A Wildlife Article used with permission from All-Creatures.org

In this letter to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Joan Harrison delineates the killings and neglect suffered by the city's birds. She also discusses the sentience and value of these creatures and humane solutions to human-bird conflicts while imploring the new mayor to reconsider the city's cruel policies.

The United States Department of Agriculture's War on New York City's Canada Geese and other Wild Birds
From Joan Harrison
January 2026

Images from Canva

The Honorable Zohran Mamdani
City Hall
New York, New York 10007

January 14, 2026

Dear Mayor Mamdani,

The president of Voters for Animal Rights (VFAR) recommended that I write a brief report to apprise you of the United States Department of Agriculture's war on New York City's Canada geese. That report follows, expanded unavoidably to include other birds. It'd be great if you could send me an acknowledgement.

Though I'm grateful for your promise to be a mayor for all New Yorkers, I feel compelled to point out that the winged creatures who reside here are also New Yorkers. I'm hoping that you'll be a mayor also for them, for they all face a formidable menace.

Respectfully,

Joan Harrison

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The United States Department of Agriculture's War on New York City's Canada Geese and other Wild Birds

A Summary of the Problem

The number of birds in North America reportedly declined since 1970 by 3 billion (https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/bring-birds-back/). Yet the United States Department of Agriculture's kill arm, Wildlife Services, is waging a war on New York City's birds (and the nation's), including at its one wildlife refuge, a war greatly intensified over the last couple of decades. Though centered on Canada geese, that war keeps expanding in time, space, and target. Between 2009 and 2017 Wildlife Services is said to have killed about 70,000 starlings, gulls, doves, owls, and other winged souls here in the name of air safety, though according to aviation experts, the skies are no safer than they were before the killings. Those killings, clearly driven by a military agenda, with the United States Air Force setting Wildlife Services policy, as FOIA documents reveal, are based on patently false premises (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W2F17noZFlaukIjXGGQFtGk5hzSSKeld/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106068489059241563307&rtpof=true&sd=true), and Wildlife Services profits greatly from them. The New York City mayor is in a position to turn all that around. A private email from Allen Gosser, then State Director of Wildlife Services in New York, to a prominent member of the once thriving, now defunct, GooseWatchNYC, states unequivocally that without the New York City mayor's complicity, even with the Port Authority kill-contract in place, Wildlife Services could not carry out its lethal work. A town in California, together with the Animal Legal Defense Fund, sued Wildlife Services some years ago on account of its assaults on Canada geese, as a result of which the mayor there permanently banned that agency from the town’s borders. The New York City mayor needs only to say no to the killings and to direct the Department of Environmental Protection not to sign Wildlife Services' Intergovernmental Agreement.

Though Wildlife Services routinely, and for years, rounded up the city’s geese for slaughter during the molting season when they could not fly (mid-June through mid-July), the mass extermination program did not take off until after January 15, 2009 when the so-called "Miracle on the Hudson" provided a perfect pretext, a pretext Wildlife Services still uses today.  A commercial airliner struck a flock of Canada geese, thus ruining both engines and forcing Captain Chesley Sullenberger to land the plane abruptly in the Hudson. All passengers were saved and all the geese died.  There now began an aggressive campaign—including a propaganda campaign with the motion picture “Sully” starring Tom Hanks, for example—against resident Canada geese, even though the geese who brought the plane down were migratory, not resident, as DNA tests confirmed, and they were not even from the United States—they were from Labrador.  Resident geese rarely fly more than 1-3 miles from their nesting grounds and, despite the claims of Wildlife Services, are scarcely a threat to airplanes.  Though activists pointed that out, along with other inconsistencies in the written justifications of Wildlife Services, instead of stopping their nefarious kill campaign against resident geese, they secretly began targeting migratory geese as well, whose aeronautic genius is often noted by scientists, and whose joyous honking and V formations used to fill the skies above Manhattan during migrations.  Those skies are now dead.

