Executioners Sing! New Documents Reveal Full Extent of Park Goose-icide by Stephen Brown - The Brooklyn Paper

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New documents reveal that the massacre of Prospect Park geese (like this guy) was part of a massive operation that may have been the biggest extermination project ever.

The 250 geese and goslings that were massacred in Prospect Park in July were only the tip of the goose-berg, new documents reveal.

Federal agents rounded up a total of 1,676 geese from 19 locations in the city and Nassau County — apparently making last summer’s operation the largest intentional waterfowl extermination in city history.

The birds were thrown into crates and hauled to JFK Airport, where they were gassed, bagged, and discarded, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request. The goose-filled Dumpsters were then hauled to an incinerator in Garden City.

In Prospect Park, the July 8 “culling” was done under cover of darkness — and the records indicate that officials knew their efforts would be controversial.

“JFK ops will also coordinate your arrival each day to avoid any unwanted attention,” Laura Francoeur, the chief wildlife biologist for the Port Authority, wrote in an e-mail explaining protocol for the operation.

Of course, unwanted attention is what the feds got after visitors to Prospect Park noticed that hundreds of molting geese and baby goslings had vanished overnight.

Within days, the truth was revealed: that the animals had been swept up in citywide operation meant to clear the skies of geese — the same waterfowl that caused the crash landing of a US Airways flight in the Hudson River in 2009.

That harrowing incident led federal officials to kill 1,235 geese from sites within five miles of both city airports that year.

But this summer, the radius was expanded to seven miles, though federal officials exceeded that distance when they corralled geese in Prospect Park.

City, state and federal officials insisted that the culling of the goose population — which had grown to around 25,000 in the city — was necessary to reduce risk to aircrafts.

But the wide array of government agencies involved likely did not comprehend the passion of many parkgoers for the Prospect Park waterfowl. Immediately after the culling, hundreds of Brooklynites were outraged, and organized a vigil in memory of the geese.

Later, it was revealed that city officials — concerned about issues of liability — had discussed the possibility of a 30-mile goose kill zone.

And recently Tupper Thomas, Prospect Park’s top administrator,confessed that she was aware that the goose massacre was imminent, but said nothing publicly because she felt it was not her place.

Despite all these revelations, the feds remain tight-lipped about the details of their goose eradication plan, which, records show, could encompass nearly the entire city.

All 19 locations visited by Wildlife Services agents last summer remain a mystery, but documents from the Port Authority — the agency managing the city’s airports — do reveal a few of the sites in addition to Prospect Park:

• In Nassau County, agents exterminated geese in Valley Stream and Hempstead Lake State Park.

• In Brooklyn, agents killed animals at the Fountain Avenue and Penn Avenue landfills.

• In Queens, agents slaughtered geese in Alley Pond Park, Little Neck Bay and Fort Totten.

• Animals on Rikers Island and Randall’s Island were also swept up in the culling.

Some saw the stunning scale of the goose massacre as evidence that the policy needed to change.

“It is certainly the largest waterfowl [massacre] we know of,” said Patrick Kwan, the New York State director of the Humane Society of the United States. “It’s an example of why we need transparency. For 1,600 geese to be killed without New Yorkers knowing what was going on or being able to consider alternatives … it’s not the most effective, efficient or humane method.”

But gassing is the method favored by the city — and it is possible that it will be expanded to include the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge next year.

The chief of resource management at the Gateway National Recreation area, Dave Avrin, said a study was underway to determine how to control the goose population in the area. Previously, Jamaica Bay, which is part of a National Park, was off-limits to Wildlife Services.

“We are going through an Environmental Impact Statement at this time,” said Avrin. “One of the alternatives is to cull them next year, another is not. We’ll determine which one at the end of the process.”

BREAKING: Feds Kill Hundreds of Prospect Park Geese! by Stephen Brown - The Brooklyn Paper:

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Dead, they’re all dead.

Federal agents slaughtered more than 250 geese and dozens of babies in Prospect Park after corralling the adults and their young into a small pen early Thursday morning, boxing them up, and tossing them in a gas chamber.

The horror-movie-style measure was part of the city’s ongoing effort to exterminate the feathered creatures within a seven-mile radius from both LaGuardia and JFK airports — a radius that was expanded last year to include Prospect Park, putting all its birds in the path of a federally mandated massacre.

Carol Bannerman, a Department of Agriculture spokeswoman, confirmed the grim reaping that federal Wildlife Services staff executed on the fateful morning of July 8.

“Free-ranging waterfowl like this can be gently herded, then individually picked out, put into crates, moved into a nearby location and euthanized using carbon dioxide,” Bannerman said.

She said that the geese were buried, but would not reveal the location of the feathery mass grave.

“In other states [the goose meat] can be donated to food pantries, but that process hasn’t been set up in New York State,” Bannerman noted.

Among the dead include such avian celebrities as Beaky, the adored and deformed goose that was missing the top part of its beak after surviving an encounter with a fish hook; and Target, the resilient goose who not only survived being shot through with an arrow, but mesmerized the borough for days.

Park-goers were crying fowl over the weekend, when several bird lovers gave

The Brooklyn Paper a tour of the crime scene, a mysterious, feather-covered area where the birds had apparently been corralled. Plastic handcuff-like ties were also littering the site.

“It’s like a crime scene that they forgot to clean up,” said Ed Bahlman, a regular park watchdog.

The birds entered the city’s crosshairs after Capt. Sully Sullenberger pulled off the “Miracle on the Hudson” and landed an airplane in the Hudson River after flying into a flock of geese.

This latest episode likely means that the mysterious animal-related violence in Prospect Park has reached its nadir.

