Bird killer


We’ve got this great big glass-fronted stadium in the Twin Cities, located near the river and on the migratory flyway for birds. Everyone said before it was built that it was going to kill lots of birds. Now that it’s looming there, people are patrolling around the base and looking for dead birds. And guess what? It’s killing lots of birds. Surprise!

I’m interested in how people respond to the confirmation of this prediction. The comments are predictably depressing.

Wind turbines kill an estimated 140,000 to 328,000 birds each year in North America, also according to the National Audubon Society.

Yes! This is a big problem! We need better solutions to prevent bird and bat deaths by turbines, and no one is going to disagree with that. The story here, though, is that we have good solutions to the problem of birds hitting buildings, and they were even proposed during construction. As the article points out:

ird strikes with buildings are avoidable. Manhattan’s Jacob Javits Center, built in 1986, reduced collisions by about 90 percent by replacing reflective glass with a visibly patterned glass three years ago. American Bird Conservancy suggests using window films, decals, netting, screens and awnings to deter bird collisions.

So here’s a situation with a clear solution, which the owners of the stadium dismissed and did not implement, and someone is pointing to a completely different problem that lacks a good solution as an excuse to do nothing? Weird.

Do you really want to destroy what is suppose to be a revenue generator with bad publicity?

Did you know that stadiums don’t profit the communities they’re built in? They line the pockets of sports team owners, for sure, and you could argue that there are lots of intangible values that having an entertainment complex brings in…but please. Don’t argue for a non-existent profit.

Also, most troubling is the idea that we should be silent about bad ideas lest we discourage people from investing in them. That seems precisely backwards to me.

Those are the reasonable (by comparison) criticisms of the article. Are you ready for the unreasonable ones?

These crazy liberal democrat groups are nuts. They care more about 35 birds dying versus millions of human fetuses murdered by Planned Parenthood.

If you look at the statistics, less than a million abortions per year are performed in the US. These are not acts of murder. These are safe, legal operations carried out for the health and benefit of almost a million women per year. I actually do care more about the health and future of women than I do the safety of birds, but that is irrelevant. Putting a film on a stadium to reduce bird collisions will not increase the abortion rate, if that’s what you’re concerned about.

This next one, though, is just plain stupid.

Just put a big ugly Elizabeth Warren face up there with mouth open. That’ll scare crow those birds away if it doesn’t scare’em to death first.

It would actually work. Setting aside the bigotry and misogyny about calling Warren ugly, putting up a great big decal of any kind — you could even use Donald Trump’s lovely face — would disrupt the reflective surface that fools the birds and would solve the problem. A non-reflective film was what was originally proposed, which would probably be simpler and cheaper, but sure, slap a great big American flag across all that glass; an abstract pattern; pictures of bald eagles; whatever. This is not an insoluble problem.

Comments

  1. Siobhan says

    Yes, but that would require admitting that scientists are right about something, and after that it’s just a slippery slope to acknowledging all the other things that science says is true. Like global climate change, you know, that great liberal conspiracy.

  2. Ed Seedhouse says

    I assume these science deniers will avoid riding in cars, buses, and airplanes, because after all these work because of the laws of physics, which can’t possibly be true, because global warming is a hoax, and if it is a hoax the laws of physics must be wrong. And these so-called “laws of physics” are found nowhere in the bible either.

  3. starman91 says

    By far, according to several studies, the greatest cause of bird deaths is buildings, followed by cats. Wind turbines are an order of magnitude down the list of causes.

  4. unclefrogy says

    the ego driven stubbornness of ignorance is astonishing, it invents such impressively irrelevant irrational arguments. I do not know what to say.

    I do not see what the problem is with a relatively simple solution to what is in part, a maintenance problem that people get so outraged?
    Are simple changes really that threatening?
    uncle frogy

  5. kevskos says

    Sure cats can catch a lot of birds. We have a feral (neutered and spayed) colony around our house. I have spotted over 50 species of birds in my yard. Only birds they ever catch are mocking birds, doves (never the very small ones) and pigeons. We have plenty of all of them.

    The wind turbines are getting much better at warning birds off as well.

  6. jamiejag says

  7. Jado says

    ” ‘This is not an insoluble problem.’

    YES IT IS!!! TOTALLY UNSOLVABLE!!1111

    Duh, libtard. If there was a solution as simple as installing a non-reflective film on the reflective windows, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN DONE ALREADY!!!

    You must think we are all really stupid to say that the solution is so simple, and we haven’t done it because the corporation doesn’t want to spend the money. Corporations are people, and you have hurt it’s feelings.

    You should apologize.”

    There. That’s my submission for RWNJ reply, complexity-obtuseness division.

    I will add in a RWNJ reply, raging-paranoia division, as soon as I can get myself a syringe of adrenaline and a sledgehammer for the ol’ cranium.

    If i win, please let me know. I’m hoping to make regionals this year.