[HN Gopher] A man who shoots at birds to keep them off a toxic p...
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A man who shoots at birds to keep them off a toxic pit [video]
Author : SQL2219
Score : 73 points
Date : 2021-11-28 15:26 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| ghastmaster wrote:
| The interesting thing that this video does not show you, is that
| they are likely killing some of the animals on purpose.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| sp332 wrote:
| It's hard to read in this format, but I recommend Kate Beaton's
| comic, "Ducks".
| https://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/81993262830/here-is-a-sketc...
| krick wrote:
| That's so backwards it's just depressing.
| bmitc wrote:
| 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.
| gruez wrote:
| >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.
|
| because limited liability. The solution, obviously is to
| recognize that they have limited liability and not extend them
| "credit". In this case the "credit" is letting them do
| environmental damage on the expectation that they'll "pay back"
| remediation costs. Force them to pay a deposit upfront prior to
| a mining permit being granted.
|
| see also: "It Pays to Not Pay Your Debts"
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-14/it-pay...
| bmitc wrote:
| That seems to just partly explain the mechanism by which
| these companies get away with things.
| reddog wrote:
| Because the company in the video -- Atlantic Richfield Company,
| aka ARCO -- acquired the pit in 1977 only to shut it down in
| 1982 after discovering what a white elephant it was. The
| company that actually dug the thousands of miles of tunnels and
| later the pit was Anaconda Copper (one of the most rapacious,
| amoral corporations to ever exist) which went belly up in 1983.
| Anaconda Copper made fortunes for the usual suspects like the
| Rockefellers and Rothschilds throughout the 20th century. Good
| luck clawing any restoration money back from them after its
| been laundered through generations.
|
| If you ever find yourself driving though Butte I highly
| recommend a stop to see the Berkely pit, the access towers, the
| enviromental devestation and the excellent mining museum. Its
| facinating.
| bmakdbd wrote:
| Anaconda Copper:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaconda_Copper
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Then we hold the people who profited off of Anaconda
| responsible for it rather than shrugging and going 'oh well,
| the laws they wrote say we just have to let them keep doing
| it.'
|
| Easy fix to get it done, the rockefellers and rothschilds are
| visiting the bottom of the pit naked in 2025. Their choice as
| to whether it is still full of poison.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Who said they simply get away with it?
|
| BP is responsible for cleaning up the site, at an estimated
| cost of $150M. They're responsible because they bought ARCO,
| which had acquired the site from the original mining company.
|
| They're the ones who built the water treatment plant that's
| shown in the Tom Scott video that someone linked to, and either
| they or Montana Resources (a mining company) are paying for
| everything shown in this video too.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| What does "cleaning up" mean?
|
| Wouldn't that mean moving the toxic stuff to some other part
| of the environment?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Nearly everything toxic can be made non-toxic. Sometimes
| it's just expensive or hard to do.
|
| Sounds like the issues here are heavy metals and sulfuric
| acid. Both of those are treatable.
|
| Presumably just paying this guy is cheaper tho.
| readme wrote:
| >Wouldn't that mean moving the toxic stuff to some other
| part of the environment?
|
| sounds like we have a problem here
| [deleted]
| danboarder wrote:
| I'm wondering why they don't fire up the original pump system
| that drained the pit back in the mining days?
| blamazon wrote:
| In the Tom Scott video linked upthread, they cover this. The
| pit is being used as a hydraulic control device-collecting all
| the badness from a ridiculously vast (~10,000 miles) network of
| tunnels into one huge dilute volume. Then, they pipe it out to
| a water treatment plant and then back to the pit. They've been
| able to raise the pH from mid-2 to mid-4 this way.
| client4 wrote:
| The filtration and pumps in Butte are suprisingly world class.
| chasebank wrote:
| I wondered the same thing. I imagine it's because it used to
| pump the water out before it became toxic from absorbing the
| metals.
| akudha wrote:
| That was my first thought too. They are spending so much
| money on gear and employing someone full time - wouldn't it
| be cheaper to just drain it? There must be a reason they
| aren't doing it.
|
| Also, he can't be there 24 hours - what happens if a bird
| lands on the water at night?
| DFHippie wrote:
| I assume the reason is that draining it just moves the
| toxins elsewhere. No one else wants to drink this stuff or
| have it in their surface water either.
| grp000 wrote:
| Might also be an issue of rainwater collection, and then
| the enormous cost of filling the pit.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| not indefinitely, just until people stop paying attention
| sjwalter wrote:
| This case in Butte is somewhat better than usual because BP is
| actually footing the remediation bill.
|
| More typical is having the taxpayers foot the bill, like with
| the fascinating example of Giant Mine, 5km outside of
| Yellowknife, the capital of Canada's Northwest Territories.
| Some 200 kilotonnes of arsenic trioxide were created as
| byproducts of the mining process, enough arsenic dust to kill
| off every human and animal on earth. Once the company (and the
| company that bought the company) that mined the gold went belly
| up, the government is stuck footing the bill for remediation.
|
| The remediation plan is to indefinitely freeze, using
| compressors like used for hockey rinks, the arsenic
| underground. An eternal, ongoing operation, costing >$1bn,
| costing more in present-day dollars than gold was even
| extracted from the mine, in order to avoid the arsenic seeping
| into the groundwater.
