Word: birding
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That's great for bird lovers and bad for planes. In January, a flock of geese struck both engines of US Airways Flight 1549 out of La Guardia, forcing it to make an emergency landing in the Hudson River. Bird strikes are up nationwide, with pilots reporting more than 82,000 such collisions from 1980 to 2007. Not all those incidents involved Canada geese, but since these birds can grow to be as heavy as 14 lb., they present a particularly meaty threat to planes. (Watch TIME's video of the rescue of US Airways flight...
Canada geese are also prolific poopers, and with excretions adding up to as much as 1 lb. a day per bird, the health hazards are serious. The birds have been blamed for fecal contamination that has led to beach closings. "It's not just the geese, but what the geese leave behind," says John Moriarty, natural-resources specialist for Minnesota's Ramsey County parks...
...being culled. In New York City, it didn't help when Bloomberg commented that gassing geese amounted to "letting them go to sleep with nice dreams." Pro-goose activists picketed at Union Square as well as at Bloomberg's posh Manhattan home. "Are we going to extinguish every single bird in the sky?" asks Edita Birnkrant, New York director of Friends of Animals...
...time trying to kill projects that sound like red alerts on Fox News: a plan for military-cemetery headstone-straightening was scrapped, as was a request for a $10,000 refrigerator to house fish sperm in South Dakota. Gone too was $7 million for Interior Department aircraft to study bird migration. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood persuaded the governor of Ohio to redirect $57 million for future road-project planning to immediate construction. Cities and states were told to stay away from swimming-pool construction and anything with the word golf in it - Frisbee golf, clock golf, minigolf. "The Frisbee people...
...sheer complexity of the stimulus measure makes it difficult to bird-dog. Though the Recovery Act was a single piece of legislation, it included thousands of funding streams for tens of thousands of projects. About $144 billion is allocated directly into state coffers for continuing existing programs that have been heavily burdened by the recession, like Medicaid. Hundreds of billions more have been set aside for tax cuts and continuing benefits to the poor and unemployed. The most visible part of the program, and the most politically explosive, is the roughly $152 billion for infrastructure investment, for which...