Zopilotes Rule The Roost

[fritz]

Bastrop park tries to expel black vultures

July 11, 2006

 

BASTROP (AP) - Officials will close a Lake Bastrop park this week while they work to reduce the population of black vultures, which are at an increasing annoyance with their habit of scratching vehicles and picking rubber objects.

 

 

 

 

Wildlife experts said they will try to scare the birds away but some will probably be shot. Earlier efforts to chase the birds off with cannon blasts and goose decoys were unsuccessful.

 

"We're kind of really down to our last option here," said Bill McCann, spokesman for the Lower Colorado River Authority, which operates the North Shore Park. "We're not out there to eliminate them, but we are going to try to reduce their numbers."

 

The population of carrion-eating black vultures began to increase about five years ago, McCann said, and now there are a few hundred of them.

 

"Every morning, you've got to get up and run them off," said Martha Nickel, a camper at the park. "There are hundreds of them everywhere. It's amazing."

 

In addition to leaving an abundance of excrement, the birds also pick the rubber off car windshields. Nickel said they pick at her cooking grill and destroyed her son's floating noodle.

 

Park Director Susan Baxter-Harwell said the birds are attracted to rubbery material because if feels like flesh.

 

A team from the Texas Wildlife Damage Management Service will try to expel the birds using pyrotechnics, a laser that that makes the birds uncomfortable when shined in their eyes and lethal measures, said Linda Tschirhart-Hejl, a wildlife biologist with the service.

 

"You use multiple harassment techniques at one time to keep them confused," she said. "It'll make them leave an area quicker."

 

The service is a partnership between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Texas Animal Damage Control Association.

 

Tschirhart-Hejl said that killing the birds is a last resort, and she does not know how many will be eliminated. McCann said the park won't eliminate all the birds but enough so they will no longer be a nuisance.

 

Jarrod Depew, an LCRA wildlife biologist, said the birds will probably come back because they're attracted to trash generated by campers and utility towers for roosting areas.

 

"There's no possible way to remove the whole vulture population," Depew said. "It's probably going to be an ongoing thing."

 

Your tax dollars at work, what ever happened to the three S's?

 

 

 

fritz

[AzRednek]

About 20 years ago a Phoenix Post Office put up some plastic owls to keep nesting pigeons away from the overhead parking cover of the supervisor's parking area. The manure hit the fan when an organization named For The Birds picketed the postal station. They handed out flyers claiming federal tax dollars were being used to keep mother birds from their babies. Post Office management handled a congressional inquiry by saying the plastic owls had been removed but in a typical government bureaucratic responce failed to mention they had called in an exterminator. The Post Office got a thank you letter from the bird lovers.