|
| Kind of hilarious the implicit bet on a stable society that
| this remediation plan entails.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Mine
| guerrilla wrote:
| Or float those plastic balls [1] on it, like they do for some
| reservoirs to stop evaporation. It'd take a lot of them, but
| that'd work and could be both cheaper and more permanent.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxPdPpi5W4o
| bmitc wrote:
| I was wondering the same thing about a net, and those plastic
| balls are interesting. The manual solution(s) just don't seem
| that efficient.
| tofof wrote:
| 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 _inside out_ " if they spend a few hours
| in the water, which makes absolutley zero sense.
|
| At no point in the entire video is that claim revisisted or
| explained.
| blamazon wrote:
| Migrating birds stopping to rest in water tend to drink the
| water. Once inside the body, if the water is too acidic, it
| begins breaking down cell walls and denaturing proteins. These
| actions are analogous to cooking.
| pvaldes wrote:
| If you put acid in a gut you have just more acid. Why we
| don't "cook from inside" each day then?
|
| This birds live and nest in the tundra; not a place short of
| acid soils and acid water. Again, why they don't dissolve
| resting all day in permafrost mud?
|
| So maybe they should consider a different explanation? Lack
| of food in tired migrant birds?, because nothing grows in
| that waters... plus poisons in water. Lead maybe?. Keep
| shooting.
|
| Birds remaining too much time in the water could be solved
| providing a few artificial islands in the center. Even
| building a second pond with healthy water a few thousand
| meters away would be more simple and even cheaper that
| shooting at birds all the time for years (after all they have
| a lot of digging machines available yet). Smaller pool with
| food or big pool without any food? Does not seem like a
| difficult choice. Give them protection and food and will say
| goodbye in a heartbeat.
|
| More simple but less funny, of course. Apart of that, the
| number of man-hours spent on this looks like a total waste.
|
| And putting chalk in the water would fix it and should be
| doable, because you just need to reach safe tundra levels,
| that are very acidic yet. Chalk is relatively cheap. Why is
| that "too expensive" for the company?. Better kill the
| animals instead to do something really useful?.
| Justin_K wrote:
| Lol before making your rant, you should know they don't
| shoot the animals, the shoot near them to scare them away.
| pvaldes wrote:
| The effects of lead pellets in marshes as bird mass
| poisoner is a well known problem in ecology. They are
| worsening the problem.
| smcl wrote:
| I think you might need to just remember that what you've
| watched is a little 10 minute simplified video for public
| consumption. We didn't see any of the planning that went
| into this, we just saw a bit of footage of some drones,
| some other equipment and a rifle. So as complete
| outsiders it is a bit naive of any of us to assume
| they're making basic mistakes (like - they haven't
| considered alternative methods, whether their solutions
| are making it worse, whether they're even using lead
| pellets ...) and we know a better course of action.
| Justin_K wrote:
| It's not a marsh, it's a deep pit left over from mining
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > If you put acid in a gut you have just more acid. Why we
| don't "cook from inside" each day then?
|
| If you reflux a lot, it'll scar your mouth and esophagus.
| That the stomach is built to handle acid doesn't mean the
| tubes leading to it necessarily are.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Good point. A problem that is mitigated if you are
| herbivorous, and chomp all day a lot of grass and other
| things that contain calcium, like goose do. Aquatic birds
| can deal or at least understand the concept of extreme
| conditions in water. You will not see a flamingo
| dissolving, and they live in extreme alkaline waters.
| They know were is time to go.
|
| In any case there are several solutions that would put an
| end to the problem or alleviate a lot it at least. Is a
| question of money, but also of will.
|
| If there are a lot of birds dying in your pool, maybe you
| should admit that the water is not only acidic but also
| poisonous and that they are desperate for the lack of
| suitable habitats. Solution, just build a second damned
| pool close and keep it clean and full of shrubs, reeds
| and plants. As long as birds can choose to stand or fly
| and feel safe, they would favor the correct pond.
|
| Or even better, fix your water in the main pond.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > If there are a lot of birds dying in your pool, maybe
| you should admit that the water is not only acidic but
| also poisonous...
|
| It's an abandoned copper mine. I suspect they're aware.
| It's a Superfund site.
| tofof wrote:
| Except that the photos of injury they showed were damage to
| the duck's feet - i.e. not part of the digestive tract, and
| very much part of the body that's submerged in water the
| entire time the bird floats on a lake.
| blamazon wrote:
| Good catch, so they are probably 'cooked' from both ends
| topologically.
| Retric wrote:
| They don't extract those birds at the moment of death, it's
| likely most of that damage occurred after death.
|
| So sure, every part of bird exposed to the acid is causing
| harm, it's just death is caused from the inside rather than
| damage to the birds skin. Further it's likely their
| exposure is mostly from drinking thus inside out.
| readme wrote:
| right near the beginning they explained how ground water fills
| the quarry with sulfuric acid
| dboreham wrote:
| I live near this site (well, 120 miles away, which in Montana
| is "near"). They scare the birds away because in the past a ton
| of birds have died after landing on the water. I don't know the
| mechanism but it's a real thing.
| willmorrison wrote:
| Tom Scott made a great video on this:
| https://youtu.be/n-Ej2EtE744
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(page generated 2021-11-28 23:01 UTC)