Gillibrand says she is pushing for the goose cull this summer because ”according to recent news reports, LaGuardia and JFK airports saw increases in bird strikes of 28% and 53%, respectively, between 2009 and 2011.” Notice what’s weird here? Why is the government relying on news reports instead of their own data?

Unlike Sen. Gilibrand and her staff, I bothered to look up the FAA’s birdstrike numbers at JFK.

Bird Strikes at JFK

2008:  147, 2 involving Canada geese

2009: 165, 1 involving Canada geese. The mother of all birdstrikes, the “Miracle on the Hudson,” was from LGA.

2010: 220, 2 involving Canada geese

2011: 257, none involving Canada geese

2012: four, zero involving Canada geese

To put it in the terms Sen. Gilibrand uses, from 2009 to 2011, Canada Geese strikes at JFK have declined 100%.

The last Canada Goose strike at LaGuardia was in October, 2010, and seems to be just a dead goose at the airport since the type of aircraft is marked unknown. Neither of the two 2010 strikes at JFK were described as causing damage.

One reason the overall numbers are going up is that pilots didn’t report them before Captain Sully saved a plane full of people hit by geese. A 2000 report from the USDA (the agency that kills geese and wildlife they don’t like)  says airstrikes are wildly underreported. The study focused on JFK, where 87% of strikes went unreported.

After Capt. Sully, the USDA and NYC got together to kill all of the Canada geese at area parks every year. But, since it’s great geese habitat, they’ll have to do it eternally because more geese just keep moving in.

New Yorkers protested Gillibrand’s office Thursday. The argument: killing the local geese won’t really prevent airstrikes. (The ones that hit the “Miracle on the Hudson” plane was migrating from Canada.) And you can’t just kill off every goose around every airport. Canada geese aren’t even the ones that usually hit planes. A study of bird strikes at JFK found that 71% were caused by gulls and 10% by raptors.

So why target them? The campaign to get rid of Canada Geese has more to do with their guano being a nuisance on golf courses and park lawns than anything with airplanes. Long before they were linked to airstrikes, Canada Geese were targeted by the USDA for pooping on grass.

The wildlife refuge doesn’t want to kill the Canada Geese, which have recently hatched chicks, because they think their current program is working. Michael Gannon, an editor at the Queens Chronicle, did one of the most thorough examinations of the issue so far. Don Riepe, the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge guardian, who JFK’s bird hazard task force for 25 years, told him that they’ve already reduced air strikes through more thoughtful programs like habitat reduction.

Ken Paskar of Friends of LaGuardia Airport said he’s not worried about the wildlife refuge as much as a garbage transfer station planned for the end of LaGuardia’s runway. Also, he asks what Gillibrand is going to do with all the other birds on the Atlantic flyway that pass by New York’s massive airports?

Meanwhile, Goosewatch NYC has set up a network to document the goose roundups when the USDA comes to town this summer. Typically they wait till the geese are moulting and can’t fly, then round them up in a van at dawn and gas them. They want residents to call GooseWatch (567-694-6693 or 567-NY-GOOSE) when the USDA trucks show up, so that volunteers can come to the park to document the event, even if they can’t stop it.

In Defense of Animals has a petition against Gillibrand’s bill.

Read about how GooseWatchNYC stopped the cull in Brooklyn’s premiere park

	Where to SEE MOOSE
	Where to SEE WEIRD BIRDS (All the interesting birds: pelicans, puffins, prairie chickens, vultures, hummingbirds)

Great horned owl family in Prospect Park, Brooklynred-tailed hawk nabs a pigeon

The owlets in Prospect Park have learned to fly over the last week. I didn’t see them for several days (which could be my lack of skill or because they were hopping around on the ground.) Then Sunday I saw three of them napping on a branch in the same fenced area as their nest, but several trees away. I had some help: crows were mobbing them. The chicks huddled together and one parent tried to sleep on a branch a few feet away.

