Via The Atlantic, Goose Strike! Humans and the Sky by Glenn Hurowitz: “This January represents the two year anniversary of the emergence of a deeper existential threat to geese and many other far less numerous birds — one that represents a new and deeply troubling force in man’s relationship to the creatures of the sky. It was two years ago today that US Airways Flight 1549, famously piloted by Captain Chelsey Sullenberger, hit a flock of migrating Canada geese and was forced to make its dramatic water landing on the Hudson River before an audience of thousands watching from Manhattan’s skyscrapers. Soon, New York and then the country, divided itself into pro and anti-geese camps. Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced a death-to-geese policy for any bird unfortunate to find itself within five miles of one of New York’s airports. Wildlife agents waited until goose breeding season when the animals don’t take flight in order to protect their young and used kayaks to herd them ashore into pens, whence they were driven off to a goose gas chamber and buried. The Obama administration, eager not to be outflanked on goose killing, unleashed the Agriculture Department’s brutal “Wildlife Services” division on the geese and is planning to destroy more than 150,000 New York State geese out of a total population of a quarter million — and then move onto other states. There’s something new and deeply awful about this campaign that distinguishes it from previous wildlife extermination efforts. The geese are being targeted not for their meat or their feathers or some tangible utilitarian use. Rather, they are being killed merely because they inhabit the sky — into which our species has relatively recently decided to start flinging, on 90 second intervals, 700 thousand pound metal tubes with multiple jet engines attached to their wings through the air at average speeds of five hundred miles per hour.”