Saturday, April 14, 2007

Unsurprisingly, Egg Addling Ends Unsuccessfully

The Chicago Park District, continuing its efforts to make the city's lakefront parks more bird-friendly, has hired an outside consultant to try to get rid of the local Canada Geese. Can't have goose crap cluttering up your Olympic venues, y'know?

They've paid this consultant a lot of money, and the consultant decided that the best way to rid Grant Park of these pesky geese is to addle their eggs. In this article, they call it "egg depradation:"

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/312283,CST-NWS-geese25.articleprint

Now, normally this is the type of thing we would use to illustrate the hypocrisy of the Chicago Park District, but we've pretty much left it alone because these geese really do mess up the pretty lawns in certain parts of Grant Park. But here's the funny part: The consultant trains 20-30 volunteers (probably costing us taxpayers a couple of grand) to find goose eggs, and then they...well, they come up with a "goose egg" because they can't find any goose eggs:

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=local&id=5191667

See, if they would have actually asked anyone who knows anyone about birds, they would have known that Canadas don't nest in Grant Park. Du-oh!

Wonder what brilliant plan they will come up with next?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wonder no more; I hear rumors that Hizzoner has personally trained the army of goats that he he keeps in Calument to suck goose eggs. Rumor also has it that some of them are also being trained to drive CTA buses and hand out campaign literature. Very eco friendly. Instead of throwing their cigar butts all over the place, the goats eat them. Hizzoner thinks of everything.