In unrelated Brooklyn raptor news, I saw a white flutter in the bushes, then the aftermath: a red-tailed hawk standing on a pigeon. All around robins and other passing birds sounded an alarm call. At first I thought the bird was a young one, but then saw it had a full red tail. It’s probably one of the adult parents in the park. I wanted to tell a group of kids that were getting an Urban Park Ranger talk about insects, but then thought they’d never want to hear about ants after seeing the hawk.

red-tailed hawk nabs a pigeon

Where to SEE WEIRD BIRDS (All the interesting birds: pelicans, puffins, prairie chickens, vultures, hummingbirds)

SEE ANIMALS IN NEW YORK CITY

Painted lady butterflies–kind of a runtish, drab cousin of the monarch–are migrating through New York City. Look for mobs of the smallish orange and brown butterflies on cherry trees. (Update: They may also be Red Admirals,  Gothamist says)

One tree on First Street and Prospect Park West had hundreds of the butterflies, which migrate from Mexico, flitting around them last night. We went back to check what seemed to be the roost this morning. Nothing.

On the Prospect Park Audubon bird walk this afternoon, another woman said her backyard cherry was also swarmed with the little butterflies last night.

The painted ladies seem to be having a great year, thanks to wet weather in Mexico. KCET in San Diego reported last month that their area was seeing huge numbers owing to the bumper crop of “thistles and cheeseweeds.” The Urban Dictionary says that’s marijuana, but what they’re really talking about is a plant that looks like rhubarb, but without the red stems, and grows in vacant lots. You can see why they like NYC.

Even though the painted lady lives nearly everywhere in the world, we’re still not clear on the details of its annual migration, Everett D. Cashatt of the Illinois State Museum says. The Iowa State entomology department is tracking them. But they’re not supposed to stop much, so yesterday may have been our big, peak day.

Their more spectacular and easily recognized cousins, the Monarchs, are also plowing through the latitudes of New York and Chicago in the last few weeks, according to the citizen scientist map at Learner.org.

Read more about butterfly migration

Where to SEE HAWKS, OWLS & OTHER RAPTORS

Fuzzy great horned owl in Prospect Park

Got to see more of the owl family in Prospect Park in the last couple days. And hear first-hand some of the reasons to keep it all hush-hush.

The two owl chicks are still on their tree, “branching,” just testing out their wings with very short hops. Soon they’ll try to fly. Inevitably they’ll wind up on the ground. The only question is whether it’ll be behind a fence in the woods (fine). On a pathway (bad). Or in an open field (horrible). Their worst enemy is people who think they’re helping–they far outnumber people who mean to do the owl harm. And those do exist. Rehabber Bobby Horvath told me how some guy wanted to catch and sell a juvenile red-tailed hawk that fledged on Houston Street.

So today I got to talk with Peter Dorosh the head of the Brooklyn Bird Club,  who does a fantastic blog on birding in Brooklyn. Peter, who works in the park, says that just this year he had to pick up raccoons shot by kids in the park. The protection of owls goes back to 1980, he says, when kids also shot owls in the city. He really did not want Central Park birders invading the Brooklyn territory and another birder who happened on us felt he had to explain that he hadn’t shown my friend Courtney and me the owl.

Another birder said that kids threw rocks at bald eagles nesting in Inwood and that put an end to their nesting there. I don’t find news stories on any of these incidents, which, of course doesn’t mean they aren’t true. My friend Dennis Edge told me how he had seen teenagers shoot at rare birds at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. He helped police catch them and waited around for hours, but after talking with parents, the police just decided not to charge them.

great horned owl chick and parent

I think the bald eagle program, which released 20 of WI’s excess bald eagle chicks over five years, starting in 2002, was meant to bring bald eagles back to the city after September 11th. And I believe it ended because Thomas Cullen, the falconer hired to raise the eagles, which were on platforms behind a big-ass fence, was investigated for their treatment and one death.

Earlier story on the owl

	Where to SEE MOOSE
	Where to SEE WEIRD BIRDS (All the interesting birds: pelicans, puffins, prairie chickens, vultures, hummingbirds)

Two Brooklyn great horned owlets on nest, through spotting scope

The pair of great horned owls nesting in Prospect Park successfully hatched two owlets.

The young owls, now several weeks old. You can see their fuzzy, tawny feathers on their nest or sometimes on a branch a few feet away on the same tree.  They’re “branching”–testing out their wings and feet. They’re probably going to take short flights soon. I hope they don’t end up on any pathways.

Last week I saw them them practice jump. They awkwardly flap their wings and are clearly thinking about flying. Birdweb says they’ll take a few weeks to learn to fly, but will probably stick around mooching off their parents until fall.