First, gory piles of animal entrails were found by the lake. Then, dozens of chicken heads were dumped in the water. As the weather heated up, dead animals began appearing in startling numbers. Around that time, park-goers mourned the death of John Boy, one of the park’s beloved swans.

Displaced Black Landowners Fight to Reclaim Georgia Land by Shaila Dewan- NYTimes.com

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HARRIS NECK NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Ga. — When the managers from the federal Fish and Wildlife Service talk about this 2,800-acre preserve of moss-draped cypress, palmetto and marsh, they speak of endangered wood stork rookeries and disappearing marsh habitat, dike maintenance and interpretive kiosks.

But when the members of the Harris Neck Land Trust talk about it, they speak of injustice, racism and a place they used to call home.

In 1942, Harris Neck, a thriving community of black landowners who hunted, farmed and gathered oysters, was taken by the federal government to build an airstrip. Now, the elders — who remember barefoot childhoods spent climbing trees and waking to watch the Canada geese depart in formation — want to know why they cannot have it back.

The Harris Neck Land Trust, formed by the former residents, their descendants and a handful of white families who owned land but did not live on Harris Neck, is asking Congress to return the land. The Fish and Wildlife Service maintains that the land is a crucial part of the national refuge system.

On its face, the quest of the former residents pits the goal of environmental conservation against that of righting a historical injustice. But it is also a conflict about two ways of life — one that tries to protect natural resources from human encroachment, the other demonstrating that humans can live in harmony with nature.

To the former residents, the suggestion that they cannot coexist with the wildlife on Harris Neck is absurd. “Wildlife was a part of us all of our lives,” said Kenneth R. Dunham Sr., 80, who was a child when the federal government gave Harris Neck families two weeks to leave before their houses were bulldozed and burned. “In my back door, I could hear the wild geese coming. We left food in the field so they would have something to eat.”

Harris Neck was deeded by a plantation owner to a former slave in 1865. Black families who settled there built houses and boats and started crab and oyster factories. But the community, many descendants suspect, was too independent for the comfort of McIntosh County’s whites.

During World War II, when federal officials were looking for a site for an Air Force base, the county’s white political leaders led them past thousands of uninhabited acres to Harris Neck. The government condemned the land and ordered the families to clear out with the promise, some residents recall, that they could come back after the war. Blacks received an average of $26.90 per acre for the land, while whites received $37.31, according to a 1985 federal report. In 1962, the wildlife refuge was established.

Trust members do not imagine that they can recreate their old way of life, but their plan for the land is meant to be similarly low impact. It includes solar energy, cutting-edge sewer treatment and organic farming. Most of the acreage would remain wild and open to the public.

But a little more than a tenth of the land would be developed — each of about 70 families would get four acres, with design requirements and a strict covenant that the land, now worth $100,000 or more an acre, could not be sold. There would be an eco-lodge and a convention center, which the county now lacks.

Transferring federally protected land is, of course, no easy matter. Representative Jack Kingston, a Republican who represents the area, has been generally supportive of the trust’s efforts but has tried to caution its members on the political difficulties. “Environmental advocates can be formidable adversaries,” he wrote in a May 25 letter to the trust.

Environmental groups, for the most part, have yet to voice opposition. Deborah Sheppard, executive director of the Altamaha Riverkeeper in nearby Darien, was hesitant to address the issue, saying that her organization had not taken a position. “This is not the traditional question that’s posed to environmental groups, and to the extent that people aren’t being responsive, it’s probably that they don’t know how to weigh in,” she said.

As a local resident, though, Ms. Sheppard said she was familiar with the history of Harris Neck and sympathetic to the former residents, displaced from land whose status as a wildlife refuge has helped drive the construction of million-dollar retreats nearby.

“People continue to suggest that people from Atlanta with money can live here in an ecologically sound way — why can’t people with experience hunting and fishing and living off the land live in an ecologically sound way?” she said. “Those people are rightly suggesting that they have a historic capacity to interact well with their natural resources. And the rest of us haven’t.”

Complicating matters is that the former residents are themselves, in a way, endangered. They are Gullah/Geechee, descendants of West African slaves who became some of the nation’s earliest black landowners. Their distinctive culture, preserved for years by isolation on the coastal barrier islands, has been threatened by development to such a degree that in 2006, Congress designated a Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor stretching from North Carolina to Jacksonville, Fla.

But without access to the land that sustained the Gullah way of life, there are few options for preserving it. Some official ideas were detailed in a letter from Cynthia Dohner, the regional director of Fish and Wildlife, who proposed, in lieu of returning the land, an “annual homecoming day” at Harris Neck and the chance to collaborate on an “interpretive kiosk.”

Evelyn Greer, 82, recalls the forced move out of Harris Neck in vivid detail: residents lugging furniture by hand or mule cart, leaving jars of preserved food and livestock behind. On the morning their house was to be demolished at 6 a.m., she and her mother woke early to retrieve a treasured phonograph and its two records. On the path, her mother froze.

“I heard the fullness in her voice,” Ms. Greer recalled. “She said, ‘We in plenty of time, but we’re too late.’ ” The house was in flames.

The family moved into a barn owned by the white man her mother worked for.

Now, Ms. Greer and other trust members meet monthly to pray, sing and mull their next move. There will be a meeting with a congressman who is friends with President Obama, and another with a Georgia Department of Natural Resources employee. Two longshoremen were in the room at a recent meeting — maybe the A.F.L.-C.I.O. could do something. “The Return of Our Land,” read an agenda. Then, pointedly, “Community Meeting No. 49.”

Mr. Dunham rose to deliver encouragement. “We’re going to move on, and we’re going to come on in spite all,” he said to amens and mm-hmms. “Won’t that be a happy time, when we all get to heaven? I’m talking about Harris Neck, now.”