Moving right along!! I hope this ends soon. They want to nest!
October 25, 2013
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
EAGLE ON ALLIANCE FILES REQUEST FOR EMERGENCY INJUNCTION TO STOP DESTRUCTION OF BALD EAGLES NESTS AT NORFOLK BOTANICAL GARDEN
Hearing set for Tuesday, October 29, 2013 at 4 p.m. at
United States District Court in Norfolk
Norfolk, Virginia – Eagle On Alliance (EOA), a public interest group of concerned citizens worldwide, filed a motion in Federal Court today for an emergency injunction to stop the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) from allowing the destruction of any more nests of the bald eagles at Norfolk Botanical Garden (NBG), and to enjoin the USDA’s Wildlife Services from engaging in any such activities until the Court has an opportunity to resolve EOA’s challenge to the federal government’s issuance of a nest destruction permit.
The Honorable Henry Coke Morgan, Jr. will hold a hearing on the motion on Tuesday, October 29, 2013 at 4:00 p.m. in Courtroom 2, United States District Court in Norfolk.
The USFWS issued an eagle nest take permit to the City of Norfolk in October of 2012 that allowed the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Wildlife Services (USDA-WS) to remove bald eagles’ nests and the USDA-WS removed a total of seven nests at the Garden between October 4, 2012 and March 29, 2013 halting the celebrated eagles’ last nesting season. That permit is due to expire October 31 and over a year later, the eagles are still at the Garden.
The nest removal/harassment permit was requested in the name of airport safety after the female from the NBG nest was struck and killed on April 26, 2011 when a plane hit her as she sat at the end of a runway eating a fish. According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Wildlife Strike Database, the pilot was not warned that eagles were in the area or on the runway, nor were the eagles dispersed by airport personnel.
This eagle strike is only one of 536 wildlife strikes at ORF according to the FAA Database. Documents obtained by EOA under the Freedom of Information Act show that other, far more effective means of wildlife mitigation, can be used at Norfolk International Airport (ORF) to insure public safety from all bird and wildlife strikes rather than the destruction of the nests of one pair of bald eagles.
Nevertheless, even though the Executive Director of ORF, Wayne Shank, stated in an interview with The Virginian-Pilot in July, 2013 that “I want to make it perfectly clear that the airport is not a proponent of any particular course of action. We are not telling anyone to take the nests down,” the City of Norfolk applied for a permit to “protect the airport” from the NBG bald eagles. Records further show that although the Airport could engage in more efforts to keep birds, including eagles, off the runway, it has failed to implement such measures, claiming that it has “limited resources” for such activities. However, the Airport’s own financial reports show that the Airport recently budgeted more than $11 million for cosmetic improvements to its lobby – including a “huge skylight covering center court and marble-wrapped columns,” see Pilot Article (May 8, 2012), and has over $150,000,000 in “total net assets.”
Internal records also show that the wildlife experts consulted by the federal government before the permit was issued agreed that removal of nests and harassment of these eagles would NOT be an effective means of keeping eagles out of this area, due to its extremely rich habitat for eagles. These experts, including experts from the Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William and Mary, who study the thousands of eagles who migrate through this part of the country each year, agreed that “there would likely be a constant effort by eagles to build in the general area,” and that “removal of the nests will not address the concern of aviation and eagle hazards.”
Because the City of Norfolk insists that this permit is needed due to risk factors of an eagle strike at ORF, EOA retained the services of Adam M. Finkel, ScD., CIH, a national expert on risk assessment and the former Director of Health Rulemaking at the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration who has worked in the field of quantitative risk assessment of environmental and occupational health and safety hazards for the past 27 years, to assess the risk of an eagle strike at ORF caused by an NBG eagle.
According to Dr. Finkel, whose declaration was filed in support of the request for an emergency injunction, the risk of any injury to a person caused by the NBG Eagles colliding with a plane within the next year (during the time it would take the Court to issue a final ruling in this case) “is de minimis by any legal, contextual, and practical standard.” Dr. Finkel further explains that because three of the four eagle strikes at ORF have involved non-NBG eagles, “we have to assume that the lion’s share of the problem involves birds that will not be affected by this controversy, whose risks to airplane flight will persist unless the airport changes its overall management practices.”
EOA also enlisted the expertise of Peter E. Nye, a nationally recognized eagle expert who served as the Team Leader of the Northern States Bald Eagle Recovery Team for the FWS, who explained in his declaration that “it is highly likely that the eagles who presently nest at the Norfolk Botanical Garden have actually succeeded in keeping other eagles from nesting and foraging there through active territorial defense, and that the abandonment of the Garden by these eagles could actually increase the number of eagles (or perhaps other large piscivores such as osprey) that move into the area to forage and/or nest.”
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