Fuzz, page 21
The nuns have just demonstrated the world’s oldest technique for scaring birds away from plants: have someone run at them making noise. The best means of keeping away crows and other “enemies of the corn,” wrote Gervase Markham in 1631, is “to have ever some young boy … to follow the seed-man … making a great noise and acclamation.” The practice was documented in detail for an 1869 British parliamentary investigation of child labor practices which was the subject of a recent museum exhibit in Nunney, England. The children were usually between six and nine—boys not yet strong enough for more laborious farmwork. They were paid a pittance to roam the fields “hallooing” and clacking wooden bird scarers. They worked a month in spring when the seeds were sown and came back in fall for another month when the crops were ripening, effectively obliterating any continuity in their education. The drawback from the farmers’ perspective was that the boys were lazy, to the extent that, by one farmer’s words, “each boy required a man to look after him.”
Well, halloo, they should have just had that man do the scaring. Adult bird scarers are uncommon, but they do exist, even today. Hiring them can be cost-effective. I say this with some confidence because science has looked into it. The UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food maintains an experimental farm in north Norfolk, England, for testing, among other things, “scaring regimes.” The site, a series of coastal wheat and rape-seed fields, was selected for the noteworthy annual depredations of a flock of three thousand resident brent geese. Researchers Juliet Vickery and Ronald Summers used the site to compare the cost-effectiveness of commonly used techniques—propane cannons and the like—with that of a “full-time human bird scarer” tooling around on an ATV six days a week. (“The farmer scared geese on the seventh day,” the researchers wrote biblically.) The human bird scarer achieved a significantly greater reduction in the amount of time the birds spent grazing and the intensity—as quantified by “dropping density”—with which they went at it.
Even factoring in the initial outlay for the ATVs, the human scarer was more cost-effective. A few farmers would seem to have taken note. Dutch berry growers sometimes hire college students to work as bird scarers in the summer as the crop ripens.
A human bird scarer makes sense for a relatively small acreage. The flowers outside St. Peter’s cover less than half an acre and require just a couple nights of protection. If ever a scenario called out for simple, cost-effective human bird-scaring, here it was. If I had seen Deckers’s original call for ideas, I’d have sent an email saying, “Did you think about hiring a human bird scarer? Just some person to sit there at the altar and keep an eye out and run off any gulls?” Instead I sent the email after I got home from Rome. “No, we did not think about that,” came Deckers’s reply. “It’s better for André that we did not!” And it was. The Vatican City State is gearing up to be a nation with one grocery store, one pharmacy, no movie theater, and two LaserOp Automatic 200 bird-scaring units.
André opens the lid of one of his laser units. Inside there’s a digital display, like something Daniel Craig would be hunched over, trying to defuse the bomb that’s set to take out MI5 and the whole London waterfront, or program his sprinkler system. “Only five buttons,” André says. Buttons for setting the start times and the intervals between activations, and buttons for setting the boundaries of what needs to be covered. “A farmer can do this.”
For a large farm, using human scarers would either be personnel-heavy or endlessly Whac-A-Mole. An automated system like André’s holds great appeal: a series of solar-powered units that can be custom-programmed to cover the whole field. Is this the golden future of bird deterrence?
André drags a planter out of the beam’s path. “In five or six years,” he begins, but he doesn’t go where I’m expecting, “no one will be using lasers. It’s dangerous.” Even the handheld kind sold for classroom lectures can damage a retina. When laser light is absorbed by pigments in the eye, it deposits energy and heats up the tissue. Because the light arrives in a tight beam—and is further focused by the eye’s lens—the energy density is high. In terms of the damage caused, think of the difference between someone in stilettos stepping on your foot and someone wearing loafers.
André isn’t wearing laser safety goggles. When asked, he points out that the beams are aimed downward, and that you would need to be looking into the source of the beam to harm your eyes.
