Monday, August 1, 2011

What Is Wrong With This Picture

Catch this video, on the New York Times website, about preserving Jamaica Bay as a bird refuge. It is obvious that the reporter is abysmally ignorant; there are lots of birds on the bay worth preserving, but nearly all of the images are of Canada geese, pretty much a pest species whose numbers New York City is trying to reduce drastically because of the species' propensity for being sucked into the engines of passenger planes, with potentially catastrophic effects. (Had the reporter tried a little harder, he or she could have gotten brant geese or snow geese, for example, instead.) But what takes the cake is one of the first images, some guy letting his dog loose for a swim in the bay--perfectly illegal, by the way, and since loose dogs are a menace to endangered birds, hardly the message this video is trying to send.

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