That first year following the “Miracle on the Hudson,” Wildlife Services agents burst into parks and other protected places, terrorized huge numbers of geese, crammed them and their babies into tiny crates where they could not move, then gassed them to death at airport hangars.  Gassing is a particularly monstrous way to kill water birds who are able to hold their breath a long time.  The massive outcry of activists managed to get the gassing stopped in New York City, though not the killings.  And Wildlife Services continues to gas geese in New Jersey and a number of other states.

Thousands of geese have been pointlessly killed here since then, their bodies, filled with contaminants, served up as food at pantries for the poor, and yet the numbers of bird strikes go up, not down.  In 2012 Wildlife Services even began ravaging the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, through the facilitating of Senator Gillibrand and the Department of the Interior. The killing of geese and the destruction of their nests and eggs (typically through oiling, which entails slow suffocation of the baby inside), moreover, no longer occur solely during the one month molting season.  Wildlife Services kills geese and other wild birds here year-round now, and firearms and shooting stations are now readily available for their use at every city airport.  Nor is their killing confined to birds.  They also kill deer, coyotes, and other mammals, on grounds that they’re a menace to airplanes.  The menace that the airplanes themselves pose—from pollution, including greenhouse gases, among other things—seems not to concern them at all.

Geese were revered in antiquity. The Egyptians regarded them as sacred.  The Roman augurs saw them as messengers from God. Aratus believed them to be weather prophets.  Aristotle and Aelian speak of their “watchfulness."  Ovid calls them “wiser than dogs.” And many ancient legends about geese survive today. The story of the Capitoline geese who saved Rome from the Gauls by their ruckus while even the dogs slept is well-known from historians such as Livy, Plutarch, and Diodorus Siculus. The pet goose of Lacydes the philosopher is also famed—a goose who went everywhere with her master, and when death finally came, Lacydes was so crushed by grief that he gave the creature an elaborate funeral as of a family member.

Yet even today, despite much negative press, Canada geese delight many as they float on the water or make their way through the grass. They’re sensitive, intelligent, loyal creatures, and first-rate parents. Their babies begin communicating with their moms and siblings early from inside the eggs and, once hatched, they already know all the basics of the Canada goose language system. World-renowned ornithologist Alexander Skutch (The Minds of Birds) writes of the exceptional memory of geese generally, that far exceeds our own, and he even speaks of their “rich inner life.”

The USDA’s systematic, irrational assault on Canada geese has long been undermining human morale here in New York City, in Denver, and elsewhere in the country. That was reported widely on social media and in the newspapers.  For it is well-known that human happiness is affected by animal happiness or the lack thereof.  So much is that so that a psychologist, Clare Mann, established a new psychological category (Vystopia) to acknowledge the traumatizing effect of animal cruelty on the human psyche—especially on vegans as they become more and more aware of the magnitude of suffering perpetrated daily by the meat, egg, and dairy industries.

There is no good reason for killing Canada geese or any other wild creatures.  Nor are the reasons Wildlife Services gives the real reasons.  At a time when the Federal Aviation Administration reported that collisions with vultures were causing more property damage than collisions with Canada geese, for example, Wildlife Services exterminated the geese and left the vultures alone. Though Wildlife Services berates mute swans for being invasive, non-native, which they are not, of all the animals that agency kills annually, about half are native!

There are easy solutions to all problems posed by Wildlife Services. Avian radar—used in Israel, a number of European cities, and even American cities, though not yet New York—is a proven success at preventing bird strikes. Flight Turf, a type of lawn that may be used at airports, is a proven wildlife deterrent. As for goose droppings, another complaint, there are Tow and Collect machines to clean up after geese, that may be rented or bought at a fraction of the cost of mass extermination.

