It's hard to read in this format, but I recommend Kate Beaton's comic, "Ducks". <a href="https://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/81993262830/here-is-a-sketch-comic-i-made-called-ducks-in" rel="nofollow">https://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/81993262830/here-is-a-sketc...</a>
The interesting thing that this video does not show you, is that they are likely killing some of the animals on purpose.<p>A USDA Wildlife Management employee once gave a presentation on various pest animal control techniques to my class of wildlife science students. He spent some time controlling birds at airports.<p>Birds learn that noises do not kill them. Eventually they ignore the noises. To fix this, every once and a while he had to make a kill with the stimulus. Some of the techniques in the video may not require occasional kills. I would love access to their logs. It would be interesting to see if indeed they are making occasional kills and how long it took to find the optimal interval.
I saw this video yesterday and one thing I wondered was, why isn't the company legally, and thus financially and criminally, held responsible for this disaster? If I as an individual dump a bunch of toxic waste, especially something that kills thousands of animals, then I would be held responsible in a vice grip-like manner. I never understand why if something is done by a company, or individual with large wealth, but at massive scale, they can simply get away with it.
Tom Scott made a great video on this: <a href="https://youtu.be/n-Ej2EtE744" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/n-Ej2EtE744</a>
It's frustrating that the description of the video and the first few seconds of the video both establish a narrative of "acid cooking birds from the <i>inside out</i>" if they spend a few hours in the water, which makes absolutley zero sense.<p>At no point in the entire video is that claim revisisted or explained.
I would think that some enterprising university could get the funds to set up an automated system with AI to recognize and shoot near the birds at a distance. Some decent learning in optics and AI to be had there. Sure that guy would lose his job, but it seems pointless to dedicate one man to do this all day.
I spent the last week in Butte for Thanksgiving. We made our way up to an overlook of the pit on Friday. We got to hear the wailers mentioned; there were no other actions but the dump trucks running material from the still open parts of the mine.<p>It's odd visiting the thing that's messed up so much of what I call home in Montana. I grew up in Missoula, downstream of Butte. That city also had a nearby superfund site, Milltown Dam, that had captured mining tailings washed downstream from Butte and the other town I visited Anaconda.<p>Of course to escape Missoula once they removed the dam I moved to East Helena, home of the East Helena Slag Pile a remnant of when the ASARCO lead smelter spewed smoke all over the town.
So are they going to have this person or persons man the pit indefinitely? I see they have some automated measures like the propane cannon but at some point shouldn’t they just put a net on top of the whole pit to keep birds off it?