean hell, you got people using them as target practice with crossbows.
