The poor people of Comanche, Oklahoma are engaged in a losing war with a flock of cattle egrets:
Bill Smith, Comanche's streets and parks superintendent, raises an arm, points a plastic gun toward a grove of trees and triggers a blast equivalent to that of an M-80 firecracker. Immediately, hundreds of birds scatter from the branches above, like pellets fired from a shotgun.
Nearby, Billy Wright, on a bulldozer, is hard at work knocking the trees down. Each time one tumbles, scores of birds issue forth, like bees pouring from a hive that's been hit with a stick.
After a while, the men light a fire in the trees that have been brought down. The birds don't like the smoke and take off again in bursts.
Trouble is, the cattle egrets seem only to circle around for a while in the sky over the northern edge of Comanche before alighting again in the trees. There are some 5,000 of them, estimates Philip Robinson, a staff wildlife biologist with the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture. Robinson is standing by, overseeing the efforts to get the egrets to move on. It's one of the requirements of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife permit the town of Comanche had to get to go to war against the egrets, which are protected under an international migratory bird treaty.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/...
As if there wasn't already enough reason to despise the people of Oklahoma for Senator Inhofe, racism, bigotry, xenophobia, Christian fundamentalism and a mindet stuck in the 19th century.
These people are worried about the smell and overpopulation ...
All the efforts to make the egrets move on represent an investment by the town of between $6,000 and $6,500, Comanche City Manager Brant Ball said. Though that's a substantial price to pay to make something go away, "what we gain is what we avoid," he said, pointing out that the woody areas the nuisance birds have chosen to occupy are very near a grocery store, restaurants, a health clinic and residential areas. Not only is the smell a concern; Ball said if the birds were allowed to stay and their population to grow unchecked, they might present a health threat to the community.
Which reminds of another nuisance species. It has thoroughly overun the planet, 6.7 billion rising to 9 billion this century, and not only does it emit a noxious smell, its pollution is sufficient to transform the living Earth to a hellishly inhospitable place.
Like the residents of Comanche, Oklahoma, Nature is going to do whatever it must to remove the primate plague. Not that humankind minds. Humans are busy accelerating the process by destroying all of the natural means by which this planet has remained hospitable to human life and compatible with the survival of civilization.
Soon enough, our civilization will run out of resources and the Human Population Bubble will collapse and from that point on humankind will linger on in a diminished and diminishing compacity until humankind's extinction event occurs.
Nature is not in any rush, though. Nature is five billion years old and therefore can afford to take its time. Humankind, on the other hand, is in a mad rush to the exit. As our species destroys the planet at an accelerating pace our species quickly runs out of time and joins the ranks of the extinct and forgotten failed evolutionary experiments.
In spite of humankind's foolishness and destructiveness, Nature survived. Nature has faced much worse in the past and survived. Nature's survival is guaranteed. Humankind's survival is not.
Humankind's long futile war against Nature must and will end.
David Mathews
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