Birds Must Be Kept From WTC Debris

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

February 11, 2002 / 9:17 AM EST / CBS

A new team of wildlife specialists swooped into the repository of debris from the leveled World Trade Center this week to protect evidence from flocks of birds.

About 35 wildlife specialists from 19 states will continue the effort, which began about Sept. 18, to keep winged looters from the Staten Island landfill, where hundreds of detectives are searching through piles of twisted steel, rubble and ash from the destruction wrought on Sept. 11. The landfill is considered a crime scene.

The landfill, which closed in March 2001 after more than 50 years of processing New York's trash, was reopened to handle the rubble and debris created in terror attacks.

Police officers and volunteers have been sifting through the rubble looking for evidence, personal effects — including wallets, watches, drivers licenses and jewelry — and human remains.

Marauding gulls and crows are not welcome, said Richard B. Chipman, the New York State director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's wildlife services unit. The birds had become a nuisance by foraging through the rubble and disturbing evidence-gathering workers.

"Our job responsibility is to harass gulls away from the landfill," said Richard C. Hinnah, a wildlife specialist with the Agriculture Department's Missouri office.

Biologists have developed several methods to bother birds.

Inch-wide mylar tape woven between stakes in the ground flash in the sun and buzz when blown by the wind. The sight and sound are enough to keep gulls from loafing on several dirt mounds, Chipman said. Scarecrows keep the birds away from other areas. Red laser points sweeping the ground get birds that have landed up and out before dawn, he said.

But the weapons of choice against the feathered menaces are fancy fireworks that scare away the birds. On a typical day, biologists may shoot more than 200 pyrotechnic devices from a launcher resembling a starter's pistol.

"We have to re-educate gulls on a regular basis that this is not a place they want to be," Chipman said. "We're going to stay here as long as they need us."

Gulls are nothing new to the site; in 1986, more than 100,000 of them swarmed over the landfill. The gulls, which don't nest at the landfill, instead choose islands and other places to mate and hatch eggs, Chipman said.

"It was something more than money that I could give," Missouri wildlife specialist Dan McMurtry told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for a story Monday.