I got to see the baby owl faces for the first time this weekend thanks to a guy from the Brooklyn Bird Club, who generously pointed out a great spot to see the nest through the trees. We were taking a young birding friend, who was delighted with the view. The little boy kept saying “Oh my God!” when he saw their yellow eyes.

I appreciated the courtesy from the birder keenly because for many birders the first rule of urban owls is don’t talk about urban owls. The sharpest birders want to keep the find to themselves. Got to protect the birds from boys who might shoot them, they say. Or crowds. Or dogs. I personally think that the average non-birder getting excited about the owls are exactly what the owl needs to be protected in the moment and in politics from anybody who would harm them.

Turns out the nest was in the tree next to the one everyone was mooning over all winter. They seemed to fly out at dusk from the adjacent tree. Maybe that was just owl trickery. The real nest tree is the one crows voraciously mobbed for the last couple months. I’m not going to give out the locale, but there are now so many birders in Prospect Park, you may be  to find them by looking for them.

Birders, mobbing crows and blue jays, white guano on the path and a few owl pellets are the big clues, in order of descending frequency and usefulness.

If a report in the New York Times is true, it’s the first successful brood of great horned owls in a century in Brooklyn. (The Bronx is lousy with them.) The owls, which are already common in rural parts of the country, are staging an urban comeback.

Where to SEE WEIRD BIRDS (All the interesting birds: pelicans, puffins, prairie chickens, vultures, hummingbirds)

Miserable bear and uncomfortable customer at Hachimantai Bear Park / Photo Courtesy of Little Akita WordPress

Two elderly women were mauled to death by bears who escaped concrete pens of a “bear farm” in northern Japan Friday. The specifics of a bear farm–animals are used both as cheap entertainment and for their gall bladders in traditional medicine–are unique to Asia. But these kind of escapes from private facilities are not. Too many of these sad places have horrific endings like the one we saw in Zanesville, OH.

The Hachimantai Bear Farm is one of two in Akita prefecture and eight in Japan, according to a 2002 report from the World Society for the Protection of Animals. Japan has a huge, totally unregulated market in bear gall bladder and some of the bear farms themselves sell it.

Yomuri Shinbun says that the farm opened in 1987 and has had a succession of seven owners and many complaints from animal groups about the animal’s living conditions.  They had 38 bears, mostly brown (grizzly) bears. There’s much confusion over how many were still in their concrete pens and how many escaped, but at least six were shot by local hunters after the incident.

Everyone originally thought that the bears escaped by climbing on piles snow. Mainichi quoted the 68-year-old operator of the park saying: ”They may have climbed over the fence from there [a snow pile]…We used to remove the snow by pouring water onto it, but we were not aware that parts of it were still there.”  But Japan Times now says a cage door was open. And one of the women may have collapsed before she was attacked. Also note: the two dead workers were 76 and 69. If I lived near there, they probably wouldn’t be my first choice for the staff.

A blogger at Little Akita WordPress described visiting the place, then getting depressed about their miserable lives in concrete pens: “After seeing those bears which live there, I felt sorry for them… They should be able to live in nature. I got very sad watching the bears which did performances to get food.”

The bears would do tricks, like showing off their bear paws, to get food from tourists. This isn’t just a backwater, shameful sideshow. Mainichi Shinbun says that 7,000 people a year still visited. The Akita Tourism board mentions it. These creepy places keep in business because people keep going to them not realizing how easy, or at least possible, it is to see them in the wild.

Bears had to perform for food at the park

Where to SEE BEAR Polar, Grizzly, Black, any kind

SEE ANIMALS IN ASIA

Lanny Chambers, who runs hummingbirds.net says hummingbirders have been debating what’s going on with this freakishly early migration of ruby-throated hummingbirds and the consensus is that most of the birds are still sensibly waiting down south to be sure they don’t get caught in cold weather. In many other species it’s the young male pioneers that are always the ones wandering out early and far, hoping to get ahead. All of the manatees caught way up north in recent years, for example, have been males.

In hummingbird world, the males head north first to stake out a good territory. “I would be surprised if people were spotting females north of their normal ranges,” Chambers says. They have no reason to go early. They don’t have a regular mate or family structure; it’s every hummingbird for itself. The females “pick males that are the orneriest, nastiest” birds defending good territory, he says.