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References

Federal Aviation Administration, “Wildlife Strikes to Civil Aircraft in the United States 1990–2022”:
https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/Wildlife-Strike-Report-1990-2022.pdf

Federal Aviation Administration, “Wildlife Strikes to Civil Aircraft in the United States 1990-2024”:
https://www.faa.gov/airports/airport_safety/wildlife/wildlife-strike-report-1990-2024

Cooperative Service Agreement between Port Authority and USDA/APHIS/WS:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11-mo-1D0DQ2LtuzYhdCP_CruE1NCBbfO/view?usp=sharing

Intergovernmental Agreement between the City of New York, via the Department of Environmental Protection, and USDA/APHIS/WS:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3D4fegnMpTTQW40VHdNTFl5QTVUdktLT2M0eFp3RXFUSHg0/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-mVGE3Urb4sQXIPvR6idAHg

USDA Report: “Canada Goose Hazard Management Around New York City Airports, 2024, NYC Properties”:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WuO4-YnT0Idok0ngLNhR0eHGcXQIRyFW/view?usp=sharing

USDA Report: “Canada Goose Hazard Management Around New York City Airports, 2024, NPS [=National Park Service] Properties”:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z1xcYye4VpgKojitvhmSrl81v4QRTTJf/view?usp=sharing

My Documents:

“The Reasons Given for Killing Canada Geese at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge and Why They’re Spurious”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W2F17noZFlaukIjXGGQFtGk5hzSSKeld/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106068489059241563307&rtpof=true&sd=true

An Interview with Donny Moss:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wCSYrxrslgeRmW9sm0CSscPsivUmmG9f/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106068489059241563307&rtpof=true&sd=true

The USDA/WS 2019 Environmental Assessment of the Birds of New York City and a Call to Action:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mcy68jxIekaZhhNzmaW2XO1nKSCDbiNI/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106068489059241563307&rtpof=true&sd=true

“Why Swan Management?”:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13VRVun96ks2gfSFT2j1-h2N255_g6IAN/view?usp=sharing

Miscellaneous:

A Cease and Desist Letter by NYC Attorney Larry Schnapf Regarding Wildlife Services’ Canada Goose Egg and Nest Depredation Program in Central Park:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1990KqvyvFJ6pZm3lLokerpq79qtiRmuV/view?usp=sharing

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Addendum

Though Canada geese and other birds are under assault by Wildlife Services, the picture would not be complete without a word about some of the other sources of gratuitous suffering of New York City's birds.

Thousands of crows here, almost the entire crow population, died in 1999 from West Nile Virus, a disease found almost exclusively in Africa and the Middle East and never in North America prior to that year.

Between 90,000 and 230,000 birds migrating through the Atlantic Flyway die from collisions with windows each year in New York City. That's been called, "New York's dirty little secret." There are other such secrets.

There are about 4 million pigeons in New York City, nearly 90 percent of whom die of starvation in their first year. About a third of the adult population is said to die annually of natural causes, many of those of starvation as well. Though pigeons fed regularly may live into their twenties, New York City’s feral pigeons typically die at the age of 3 or 4. As European and Asian cities and states are finding innovative ways to accommodate these spectacularly intelligent, loving creatures—Portugal, India, the Netherlands, for example—by building attractive pigeon lofts where the birds are fed and housed at the city's expense, or, as in India, 7-story structures, Chabutros, with swimming pools and medical services for birds!—without so much as providing feeding stations or bird baths in parks, New York is leaving its besieged pigeon residents to starve. Not the mark of an enlightened place!

Though the numbers are unknown, New York City’s red-tailed hawks and owls, among other raptors, frequently die from the rodenticides placed all over to kill rats—a recent example being Flaco, the beloved owl.

During the week before Yom Kippur, a small group of orthodox Jews keeps truckloads of about 100,000 chickens for days without food or water crammed together in tiny crates for a heartless atonement ritual (kaporos) that most Jews never heard of, and many rabbis condemn. Each participant (generally male) swings a live, terrified chicken around his head while chanting that his sins are now being transferred onto the bird, whose throat he now slits. The streets of Brooklyn turn into a bloodbath. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpEsbOXdrdQ). Sometimes a bird survives the atrocity, is tossed into a trash bag anyway, from which her rapid desperate movements may be seen as she struggles to escape. The ritual violates many laws and health codes, yet the police protect the practitioners, not the public (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw4SBMHCn8o). Activists keep arguing for the use of coins instead of living birds, though so far to no avail. The Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos rescues hundreds of those birds each year, though the problem remains unsolved.

New York City should not be a death camp for birds.

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: January 16, 2026
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