Bad Birds
The article below was from a recent New York Times Op-ed page. It reminds me that a strong form of biobigotry exists in our own back yard evidenced by the Central Park Conservancy's zealous persecution of Canada Geese in Central Park.
For the past year the Conservancy has contracted with the "Geese Police" of Howell, NJ. These stalwart individuals appear every morning at the Lake and Meer and use their Border Collies to harass the geese. The geese dutifully fly off but, unfortunately for myself and other bird watchers, so do the ducks that overwinter on the lakes. Now that spring has arrived the Geese Police are chasing away the herons and egrets that used to fish in these waters. The geese, of course, are shunted to other waters in less well-financed parks in New York City. Some of them end up on the Reservoir (along with some of the overwintering ducks) because the Reservoir is controlled by the Parks Dept. and is off limits to the Geese Police.
When asked why the Conservancy spends so much money on this program the vague replies from Conservancy employees range from "The geese are to aggressive," to "We get complaints." Geese are just being geese but in our biobigotry we vilify them as "bad birds." Just take a look at the video used as a marketing tool by the Geese Police. You would think Canada Geese are public enemy number one.
Now that the Conservancy is contemplating extending the Geese Police's contract for another year I urge you to contact Adrian Benepe, Commissioner of the New York City Parks Department, and ask him to stop the harassment of waterfowl in Central Park. You can e-mail him at: http://nyc.gov/html/mail/html/maildpr.html
April 29, 2008
Basics
Noble Eagles, Nasty Pigeons, Biased Humans
By NATALIE ANGIER
The other day I glanced out my window and felt a twinge of revulsion delicately seasoned with indignation. Pecking at my bird feeder were two brown-headed cowbirds, one male and one female, and I knew what that meant. Pretty soon the fattened, fertilized female would be slipping her eggs into some other birds’ nest, with the expectation that the naïve hosts would brood, feed and rear her squawking, ravenous young at the neglect and even death of their own.
Hey, you parasites, get your beaks off my seed, I thought angrily. That feeder is for the good birds, the birds that I like — the cardinals, the nuthatches, the black-capped chickadees, the tufted titmice, the woodpeckers, the goldfinches. It’s for the hard-working birds with enough moral fiber to rear their own families and look photogenic besides. It’s not meant for sneaky freeloaders like you. I rapped on the window sharply but the birds didn’t budge, and as I stood there wondering whether I should run out and scare them away, their beaks seemed to thicken, their eyes blacken, and I could swear they were cackling, “Tippi Hedren must go.”
In sum, I was suffering from a severe case of biobigotry: the persistent and often irrational desire to be surrounded only by those species of which one approves, and to exclude any animals, plants and other life forms that one finds offensive.
It was not my first episode of the disorder, and evidently I don’t suffer alone. “Throughout history there have been vilified animals and totemic animals,” said John Fraser, a conservation psychologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “There are the animals you don’t like and that you dismiss as small brown vermin, and the animals whose attributes you absolutely want to own,” to be a tiger, a bear, lupine leader of the pack.
Biobigotry is different from the impulse to avoid organisms that can hurt or sicken us, like yellow jackets, mosquitoes or poison ivy, or to fend off traditional household pests like mice and roaches. Rather, it is the dislike we direct toward creatures that live outdoors and generally mind their own business, but that behave in ways we find rude, irritating, selfish or contemptible. The squirrels are gluttons, the crows are schoolyard bullies, the house sparrows are boring and look like mice when they skitter along the ground. How we love those noble falcons and eagles that lately have blessed us by nesting on our skyscrapers and bridges. How we beg them to feast freely on the pigeons and starlings that curse us by nesting on our skyscrapers and bridges.
Sometimes our biobigotry is merely attitudinal. In the course of an interview about spotted hyenas, for example, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, scornfully referred to the wildebeest that the hyenas frequently prey on as “wildeburgers.” Why? Because once a wildebeest has been caught, said the scientist, it just stands there with cowlike passivity and allows itself to be torn apart. Compare that with a zebra, the researcher said, which will go down fighting and kicking and cracking the predator’s jaw if it can.
“Oh, we’re all of us prone to a massive over-interpretation of the things that we see,” said Marc D. Hauser, professor of psychology and evolutionary biology at Harvard University and author of “Moral Minds.” “I distinctly remember, when I first went to Amboseli National Park to study vervet monkeys, how quickly I developed strong feelings about the personalities of the monkeys — here were the great and brave ones, there were the lame ones that hid in the bushes and acted pathetic.”
At other times, we take steps to favor our local heroes or thwart our chosen goats, whose greatest sin, as a rule, is being exceptionally good at their game. We try to squirrel-proof our bird feeders, yank weeds from our flower beds, call Animal Control, and when all else fails, reach for our guns. Stephen C. Sautner of the Wildlife Conservation Society cited the case of a friend and avid birder who has a colony of purple martins on his property. “He spends much of his time shooting and trapping starlings and English sparrows,” said Mr. Sautner, “both of which he describes as ‘evil.’ ”
We always have a story to justify our most aggressive attempts at unwanted-animal control. The animal is an invasive species like the European starling, and it doesn’t belong here. Or it’s a native species like the cowbird but its range has been unnaturally extended through deforestation. Or it likes our garbage and our raggedy parks and thus has an unfair advantage over fussier creatures. Whatever the self-exculpatory particulars, said Marc Bekoff, author of “The Emotional Lives of Animals” and emeritus professor of biology at the University of Colorado, “I see it as a double cross that we create a situation where cowbirds spread, or red foxes eat endangered birds, and then we decide, well, now we’ve got to go out and kill the cowbirds and the foxes.”
Our proneness to biobigotry, experts said, arises from several salient human traits. For one, we are equipped with an often overactive theory of mind — the conviction that those around you have their own minds, goals and desires, and that it might behoove you to anticipate what they’ll do next. We spin elaborate narratives out of the slenderest of observational threads: Look, the blue jay is trying to dislodge the cowbird from the feeder. Could the jay know the cowbird is a nest parasite and be trying to drum it out of town? “We interpret animal behaviors through a human lens and human morality,” said Mr. Fraser, the conservation psychologist.
Related to the human impulse to see ourselves in nature is the persistent sense that nature belongs to us, and that we have the right and the means to control it. “In the past, when we talked about exploiting nature, that was seen as a good thing,” Mr. Fraser said. “Now we realize that that attitude is counterproductive to human success.”
Nowhere is our sense of droit du roi over nature more manifest than in our paradoxical attitudes toward farm animals. On the one hand, they’re the beloved figures of our earliest childhood. On the other hand, many of our most pejorative comparisons were born in the barnyard — you lazy pig, you ugly cow, you chicken, what a bunch of sheep.
Conservation groups, which keep track of public attitudes toward animals, acknowledge that they are ever on the lookout for the next Animal Idol — an ecologically important creature that also happens to be large, showy, charismatic and likable. If you have two important birds from the same region of Latin America, said Mr. Fraser, one a hyacinth macaw that looks like flying jewelry and can vocalize like a human, the other a storm petrel that is brown, squawky and cakes the coastline with guano, guess which face ends up on the next fund-raising calendar.
Not that public attitudes can’t be changed. Bats, for example, were long considered vermin, but nowadays, in the wake of the wildly popular children’s book “Stella Luna,” they’ve taken on a magical air, as the mosquito-eating Tinkerbells that if you’re lucky will soon take up residence near you. Until then, step away from that bat house, sparrow. Don’t make me shoot.
