BY PAT SUMMERS
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
An online petition to “Save Teterboro Airport Birds” that has already attracted more than 600 signers didn’t just happen. It’s the heartfelt work of Julie O’Connor, the animal activist you’d want on your side if you come back as a (non-human) animal.
In her petition, O’Connor says she has learned that starlings are being killed at the Teterboro Airport, one of many run by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Nor are starlings the only targeted birds; “pigeons, starlings, gulls, geese, sparrows, blackbirds, etc.” are specified in the PA’s Wildlife Hazard Management Plan.
It appears that all Port Authority airports intend to kill “all of the birds in the sky indefinitely,” O’Connor says.
Her petition also cites “the fact that those asking for the permits are the ones who make the money for killing the birds – the US Dept. of Agriculture, since the USDA receives money for providing the extermination services.”
Echoing other animal advocates on other issues – think New Jersey’s black bears – O’Connor argues that non-lethal ways of containing birds (a.k.a. “wildlife hazards”) should be independently tried and evaluated before the wholesale killing of birds. Those non-lethal means include landscape changes, pyrotechnics and altering flight patterns.