Who stares into a laser beam? Adolescent boys, in 80 percent of the cases. That was the finding of a team of ophthalmologists who reviewed 77 cases and emailed surveys to hundreds of their peers. Some of the kids, they found, were taking part in laser staring contests, reluctantly admitting to emergency room personnel that they’d looked into the laser for 10, 20, in one case 60 seconds. (The boys often had behavioral or genetic disorders linked to self-injurious behavior.)
Before I left, I spoke by phone to a Purdue University biology professor and former National Wildlife Research Center researcher, Esteban Fernandez-Juricic. He was involved in a study examining the safety—to birds—of brief exposures to a bird deterrence laser. It was the first study of its kind, previous safety claims having been based on human focal lengths, spectral sensitivities, and eye configuration, which have, as he put it, “zero to do with the bird eye.” Some species, Esteban said, don’t react to a laser, even when it crosses their visual field. “Maybe some species cannot see the lasers. We don’t know. So with these species that don’t respond, we should take more care.” But the opposite may be more likely to happen. Esteban voiced the thoughts of an imaginary frustrated farmer faced with a flock of one of those species: “Come on, species, there you go! More to you!” He has a wonderful, excitable Roberto-Benigni-wins-an-Oscar way of speaking.
Laser companies know about Esteban’s project, and it makes them uneasy. They’ve been scrambling to manufacture large units for agriculture, and a lot of money is at stake. “I have stories which I cannot tell you,” Esteban said. “It’s … how can I characterize it …”
“Someone tried to influence your results?” I offered. “A bribe?”
“What you are saying might not be very far from what happened once.” Esteban had to call the university lawyer. “I said, ‘Oh my gosh. You need to get involved, because this is …! Whoa.’ ”
André Frijters had not heard of Esteban, which was not surprising, because the results of the study had not yet been published. Three months after I got home, Esteban shared preliminary findings with me—no details, and no laser names. The results, he said, were unsettling enough for one bird-scaring outfit to travel to Purdue for a meet-up.
Esteban tried to calm his visitors. “It’s not like, You bad companies that are trying to do this! It’s an opportunity to work with the scientific community to modify the way the laser is operated, or the wavelength or the intensity.”
One year later, the study remained unpublished and Esteban was not replying to my emails. I hope he’s okay.
Around 5:00 a.m., about the time of the Easter 2017 flower assault, I walk over to St. Peter’s Square to see what’s happening. The lasers make firefly flashes as the beams touch the plants in their whizzing circuit of the altar area. They appear to be doing their job. From what I can see from back behind the security fencing, Deckers’s flowers are unmolested. Thirty gulls are asleep at the base of a fountain in the center of the square, drawn to the heat of the cobblestones.
Along the colonnade, a dozen of Rome’s unhoused are waking and quietly rolling up their sleeping bags. Police cars are parked thirty feet away, but the polizia have left these men and women to sleep in peace. Is this the kind and gentle hand of Pope Francis? I wonder to what degree his papacy is influenced by his namesake, St. Francis, friend to the poor and friend to the animals. Might the current papacy espouse more progressive approaches to nuisance wildlife? A ludicrous inquiry, I know. But I’m here. I might as well ask.
* When I first heard about “defensive vomiting,” I figured it was a way to become lighter and better able to take wing and flee. Nope. Nor is it done to repulse the predator. Au contraire, it’s more likely, said gull expert Julie Ellis, “a way to distract a potential predator with some alternative food.” Animals are different from us.
† Especially as they don’t have dicks. Like most birds, gulls mate by aligning their cloacal openings. The ornithological term for this is “the cloacal kiss.” Which makes bird sex sound sweet and demure, until you remember that they also excrete through their cloaca.
‡ And good luck if it’s you. In addition to beaking your head, gulls can be, as Ellis phrased it, “very adept at aiming their feces.” She shared the story of a student on Appledore Island who, hoping to protect herself while traversing a nest-dense canyon, put on a raincoat and pulled the hood up tight. “A gull managed to shit directly into her mouth.”
