Aviation Sacrilege

Do you hold anything in aviation sacred? I do: the sweet feeling of a great landing, the sound of a radial engine, the complete absence of sound at the top of a hammerhead stall in a glider, breaking out of bad weather to see the airport right in front of you...exactly where it's supposed to be, thermalling with eagles, I could probably go on all day.

I wouldn't go so far as to call flying a religion for us pilots, but it is definitely a spiritual force in our lives. We do hold parts of it sacred and we hate for that sanctity to be violated. We do a pretty good job of policing ourselves, but I'm worried that some airport officials in Wisconsin may be trying to slip through the cracks. They're dangerously close to committing a great sacrilege: killing dozens of birds to prevent an incalculable possibility of danger to human flight.

Talk about putting the cart before the horse!

According to the Isthmus, pilot and veterinarian Jens Luebow has been flying out of Dane County Regional Airport for years and doesn't think the local flock of Canadian geese are a problem. He thinks people are using the fear of an aviation accident to accomplish a completely unrelated goal. In spite of that, the city is currently planning on killing over a hundred geese. There's a hearing about it at 6:30 pm this Wednesday in Warner Park, the home of the geese in question.

Leubow isn't the only person opposed to this wanton mass-murder. iPetitions.com has 200 signatures from people who oppose this action.

The official airport FAQ shows that they followed a very methodical process in this matter, but it does nothing to convince me that they need to kill these birds or that removing them at all will solve the problem. If Warner Park is a great habitat for Canadian geese, won't more just move in after the current flock is butchered? It seems to me that this act has little hope of making any difference, especially given that there have only been four aircraft/goose collisions in the last 20 years, none of which happened in the last six years.

The airport FAQ quotes 14 CFR 139.377 a lot. When I read it, I get the feeling that there are a lot of other solutions to consider before taking such a drastic step as is being considered here. It seems to me that as long as there is a nice park near this airport, geese and other birds will be a problem. (Something about "if you build it, they will come" or something like that....) Killing some birds now will not prevent future problems.

All accident statistics aside, I think there's a bigger point here. What about the fate of our souls as aviators? (The word aviator comes from avian, or bird, you know....) How could we ever in good conscience condone murdering birds to further our own flight? They were there before the airport was, just like they were there before Orville and Wilbur finally succeeded in following them to the skies. If we can't find a way to coexist with the very creatures that inspired us to fly in the first place, what right do we have to be in the air at all?

Any thoughts?