US News

Birdbrains get no silly goose truce

Call it the Great Goose War — Part II.

Goose-rights wackos are squawking mad, and they’re not taking it this time. From Brooklyn to Queens and points beyond, bird fans with too much free time on their hands are mobilizing as human shields to save Canada geese from massacre.

In coming days, government assassins plan to creep into parks by stealth of night to slay between 700 and 800 Canada geese. Like the ones who took down “Miracle on the Hudson” US Airways Flight 1549. And nearly dumped Leonardo DiCaprio’s plane to Moscow in the drink.

But now, goose-killers will be met by animal-rights freaks, ready to use their bodies to prevent the slaying of a single, foul-smelling, plane-downing waterfowl.

How about some love for these vile creatures?

“They’re not rats with wings,” protested David Karopkin, who organized GooseWatch to save the geese. “We’re trying to change the image of these animals.”

Good luck with that.

Summer is molting season for Canada geese, as the beasts shed feathers and are rendered flightless. They also drop more than their share of unspeakable waste on lake shores, a fact about which I’ve learned more than I care to know.

Taking advantage of this opportunity, the US Department of Agriculture announced plans to enter city parks in coming nights, slaughtering hundreds of vulnerable birds. Unlike last year, when 368 geese from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park alone were massacred and discarded in a landfill, this year, the feds plan to ship butchered birds to Pennsylvania food banks for distribution to poor folks. I hope I never get that hungry.

The government is cagey about its bird-braining plans.

“We haven’t announced where we’re going specifically,” said city Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Farrell Sklerov, whose agency works with the USDA. “One of the priorities is ensuring the taking is in a stress-free manner, not upsetting the birds.” Can’t have dead, stressed birds.

“Anyone interfering in the process is not welcome.”

Good luck with that, too.

Birds who splash in Prospect Park, home of the Silly Goose Massacre of 2010, are said to be safe because their numbers have remained low since the culling, around 2½ dozen critters. But goose-watchers are taking no chances.

“We’re at Prospect Park every single day,” said Karopkin, 28, a paralegal. “I’ve spent nights outside the park. Other people are in the park.”

One guy who told me he’d bought a tent has chosen to be less obvious. He wants to secretly videotape a goose-killing attempt.

Karopkin has an e-mail list ready to mobilize “well over 100 people,” any time of night or day, in parks throughout the city. He added, “I am also extraordinarily concerned about the airplanes.”

And there’s the rub. Activists refuse to believe park geese take down planes. Last fall, DiCaprio’s Delta jet, en route to a Russian conference on — wait for it — tiger extinction, was forced to make a hairy emergency landing in New York after the pilot reported a bird strike. Later, officials relented, saying the animal-hugging actor’s jet must have been felled by engine trouble.

Goose booster Anne-Katrin Titze, who helped sound the alarm in Prospect Park, doesn’t believe it.

“Are we threatened by 700 to 800 geese? Isn’t that bizarre?” she said.

Call me cruel. The only good goose I know is served on a plate.

ARABIAN FRIGHTS

It took four years, but educrats have woken up to the fact that an Arabic-themed middle school in Brooklyn was a rotten idea.

Since its inception in 2007, critics feared the Khalil Gibran International Academy would promote terrorism. It wound up fomenting terror of another kind. As I reported, one-third of Gibran’s 114 students were suspended last year for infractions, from hitting to weapons possession. Cops were called to the school three to four times a week, making Gibran perhaps the city’s most violent public institution.

Gibran went into disarray even before Day 1, when founding principal Debbie Almontaser was booted for defending the vicious concept of intifada to this newspaper. The school she created in her own image has crumbled ever since. So this week, blaming “low enrollment,” an education panel pulled the plug.

The Department of Education is shutting the middle school and reopening Gibran as a high school in 2012, changing its focus from the Arab world to a global outlook. The school is also moving from a remote spot near the Brooklyn Navy Yard to better-watched Downtown Brooklyn.

Activists complain that the new plan bears little resemblance to the school’s original vision. To that, I say: Hooray!

Wills and Kate just plain folks

On their first trip abroad as a married couple, the Duke and Duchess of Whatchamacallit plan to revert to plain Wills and Kate. Unlike Queen Elizabeth, on whom one better not turn one’s back, grandson William and his bride are not bow-and-curtsy types. They want regular Joes and Jills to speak their minds when the royals arrive in Canada today.

First question — what was with the stupid hats at your wedding?


Grudge Report

Boys, can we just kiss and make up?

Rudy Giuliani has not returned calls to ex-First Roommate Howard Koeppel, despite the former mayor’s long-ago promise to officiate at Koeppel’s wedding to Mark Hsaio as soon as gay marriage was made legal in New York, Post City Hall Bureau Chief David Seifman reported yesterday. Well, bad blood has flowed between the men since 2009, when Rudy, mulling a presidential run, boycotted the Koeppel-Hsaio nuptials in Connecticut, directing a secretary to send last-minute regrets.

Now, the guys are really not speaking.

Last year, Rudy’s 20-year-old, sticky-fingered daughter, Caroline, was busted for shoplifting $100 of Sephora skinflash primer. Koeppel, still smarting from the wedding diss, dished to me about Giuliani-family dysfunction. He said Rudy, who lived with Koeppel and Hsaio during his 2001 divorce, communicated with his little girl via nannies and bodyguards. Rudy felt weird even asking Caroline to sit next to him at an Arizona World Series game. Giuliani returned to New York alone from Arizona, leaving young Caroline with her brother and $100 shopping money.

Rudy cuts off old pals like dead skin. Don’t expect a reply, Howard.

Aw, ‘poor’ ol’ Charlie

I’m glad Charlie Sheen has fewer mouths to feed. A week after his second and last goddess, pot-magazine model Natalie Kenly, moved out of his mansion, the Masheen reportedly inked a deal to star in a new sitcom — on raunchy and cheap cable TV.

Now the tiger-blooded warlock won’t have to censor his basest instincts. He also won’t make the $2 million an episode he pulled down from CBS. The day Kenly left him, Sheen was said to celebrate by bedding three women from three countries. With less income, Charlie’s party, like Anthony Weiner’s, will be forced into premature evacuation. It’s safer.