13
THE JESUIT AND THE RAT
Wildlife Management Tips from the Pontifical Academy for Life
The Vatican City State is a sovereign nation the size of Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Like Disney World, it has places where tourists may go and places where only staff are allowed. Because I’m neither, and because I don’t fit the Vatican’s definition of press, I was told to write to the secretary-general of Vatican City State. It was like trying to enter the United States by writing a personal note to Donald Trump. Though likely went better. My note was forwarded, and promptly generated a gracious reply, which Google Translate presented as follows. “I gladly take this opportunity to offer you, my dear lady, the expression of my distinguished homage.” Signed, somewhat incongruously, “the Vatican Director of Gardens and Garbage.”
The very same director, in a blue Ford Focus,* has just pulled up along the curb at one of the guarded entrances to the Vatican. Rafael Tornini gets out to shake my hand. In person, he is a formal but not showy man. He is dressed in a dark blue business suit, clean if slightly worn. We head out for his office. The streets are narrow and largely empty. It appears to be a city without traffic, a country without children.†
“And there is the border with Italy!” I follow Tornini’s gaze to the massive wall that surrounds the Holy See. A gull glides over. There’s your symbol of peace, I think to myself. A bird, any bird, soaring over walls, ignoring borders! Peace, freedom, unity! It’s possible I’ve had too many espressos.
Tornini’s office is modest. His view is of the leaves of some thick vine. An interpreter joins us. Tornini says gulls cause no trouble inside the Vatican gardens. “Here it’s the green parrots.” They eat the seeds that the garden staff plants.
Nothing is done to get rid of them. “They’re part of the system.” According to Carol Glatz, the Catholic News Service reporter who covered the peace dove fiasco, the Holy Father is a bird guy. He used to own a parrot (and he taught it dirty words).
Pope Francis has indeed steered the nation according to the worldview of St. Francis of Assisi, the OG animal activist. Shortly before Tornini took his current post, Pope Francis decreed that biological pest control be used in place of chemical pesticides. Insects that prey on problematic bugs have been introduced, and nest boxes have been mounted on tree trunks in the gardens to encourage bats, because the bats eat the mosquitoes.
We get back in Tornini’s car to go see the Vatican bat boxes. They’re very nice, they’re wooden, they’re tasteful. Soon we arrive at a low, sprawling mound of grass clippings. The Vatican compost heap! Far in the back, a week old by now, is some distinctly papal organic waste: elaborately woven palm fronds left over from Palm Sunday. Tornini pulls one out for me.
Open compost piles can attract animals. Here it is—that rare conversational segue to the topic of Vatican pest control. I ask the interpreter to inquire about rodent problems.
Ratti, I hear him say to Tornini. He turns to me: Sì, sì. The Vatican has rats.‡
Sì, answers Tornini when I ask whether they set traps. He says something to the interpreter, who then adds, “They have to do an action against them, because it’s a big population. And they really make damage. To the machinery, the wires. They try to keep everything as clean as possible, but—”
“So Pope Francis is okay with killing rats?”
Tornini has never even met Pope Francis, and now he is being asked to speak for him. The interpreter listens, then turns to face me. “He says you should ask him.”
Of course I can’t do that. Instead, I will do the closest thing available to a lapsed Catholic with no high-level connections. I have an interview with Father Carlo Casalone, a staff bioethicist at the Pontifical Academy for Life. The PAL is a Catholic think tank of sorts. Its members are appointed by the pope but are not necessarily clergy or even Catholic. The PAL guides Church doctrine on matters ranging from the perennial (abortion, euthanasia) to the more cutting-edge (gene therapy, artificial intelligence). As the sexual abuse scandal widened, the PAL played a role in drafting the Church’s response. I told the PAL media manager I was interested in the academy’s opinions on the designation of certain wildlife as pests. That is, under what circumstances should a species be exempt from moral protections against extermination or cruelty? I quoted St. Francis of Assisi. I did not mention rats. He replied right away. It was perhaps a welcome diversion from thornier inquiries lately clogging his inbox.
