By Olivia Scheck and Carla Zanoni
DNAinfo Staff
INWOOD — A distraught dog owner saw a group of geese rounded up in Inwood Hill Park Tuesday morning, part of an effort to prevent the animals from interfering with planes overhead.
"I started to move in their direction to scare them off to try to save them when one of the men told me that if I interfered with the capture, he would have me arrested," the heart broken witness and Inwood resident Suzanne Soehner, 64, first wrote in a post on neighborhood blog InTheWoodNYC.com. "If I hadn't had the dogs with me, I would have accepted that challenge."
Soehner said she was walking in the park on Tuesday afternoon when a "convoy of trucks" entered the park made up of a van, a "flatbed filled with what looked like huge milk cartons," a truck with canoes in the back and a black SUV filled with police officers.
Soon after arriving, workers entered the salt marsh off Indian Road and began rounding up the birds.
"I said, 'This is supposed to be a wildlife refuge, why is it that the solution to every problem seems to be killing?'" she said.
Inwood resident Sam Denno also witnessed the round up Tuesday afternoon and said he was dispapointed that the goslings he and his children have been watching grow since the spring were taken away.
"City rounded up for slaughter the #Inwood Hills geese including a dozen goslings this morning," he tweeted. "This explains why no more eagles. #bastards."
The city's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and United States Department of Agriculture said they expected to round up between 700 and 800 Canada geese around New York City during the coming weeks, according to a public statement. However, the agency refused to specify where the geese would captured, fearing interference from animal rights activists, according to the New York Times.
A DEP official said the agency and USDA would not "comment on locations or timing of the goose hazard reduction program until it is completed in mid-July and the final report is made public."
The effort to thin the goose population began after a pack of geese flew into the engines of US Airways Flight 1549, requiring the plane to emergency land on the Hudson River, in an incident that became known as "The Miracle on the Hudson."
While in previous years the captured geese had been exterminated, this time around, the DEP has promised to slaughter the animals and donate them to food banks and homeless shelters in Pennsylvania, according to the statement.
Soehner, who was still shaken up by the incident on Wednesday morning, said she now plans to rally with a wildlife protection group on Thursday evening outside Mayor Michael Bloomberg's home on East 79th Street to drive home the message that killing geese is not an acceptable method to calm the population.
She said although the incident in the park was disturbing, she was pleased she was there when it took place.
"If I hadn't been there to witness it I would have just noticed they were gone and wondered where they went," she said of the geese. "Now I can take actions to prevent this in the future."
