Peace with Geese and Parachuting Cats in Borneo
As a city dweller, I have remained blissfully unaware of the war on geese raging in our suburbs, a tidy lesson in the law of unintended consequences:
In 1965 an intact flock [of Canada Geese] was discovered in Missouri. Wildlife agents took their eggs, incubating them in many parts of the country thus encouraging them to nest in a wide array of areas. Because migration is a learned behavior, if geese are born in New Jersey or Connecticut, they have no reason to fly off to Canada. They return to the place of their birth to nest and raise their young.
Various strategies have been employed to deflect geese, including putting oil on their eggs to strop development and stationing collies near ponds to discourage landing.
All of this reminds me of a book/pamphlet/very low budget production I had as a child called something like The Day It Rained Cats. It was the story of how the WHO wound up parachuting cats into Borneo in the 1950s:
In the early 1950s, there was an outbreak of a serious disease called malaria amongst the Dayak people in Borneo. The World Health Organization tried to solve the problem. They sprayed large amounts of a chemical called DDT to kill the mosquitoes that carried the malaria. The mosquitoes died and there was less malaria. That was good. However, there were side effects. One of the first effects was that the roofs of people's houses began to fall down on their heads. It turned out that the DDT was also killing a parasitic wasp that ate that cheating caterpillars. Without the wasps to eat them, there were more and more thatch-eating caterpillars. Worse than that, the insects that died from being poisoned by DDT were eaten by gecko lizards, which were then eaten by cats. The cats started to die, the rats flourished, and the people were threatened by outbreaks of two new serious diseases carried by the rats, sylvatic plague and typhus. To cope with these problems, which it had itself created, the World Health Organization had to parachute live cats into Borneo.
I can't be completely sure, but I think this story might actually be true. For more on geese, check out GeesePeace.org--which is also real.
