Goose Tales
Posted: January 22, 2009
Corn could be the reason that that U.S. Airways flight landed in the Hudson River last week, according to Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute. Seriously?
Time Magazine this week blames global warming for more geese around airports leading to more airplane bird strikes, but Avery says, “Time reached the wrong conclusion. Research indicates we should blame the prosaic corn harvester-and perhaps our attempt to expand corn production for biofuels.”
He says that there has been a five-fold increase in the number of Canadian geese since 1970 because of the type of harvesting equipment used by corn farmers and because of the increase in corn acreage in the Northeast.
Meanwhile, farmers have been planting still more corn, on every possible corner of the eastern seaboard, to get their share of those ethanol subsidies. Corn planting expanded about 50 percent in the mid-Atlantic States from 2002-2006, according to Virginia Tech, with comparable increases in New York and Pennsylvania.
Avery’s solution to the problem of geese getting sucked into airplane engines is better bird-strike prevention and “more real goose research.”