Another hummingbird tracker, Learner.org, has done a very cool animation of the migration data. Even though they employs school kids as citizen scientists–and so have a completely independent set of information–they show the same thing as hummingbird.net: a very early start to a migration, but the bulk of birds still hanging back in the south until it’s a sane time to head north.

Chambers says that some hummingbirds probably try to head north early every year, but storms stop them. They just go hide in the bushes. Hummingbirds are tougher than their delicate frames suggest, he says. “They can take a night or two of temperatures in the teens,” he says. “Twenty degrees isn’t a problem. They may be uncomfortable, but they’ll be okay.” Their main food isn’t flower nectar (or the Kool-Aid like drink people put out for them); it’s bugs.

Don’t take their early migration as a sign of global warming, the apocalypse or even of a hot summer. Hummingbirds spend the winter in Mexico and Central America, so they have no notion of what the weather is up here before they take off across the Gulf of Mexico. Studies show they go by hours of daylight, Chambers says.  ”Ruby throated hummingbirds have been arriving on the gulf coast exactly when they always do,” he says. “This is a pattern that just doesn’t vary.”

Read about the hummingbirds that came early or never left at all

Check out hummingbird.net’s very cool advice on attracting hummingbirds and using feeders

Where to SEE WEIRD BIRDS (All the interesting birds: pelicans, puffins, prairie chickens, vultures, hummingbirds)

SEE ANIMALS IN THE NORTHEAST (NY, NJ, MD, MA, ME, NH, VT, CT, RI, PA)

I’m sure it was a battle for a mate or maybe who gets to move into the best lamppost in Park Slope. This is why people hate it when sparrows show up in their bird houses: they’re really aggressive about kicking out any bird they perceive as an intruder, going as far as destroying eggs and chicks of native birds.And how they invaded North America.

SEE ANIMALS IN THE NORTHEAST (NY, NJ, MD, MA, ME, NH, VT, CT, RI, PA)

Where to SEE WEIRD BIRDS (All the interesting birds: pelicans, puffins, prairie chickens, vultures, hummingbirds)

	Cameron	Branson
Destination	Marianas Trench	Puerto Rico Trench
Depth	35,800 ft	28,373 ft
Craft	Deep Sea Challenger	DeepFlight Challenger
Material	foam	carbon fiber and titanium
Goal	visit the Mariana trench many times	reach depths of each ocean
Confidence in critters at great depths	“We’d all like to think there are giant squid and sea monsters down there,” he told the Times.	”We know there are gigantic things down there,” he told the Telegraph.
How vehicle moves	vertical, like a seahorse	with wings or flippers, like a dolphin

Luckily the world has more than one eco-minded, genius gazillionaire. Branson and his team hope to visit the Mariana, too, later this year in a different kind of craft. Branson himself will go down to the Puerto Rico trench. That’s the deepest spot in the Atlantic and is about 7,000 feet shallower.

Nobody is sure if anything could really survive that deep. It’s dark and that means not much plant life. It’s cold–and most creatures prefer the warm, shallow water like the mountainous waters that usually abut the sea trenches. Both land formations are formed by tectonic plates squishing and stretching the earth. And then there’s the incredible water pressure, which has made these explorations so difficult and dangerous.

Of course, we’re all hoping someone will find a whole herd of Loch Ness monsters down there. Or at minimum a giant squid. Certainly something better than the shrimp-like creatures Cameron got to see.

Branson is suitably enthusiastic, hoping his craft, which is bigger, can cruise and call in another sub to take pictures, will find something. He’s got a soft spot for fun creatures and has created a lemur haven, despite taking some slack from doubters.

The only other manned mission to the deepest part of the Mariana Trench was in 1960 when the U.S. Navy sent oceanographers Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard down to the bottom. Near the bottom they saw a flatfish, but Walsh told ScienceFriday last week, biologists insist they really didn’t see it.

“Well, just before we landed, we spotted what we thought was a flatfish, a white flat – like a halibut or a sole, a foot long. And that was quite a sighting, if true, of a higher-order marine vertebrate in such – at such a great depth. And it was a bottom-dwelling type of fish, so it meant that it was where it belonged and that there was food down there and sufficient oxygen to support it. Now Jacques Piccard…and I were not ichthyologists. We were engineers. We were, if you would, test pilots of this vehicle trying to prove out its capability. So in the subsequent years, we’ve been advised by all kinds of scientists that we didn’t see that.”

