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June 29, 2006
Activists take to streets for put-upon parakeets
Sat, 19 Nov 2005
By KEN DIXON
dixon.connpost@snet.net
Buoyed by a nationwide uproar in the animal-rights community, activists took to the streets of West Haven Friday night in an attempt to halt United Illuminating Co.'s eradication of monk parakeets.
The utility said it plans to continue the operation, which was in its fourth night, targeting more than 100 bird colonies on utility poles between West Haven and Fairfield.
Federal officials in Washington, D.C., said Friday that at least 80 of the parrots had been killed and their bodies kept for research by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Meanwhile, state Rep. Richard Roy, D-Milford, whose city is home to hundreds of the squawking, bright-green birds and their thatched-stick nests, said Friday he would seek a meeting with the state Department of Environmental Protect in an attempt to cease the slaughter.
The chief spokesman for the DEP, Dennis Schain, said Friday that the department would meet with Roy whenever he wishes. A spokesman for United Illuminating agreed.
And the head of a national group that supports monk parakeets, which are also known as Quaker parakeets, said Friday that she is seeking legal grounds to apply for an injunction against UI's eradica-tion program.
Brenda Piper, president of the Quaker Parakeet Society, told the Connecticut Post that a 2003 Con-necticut law that allows for the “shooting,'' - but not asphyxiating - of crows, cowbirds, pigeons and monk parakeets may become the focus of a legal attack.
Piper said there are numerous options to killing the birds, which build nests on utility poles. Monk parakeets, because of the length of their tails, are actually parrots (Myiopsitta monachus) that are native to the jungles of South America. They are believed to have arrived here in the 1970s in a crate that broke open at Kennedy Airport in New York.
She said her society would help relocate the birds out of state if UI and the USDA give them the seized animals.
“United Illuminating must feel the pressure,'' said Priscilla Feral, president of the Darien-based Friends of Animals, Inc., which mobilized a national effort to stop the killing of the birds that have lived in the state since the early 1970s.
By 8:45 p.m. Friday, about 30 bird supporters were picketing and petitioning at Capt. Thomas Boule-vard and Campbell Avenue in West Haven, protesting the UI bird removal.
Feral called the event Operation Parakeet. “The people who can halt it are UI,'' Feral said, blaming the DEP for not recommending nest-removal alternatives that do not include killing birds.
Al Carbone, spokesman for UI, said that by Friday afternoon about 25 nests in West Haven had been demolished and the monk parakeets turned over the USDA personnel on the scene. The birds are then put in carbon dioxide chambers and asphyxiated.
Carbone said the utility has also received “a few'' calls and e-mails of protest, although Feral believes hundreds of phone calls and e-mails have been directed at the utility.
“All along we've gotten customer complaints about the size of the nests,'' Carbone said, stressing that the stick colonies have caused transformer fires and power outages.
Roy, who this year took over the House chairmanship of the General Assembly's joint Environment Committee, said he believes there is a nonlethal way to clear the utility poles and let the birds fly off to build nests elsewhere.
Schain said that a top wildlife expert in the DEP spoke with Roy on Friday and the department was ready for further discussions with lawmakers.
Sen. George L. Gunther, R-Stratford, whose district also supports hundreds of parrots, agreed Friday that the nests can be taken off poles without killing the birds.
“To me, they are a very pretty bird,'' Gunther said. “They're a pain in the neck, but I don't think they're competing with native birds. I don't think they should be terminated.''
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