Sweet dreams!
Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday there were no alternatives to the federally funded goose culling that is expected to annihilate up to 2,000 of the birds.
“There are people who care very much about the geese. But in the end, safety of the public is No. 1,” the mayor said on his weekly radio show.
On the plus side, “there is not a lot of cost involved in rounding up a couple thousand geese and letting them go to sleep with nice dreams.”
Federal Department of Agriculture workers on Monday will begin corralling Canada geese into portable pens and killing them in carbon dioxide-filled gas chambers in a six-week effort to cull the plane-menacing honkers living around Kennedy and La Guardia airports.
Teams of six to eight workers will carry out the wild-goose chases in parks and other city properties in a five-mile radius of the airports, officials said.
Over the next six weeks — when the geese are molting and unable to fly — the workers will set up portable capture pens made of snow fencing or chain-link fences.
The workers will herd the geese into the pens and then transfer them to crates that hold four or five birds apiece.
It takes about a half-hour to herd and remove 20 or 25 geese, said Carol Bannerman, a Department of Agriculture spokeswoman.
Once the geese are crated, they’ll be taken to the euthanasia chamber — a method approved by the American Veterinary Medical Association.
The geese will not be used for human consumption.
Canada geese are just one bird species blamed in aviation accidents — but because of their size, when they hit planes, they can cause major damage.
Migratory Canada geese have been blamed for the Jan. 15 downing of US Airways Flight 1549, which ditched in the Hudson River. Pro-goose activists say it’s therefore wrong to target the resident geese near the airports, since they weren’t involved in that strike.
“There’s a ton of nonlethal alternatives,” such as chemical repellents and goose-frightening pyrotechnics, said Wayne Johnson, a “free-land activist” who has led protests of geese killings around the country.
The bottom line, Bloomberg said, is that airline passengers need to be protected.
“We’re trying to strike a balance. In the safety of flying, the public trumps the rights of the geese,” he said, noting that the poisoning was a “less stressful way of eliminating geese. They actually use carbon dioxide, and they just sort of go to sleep.”
Officials have so far announced plans to cull geese from Randalls Island, Riverside Park in Manhattan, and Flushing Meadows-Corona and Fort Totten parks in Queens.
Department of Agriculture staffers haven’t decided yet what other parks or city properties might be targeted.
The roundups are just one prong of the joint city-federal-Port Authority effort to remove geese and other bird pests from around the airports.
The city plans to post signs banning bird feeding in parks, and the PA is expanding shotgun training of airport employees authorized to shoot birds.