But what if conventional wisdom is wrong?

The first crew never got a good look because they stirred up so much silt. Cameron had to head up early because of a technical problem. He hopes to return. His mission, backed by National Geographic, was always to get down there a few times.

Although the story of two rich geniuses racing in their private subs to the bottom of the ocean is delightful, really Branson didn’t plan to dive to the Mariana Trench himself.  His partner, Chris Welsh, is heading there (and, yes, the trip was delayed). Branson is going on the second of the five legs of the adventure, one for the bottom of each ocean. The Puerto Rico Trench is near a breeding ground for humpback whales (they like shallow, warm water) and plenty of other marine mammals and flying fish near the surface, NOAA has found.

The vessels are slightly different, but both plan on using little helper “lander” craft that go down first and drop bait. Welsh says on their blog: “The Virgin sub is excellent for large scale exploration and identifying areas worthy of more detailed examination, and Jim’s sub is perfect for detailed examination of those sites once found.”

For now let’s remember that not seeing something doesn’t prove it isn’t there. Animal tourists know to well that you can go to the exact location of a previous sighting and come up with nothing after a whole day of patient waiting. It’s as if human beings had only spent a few hours in Alaska and came back thinking it was just snow: it is mainly just snow, but there are also polar bears and walruses in certain parts. I’m just happy there are two gazillionaires willing to go looking for new creatures down there in the least explored place on earth.

Where to SEE WHALES

Read about Branson’s mission to save lemurs

SEE ANIMALS IN AUSTRALIA

Animal tourists would love the new refuge, even though it’s not, like the original refuges, tailored to save a certain species or natural wonder. (Teddy Roosevelt made Pelican Island the first in 1903 one to save egrets from poachers after the birds for hat feathers.) Hackmatack is like more recent refuges: it’s not here because the wildlife is particularly awesome, but because it’s savable and near people.

“ We’ve been talking about the Hackmatack NWR as one of the new urban refuges that the USFWS has made a priority. Another reason why our area makes sense,”  says Cindy Skudrud who helped start Friends of Hackmatack.

But, the wildlife would include whooping cranes at least twice a year as they migrate through, plus the possibility of mountain lions. The refuge would also offer a chance to see river otters, Blandings turtle and a bunch of other grassland and water birds, says Skudrud. Dickcissel, Henslow’s sparrow and short-eared owl, the savanna-loving red-headed woodpecker, and wetland-dependent species like pied-billed grebe and least bittern would use the land, which is mainly forest, prairie and peat bog. Here’s a list of 57 endangered and threatened species of plants and animals that would be helped by the NWR. It includes the Tamarack (Larix laricina), a kind of larch tree, whose native name gives the refuge its unwieldy name.

When the refuge system celebrated its 100th birthday, Skudrud and other conservationists realized Chicago was the only big city without a refuge within an hour’s drive. (Even the new one will be a bit of a stretch. It’s an hour twenty two minutes from Chicago’s northernmost outpost, Roger’s Park, though if you count the gerrymandered O’Hare and speed a little you might make it.)

The plan is to save and connect the existing scraps of parks and conservation land.

The wildlife service’s FAQ reads like they only answer to the Tea Party instead of the average Chicagoland resident. They answer questions on federal property rights, whether hunting will be allowed (yes), whether they’ll grab land from farmers (no) and whether they’ll be willing to feed and shoot Canada geese to keep them off farmland (absolutely!). Nowhere in the FAQ is the answer to what seems like the most important questions: what will the millions of people who live in the Chicago-Milwaukee corridor be able to enjoy at Hackmatack NWR? Why is it worth saving? You can let the FWS know you’d be interested in seeing the animals at Hackmatack by writing them.

Comments are open on the plan until April 27. You can email r3planning@fws.gov

While you’re at it,  tell the FAA to let Operation Migration get an exemption to its rule about ultralight aircraft pilots getting paid.

Use the Sierra Club’s easy format to tell the FWS what you think

Attend the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Hackmatack public meetings on:

• Tuesday, April 3, 5-8 PM, Lost Valley Visitor Center, Glacial Park, off Rt. 31 north of Ringwood, IL
• Wednesday, April 4, 5-8 PM, Brookwood Middle School, 1020 Hunter’s Ridge Drive, Genoa City, WI

SEE ANIMALS IN CHICAGOLAND