Risking Aviation Safety—For Geese!

Now this really drives me nuts.  There is certainly nothing wrong with having safe havens for wildlife.  They are generally good things.  But if our devotion to animals risks human life, we have gone way overboard.  And that appears to be behind the so far unsuccessful efforts to limit the goose population in a wildlife preserve near JKF Airport in the wake of bird strike last year that landed a jet in the Hudson River.  From the story:

A year and a half after Canada geese forced an airliner to splash down in the Hudson River, officials are rounding them up in almost every part of the city — but flocks are still free to take off around John F. Kennedy International Airport. The wild birds were at the center of a government vs. government battle on Tuesday. A National Park Service official told The Associated Press that, for now, his agency won’t touch the hundreds of birds living in a refuge near Kennedy airport’s runways. “Our mission is to protect and preserve wildlife — that’s a law — and it isn’t a given that the removal of the geese is necessary to protect the flying public,” said Dave Avrin, the official at the Park Service’s Gateway National Recreation Area, which includes the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.

Priorities, people!  Those geese are beautiful animals—but in this context they are just birds.  The entire gaggle is not worth one human life.  They have already taken down one plane.  Can you imagine the uproar if they take down another?