Tuesday, June 08, 2004
 
Look at the Pretty Birds

Hey, I am from Milwaukee. I know all about the flying rat problem upon which Whitney Gould reports in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Aggressive and messy, gulls are the new urban menace:
    Like something out of a Hitchcock movie, they're lined up along the rooftops of buildings, on parking lots, on grassy plots, on the gravel wasteland left behind by demolition of the Park East Freeway spur. Gulls. They're everywhere, it seems - and so are their droppings.
Think that's the problem? No, sir, it's just a symptom. I got your real problem isolated:
    Scott Craven, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says a good food supply is part of the attraction in urban areas. "We've created a wonderful habitat for them after they were beaten back for years by egg and feather collectors and persecution," he says. "This is their rebound."

    The birds are protected by federal law, but when they reach nuisance levels, their eggs can be removed with permission of state and federal wildlife officials. In extreme cases, such as Manitowoc's, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has given local officials permission to shoot limited numbers of gulls.

    Andy Paulios, a state Department of Natural Resources wildlife manager, said the best approach is for communities to monitor gull numbers, recognize that the birds are here to stay and then work for a consensus on where they can be tolerated and where they cannot.
To summarize, the problem has three parts:
  1. Daft ecologists who think it's mother nature's appropriate retribution to Man.
  2. Federal law and requirements for permission slips from daddy Fed and mama State to take action.

  3. Bureaucrats who recommend more bureaucracy to solve the problem.
Class, is this story an example of a man versus nature or a man versus overbearing state authority conflict?


- posted by Brian J. @ 7:49 PM
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