Walk straight down Via della Conciliazione from St. Peter’s Square. Three blocks along, across the street from the souvenir store selling Pope Francis bobbleheads, with their unfortunate suggestion of tremor, you will see a boxy three-story building of caramel-colored stucco. A plaque beside the doorway announces that you have arrived at the Pontificia Academia pro Vita, the Pontifical Academy for Life. Although situated outside the physical borders of the Vatican City State, the PAL is officially a part of it, which means that while visiting, you undergo a sort of geopolitical transubstantiation. You are in Italy, and yet you are inside the Vatican.
Father Carlo’s office walls are white and undecorated, unless a crucifix counts as decor. It was the same at Tornini’s office. The extravagance of the Vatican seems concentrated, like a laser beam, inside the museum and the churches. Father Carlo is himself unadorned: black pants, black shoes, black button-down shirt with the white tab collar. His voice is low and quiet and he doesn’t talk with his hands, or not in the stereotypical manner of the Italian male. Though the floors are marble, I imagine him making no sound as he walks.
Some of this anti-ostentatiousness may be the influence of Pope Francis, who in turn is influenced by St. Francis of Assisi, the humble, nature-besotted friar. When he became pope, Francis took a regular clergy apartment. Like Tornini, he gets around in a Ford Focus. This week I dropped by a Holy Thursday Mass that included the ritual washing of a few congregants’ feet. It was more a gesture than a real cleaning—a splash of water over the instep. “Francis gets right in there with a scrub brush,” laughed my Catholic News Service acquaintance Carol Glatz. (And yes, he eschews the red loafers.)§
So I’m curious. How far does the pope think we should go in the direction of respecting and protecting the natural world and its wild inhabitants? Before I arrived, the PAL media manager sent me a copy of Francis’s rather beautiful encyclical On Care for Our Common Home. “Each creature has its own purpose,” he writes. “None is superfluous.” He describes how St. Francis would burst into song when he gazed at the sun, the moon, or the smallest of animals. I read these passages to Father Carlo.
He listens, nodding. “Saint Francis began a new relationship between nature and humanity. If you read his poems, you find the expressions Sister Water, Brother Sun, Sister Moon.”
“Would Saint Francis include Brother Rat?” Sister Boll Weevil, Uncle Blackbird Who Devours 2 Percent of the North Dakota Sunflower Crop?
Father Carlo says yes, yes he would. “He includes even death.”¶
“Did Saint Francis say anything specifically about rodents?” I hear myself say.
“No, he didn’t. But the point is, brotherhood is not a simple relationship. With your brothers and sisters, normally you fight. You cannot think that there is an idyllic way of being in a relationship with someone. Every relationship among humans and the earth is not only connotated with positive aspects. At the same time you also have negative aspects. The point is, how do you deal with those aspects.” He’s good, this guy.
“Yes, and how should we deal?” It’s well and good to say these things, but how do we act in a way that serves both human and animal fairly? Let’s take the example of Canada geese on golf courses. What is their crime? Befouling the turf.# Littering. For this, should we be allowed to call someone in to round them up and gas them? Do they deserve to die because a few well-heeled humans want to hit a ball into a hole and they need an obsessively tidy playing surface the size of the Holy See? Think of all the Sister Water that gets wasted watering the greens. Maybe it’s time to eliminate golf, not geese!
Father Carlo collects his thoughts. Among them, surely: Who let her in? “We have to put the action in the context of where we are. What does it mean, the golf field, for the people that are working in it? If this is the only way that people can find employment in the region, you have to keep in mind also this aspect of the action you are performing.
“Secondly, maybe it’s not necessary to kill the birds. You can act in another way to deviate the trajectory. You have to move, to think, in a progressive way of intervention.”
Like egg addling! I almost blurt. Rather than culling flocks of Canada geese, some municipalities seek out nests and either shake the eggs or coat them in oil and then return them to the nest. With the result that the parents are incubating blanks. To figure out the cutoff for humane termination of a Canada goose fetus, a team from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources examined tens of thousands of eggs. They then established a method to assess the age of an egg by seeing if it floats—an indication that there’s more air inside than goose. The technique has been recommended by the Humane Society of the United States and by PETA, and while I wonder what the Catholic Church might have to say about goose abortion, I don’t wish to addle Father Carlo, so I move on.
