07/13/2010 // West Palm Beach, FL, USA // Tara Monks // Tara Monks
New York, NY – Residents near Prospect Park in Brooklyn found out Monday, July 11, 2010, that the Canadian geese population that has inhabited the park for the past three decades was euthanized, as reported by The New York Times. Nearly 400 adult geese and goslings were rounded up by wildlife biologists and technicians and gassed.
According to a spokeswoman with the federal Agriculture Department, the geese were herded into a fenced area, packed two to three to a crate and taken to a nearby building. The birds were then gassed with lethal doses of carbon dioxide. The geese were molting, an annual phase that renders the birds unable to fly. The situation made for easy capture.
The Agriculture Department spokeswoman said the measure was necessary. She told the press, “The thing to always remember in this New York situation is that we are talking about aviation and passenger and property safety…In New York City, from 1981 to 1999, the population increase was sevenfold.”
Authorities have watched the population grow since the catastrophe that happened when US Airways Flight 1594 was forced to land in the Hudson River after hitting birds in January 2009.
Last summer, 1,235 geese from 17 sites around New York City were caught and killed. The Prospect Park culling “appears to be among the biggest,” according to The New York Post, and has left some residents appalled.
Anne-Katrin Titze, a resident who visits the park daily, lamented, “It’s a horrible end…It’s eerie to see a whole population gone. There’s not one goose on this lake. It looks as though they’ve been Photoshopped out.”
Conservation director at New York City Audubon explained that mass euthanasia was sometimes the only way to manage a population level. The goal is to eliminate the geese, because of the hazards they produce for the aviation industry, within seven miles of the major airports in the region. Prospect Park is 6.5 miles from La Guardia and Kennedy airports.
The geese were brought to New York in the early 1900s in attempts to save the dying species. By the 1930s, they were added to the list of animals that could be hunted. While other parts of the country typically chase birds away from hazardous areas, New York has no relocation program for the geese.
The carcasses of the Prospect Park geese will be double-bagged and dumped in a landfill.
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