I am copying the original story from the Vancouver Sun, Friday April 14, 2000
below.
Horned Larks were reported from the general area of the airport up to the 80es,
but not anymore.
Vancouver Airport has undergone a massive expansion since then.

Airport shoots 3,200 birds to protect planes
Although critics are shocked at the number, airport authorities make no
apologies for 'aggressively' protecting travellers.
Larry Pynn Vancouver Sun

Alarmed that the Vancouver Airport killed more than 3,000 birds in 1999, a B.C.
environment ministry biologist says the situation will be reviewed when the
airport's licence to shoot birds is renewed.

The Vancouver International Airport Authority shoots the birds to prevent
aircraft-bird collisions. But bird lovers claim the airport is unnecessarily
shooting thousands of birds each year.

The conflict with bird watchers and naturalists increased after the opening of
the third runway in late 1996. It has brought aircraft to within half a
kilometre of the federal Sea Island Conservation Area.

Richard Toochin, a Vancouver Natural History Society member, said he watched
the shooting of a short-eared owl -- a vulnerable species in B.C. -- just
outside the airport's north perimeter fence.

"I watched the owl fly high, doing the courtship flight. I thought isn't that
great. Then I suddenly heard 'bang, bang, bang' and it folded its wings and
dropped. I was pretty sickened by it. God, that was unnecessary. I got pretty
emotional."

While the authority insists it employs a 12-gauge shotgun only as a last
resort when scare-tactics fail, it makes no apology for the 3,234 birds killed
in 1999.

"I don't think you can be too aggressive when it comes to the safety of the
travelling public," said Craig Richmond, the airport's vice-president of airport
operations.

The birds killed last year included 1,823 ducks, 461 dunlin, 404 starlings,
252 gulls, 248 crows, 23 swallows, 14 Canada geese, four killdeer, two owls, two
pheasants, and one pigeon.

Another 85 birds died in collisions with 54 aircraft in 1999. And the airport
says it has scared away close to one million birds using other methods,
including noisemakers, bird distress calls and border collies.

The airport also says it is prepared to expand its shoot-to-kill program for
the first time to control an increase in bald eagles.

A bald eagle was sucked into one of the engines of a Canadian Airlines 747
when the aircraft was taking off Jan. 31 last year, damaging the high-pressure
compressor and forcing the jet to return to the airport.

And so far this year, two bald eagles have been found dead, alongside the north
and south runways, following collisions with aircraft.

"We don't want to shoot," said Dave Ball, the airport's wildlife supervisor.
"But if comes down to a safety issue, we would do it."

The shootings are allowed under permits issued by the Canadian Wildlife
Service for migratory birds and the B.C. environment ministry for other species.

Tom Plathe, a bird biologist with the B.C. environment ministry in Surrey,
said Thursday he is surprised at the high numbers of birds being killed and "not
happy at all" with the shooting of short-eared owls.

He noted that the short-eared owl -- a species whose breeding habitat has been
all but wiped out in the Lower Mainland -- prefers to hunt in grassy fields
rather than mowed green grass typical of the airport and should not pose a
problem.

He said he cannot support the shooting of bald eagles, and questions the merit
of shooting at dunlin since they travel in flocks and cannot be eliminated with
a single blast -- in other words, noisemakers should be just as effective.

"It doesn't make any sense," Plathe said, adding the situation will be
reviewed before the authority's kill permit is renewed. "I'm not convinced that
using non-lethal methods isn't just as effective. Given the killing of all these
birds, I wonder if it isn't just a little excessive."

The authority concedes no one has been killed as a result of a bird strike
with an aircraft at Vancouver and boasts that the airport's bird-strike rate --
1.6 incidents for every 10,000 takeoffs and landings -- is "very low," not even
within the top 20 airports in Canada, due to an around-the-clock control
program, including 13 staff, at an annual cost of $750,000.

"Over time we hope the birds will realize there is a predator here and won't
find the airport attractive," Richmond said.

The airport wildlife officers spend most of their time within the fenced area
of the airport, but they also patrol the Sturgeon Bank mudflats and an
88-hectare patch of undeveloped airport land located beyond the north perimeter
fence right up to the border of the 140-hectare conservation area.

Airport officials also claim they have the legal right to harass -- but not
shoot -- Canada geese within the conservation area, but say they have not
exercised that right.

To bird lovers familiar with the conservation area immediately to the north of
the airport grounds, the airport authority is taking its policy too far.

Toochin's father, John, a natural history society director, said he was
birding there a week ago and watched as one of the airport's two border collies
flushed up a short-eared owl from the edge of the conservation area.

The bird then flew across the airport perimeter fence -- the opposite effect
that had been intended. He later heard three shots, but does not know if the owl
was killed or simply scared away with noisemakers.

"The odd time you have to shoot a bird, but this is just shooting all the
damn time," Toochin said. "This is wrong. I won't buy it."

Ball did not know of the specific incident, but he said the border collies
spend about 30 minutes a day patrolling the fields next to the conservation
area, working from south to north to flush the birds away from the airport.

Dave Smith, a biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service, said he was
unaware that airport authority staff were patrolling outside the airport
perimeter fence right up to the conservation area boundary.

He added that the conservation area habitat is managed to discourage ducks
and geese and that the numbers shot by the airport don't pose a threat to
overall populations.

When The Vancouver Sun toured the airport grounds Thursday, Ball incorrectly
identified a flock of dunlin shorebirds as starlings and a northern harrier as a
gull. Both he and Richmond thought the bald eagle was recently removed from the
endangered species list, but that occurred in the U.S. The bald eagle has no
threatened or endangered status in B.C.

In comparison, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport has a policy against
shooting birds, preferring instead to use scare tactics and even live-capture.
Boundary Bay Airport in Delta, also located next to a
provincial wildlife management area, does not shoot birds, even though it has
a licence to do so. However, Vancouver airport officials said several airports
in North America located next to significant bird populations do resort to
shooting. They said several thousand gulls are killed each year at New York's
Kennedy airport.
------------------------------
Reto Riesen
Prince Rupert BC
riesenr at citytel.net


Kelly Mcallister wrote:

> Airports frequently are the last strongholds for grassland associated birds.
> In the east, the majority of Upland Sandpipers are breeding on airports.
> Here, in Thurston County, the Olympia airport supports a wide variety of
> grassland associated species including streaked horned larks and western
> pocket gophers. There are a variety of potential and realized conflicts
> between wildlife and operations of airports but, when you look at how
> airports have been among the only land users to conserve grassland habitat
> critical to the survival of some species, pause a moment before heaping
> a great big load of criticism on them.