Mermaid
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The squabs that didnt land.
« on: 2002-09-20 18:20:30 » |
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Soaring tribute just can't fly Squab parade falls flat at 9/11 event
Richard Lezin Jones, New York Times
Mermaid notes: The Squab has landed. Or did it? This is just sad on several different levels. I dropped my jaw at least four times during the course of my reading. Read. Smile. Or weep!
It was meant to be a dignified Sept. 11 tribute -- a flock of doves soaring majestically past Lower Manhattan's altered skyline. But there was a hitch: They weren't doves. They were pigeons. And many of them couldn't fly.
Many of the birds plunged into the Hudson River, smacked into plate-glass windows on office buildings or careered into the crowd. One perched atop the hard hat of a construction worker whose company had helped clear ground zero.
Since last week's memorial ceremony, animal rights advocates and others have been trying to rescue the birds and roast the organizers.
For their part, organizers said they had tried to hire a company to conduct a professional bird release, in which trained doves or homing pigeons would soar high in the sky and then return to their owner's roost. But the pros were already booked. So the organizers turned instead to a Newark poultry market and bought 80 squabs, not knowing that the weak-winged birds would have trouble flying.
Nonetheless, one organizer said that most of the birds are better off now than they would have been had they remained at the poultry market.
"Without a doubt it beats what could have happened to them," said Guy Catrillo, a chief organizer of Jersey City's 9/11 Memorial Committee. "They were squab; they were soup birds. I like the idea that I helped these squab get another chance."
Animal advocates, however, said that second chance may have come at too great a cost.
"I don't know how anyone could be so short-sighted, especially for 9/11," said Ellen Goldberg, a teacher at the Raptor Trust, a nonprofit bird hospital in Millington, N.J., that is treating two of the birds.
"Every year," she said, "we have to deal with 3,000 birds, including 300 pigeons. We get sick birds, injured birds, birds that have been shot. We thought we'd seen it all. We've never seen this before."
The birds, which Goldberg said might never before in their young lives have spent significant time outside their cages, turned the ceremony into a blur of feathers and confusion.
"When they let the birds out, they seemed not to know how to fly," recalled Susan Ryan, who attended the ceremony with a co-worker, Nuria Almeida. "They flew into buildings. One flew right into the water."
Almeida said the program continued, awkwardly. "A lot of people were upset because they didn't want them sitting on their heads, and they were swatting them away," she said.
The women were so struck by the pigeons' plight that they returned to the site of the memorial service after work that day and gently placed two of the birds in a shoe box, then took them to the Raptor Trust.
Despite what he called "snide comments" about the release, Catrillo said he already had plans for next year's memorial service.
"I'm going to release monarch butterflies," he said. "But I'm sure there's some group somewhere who will say that that's the wrong thing to do, too."
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