It’s a tale of two fronts in the War on Geese.
In the environs surrounding La Guardia Airport, the Canada goose population has been reduced by 80 percent since January 2009, when a double-barreled bird strike nearly killed all 155 people on board US Airways Flight 1549.
But the fowl have gone virtually unmolested in the marshes near Kennedy Airport — thanks mainly to the appeasers at the National Park Service.
As The Post’s Bill Sanderson reported this week, the Park Service has blocked efforts by the city, Port Authority and federal Agriculture Department to cull the goose population in the sprawling Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, which abuts JFK’s runways.
Last summer, the Service OK’d a goose-cull in a landfill area a mile east of the
airport — but only days before the end of molting season, when the geese are flightless and easy to kill.
Now the Park Service is stalling a broader kill plan, arguing that Agriculture’s environmental-impact assessment wasn’t “vigorous enough.”
The review failed to address “alternatives in terms of [goose] habitat and ancillary damage to the habitat,” a Park Service spokesman said — whatever the hell that means.
But speaking of “environmental impact,” the plain fact is that Jamaica Bay geese will either be killed humanely — or stand a much higher chance of getting ground to bits in a jet-engine turbine, and just possibly taking a planeload of humans with them.
The National Park Service appears to prefer the latter.