Birds

I will admit up front that I have no love for the Brown Pelican. These birds hang around the Naples Pier and harass the fisherman. We had a large net so that every time a bird grabbed our fish we could capture the dumb thing and get the fish out of its mouth. That being said I don’t take any pleasure in watching these birds get soaked with oil but let us please put things in perspective.

I saw a report last week that said after scouring the beaches in a four state area they came up with 512 birds that were affected by the oil spill. Up in North Dakota where I lived for 25 years they would shoot that many ducks and geese out of the sky every day during hunting season. I worked in a poultry processing plant where we slaughtered 100,000 birds per day and we were only one of 700 USDA plants.

The question I always have, when I see these people standing on the shore, scrubbing the oil from these birds is how can they take time off from work to do this and if they are getting paid, who is paying them. Every minute showing these bird wipers is a minute where we could be interviewing people whose business and livelihood is being adversely affected. I don’t want to offend any animal lovers but I am still more interested in people stories than in bird stories and sometimes I feel this puts me in the minority.

Jack/John