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Birds are being vacuumed up as part of olive harvesting in the Mediterranean
- kabwj 7y agoThis is a shame because vacuuming is probably one of the best and cheapest ways of harvesting olives which doesn’t involve importing illegal Romanians for cheap labour. (I say this as someone with interests in the sector and with no love for nature :P) Having to give up on all of these machines will be very expensive.
- mprev 7y agoAnd this attitude is why we are in the mess we are today. Presumably your interest is financial. Even if you can’t see beyond your own wealth, then perhaps you can recognise that our reliance on nature — including olives — is a balance. Crass exploitation with no regard for our impact on the world is short sighted to say the least.
- eecc 7y agoYup, it’s called the Tragedy of the Commons... and we only get to realize the financial impact of the loss after the irreparable damage is done
- raverbashing 7y agoThe irony is that the machines probably avoid a bigger human cost But it should be possible to use them while avoiding harm to birds.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dandellion 7y agoMaybe we just need to come up with a better solution. Might be enough to not use the machines when the birds sleep, or to add a light or buzzer so the birds can get away or something. A hefty fine for killing birds would probably help to get creative solutions faster.
- m0nty 7y ago> add a light or buzzer I doubt these machines are silent already.
- mayniac 7y agoThe article mentions this. They're loud and have bright lights. The problem is these disorient the birds, and they struggle to escape in time. Not really surprising, if someone woke me up at 3am with an industrial hoover and a foglight I would probably panic too.
- pvaldes 7y agoThey are loud, approach slow, have bright lights, there are loud people talking and working around... and the birds keep sleeping and do not try to escape or avoid the area? Seems unlikely I can't eval the problem with this data and never had heard of it before. Nor had seen any remains of birds in almazaras but my experience in this case is limited. Maybe is a true problem locally and is good to care for it... something does not fit in this narrative. Maybe the migrating birds are just too tired to escape?. I would look for some hidden interests. The history is very strange. In any case just put a red light in the extreme of the vacuum tube, and you'll have a cheap and pretty simple solution. Birds will avoid the tube if they can see it coming closer.
- sdfjkl 7y agoThe lights and "buzzers" seem to be part of the problem, rather than a solution, according to the article: > The loud noise and dazzling illumination of the lights is thought to disorientate the birds, who are unable to escape and end up being sucked into the machines in large numbers.
- EugeneOZ 7y agoIf loud noises will start _before_ machines turn on vacuum, at least few minutes, then, maybe, it could help.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoConsidering Romania and Spain are both in the EU, there's nothing "illegal" about "importing" them. EU citizens enjoy freedom of movement across all member states.
- kabwj 7y agoIllegal because they don’t have contracts and are paid below minimum wage.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoThen maybe you should attach the “illegal” to the employment, and not to the people. People also aren’t “imported”. They aren’t cattle.
- TheAdamAndChe 7y agoPeople easily can be imported. I understand what you're trying to say, and having empathy for everyone is important, but it's also a easily possible to understand illegal immigration as a concept and still care about people. Illegal immigration does have negative impacts on the local population that need to be addressed, and shouldn't be ignored in an attempt to act like all forms of labor are equal.
- threeseed 7y agoWhat are you talking about ? The issue was specifically around the EU where citizens are allowed to work in other member countries. It's not illegal and by any definition it's not imported.
- TheAdamAndChe 7y agoThe guidelines of this site specify that I should address the strongest interpretation of the argument. I felt the underlying message of empathy was more important than the semantics of illegal immigration versus legal. At least in America, the colloquial use of the phrase illegal immigration almost always discusses economic integration in a manner that exploits existing labor laws, which is what I believed the commenter above was speaking of. Again, squabbling over semantics is unimportant and uninteresting in my opinion.
- MartinMond 7y agoCan the process be slowed down, so that the birds are first woken up and given time to escape before the vacuuming starts?
- raverbashing 7y agoI think something like this would work, or maybe trees should be "pre-shaken"/"pre-illuminated" to allow the birds to fly off
- cm2187 7y agoOr have refregirated harvesters to operate during daytime.
- is_true 7y agoI think the best choice would be to do something at sunset the day before. So birds go somewhere else.
- megous 7y agoSo are we eating olives mixed with dead birds remains? It has to be impossible to clean up completely, no?
- sdfjkl 7y agoConsidering the birds seem to come out more or less whole (alas none too healthy), it's probably trivial to sieve the olives from the much larger bird corpses.
- coldtea 7y agoAs a Mediterranean with olives of my own, no. Olives are sieved and separated.
- megous 7y agoWell, dying animals usually release their contents pretty quickly. I'm still a bit worried.
- ThrowawayR2 7y agoFruits and vegetables grow out in the open. A significant portion of the produce people consume is statistically guaranteed to have been anointed (so to speak) by passing birds and other wildlife already.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- emerongi 7y agoThey sieve, blow and wash any foreign bodies out.
- threeseed 7y agoBe curious to know how they wash it. Because having olives lying next to dead birds sure sounds like a disease risk.
- theclaw 7y agoSucks to be them
- freebear 7y agoIf you eat our food, if you compete with our food, or if you live close to our food: we will kill you.
- vixen99 7y agoOr if you simply exist, we'll also kill you in our factory farms.
- sethammons 7y agoConsider that a cow or other animal raised for slaughter would not have otherwise existed. Is it better to never have existed, or to live and be harvested? As for the factory part, I live in cattle country in Montana. I see acres of open spaces, and cows frolicking and enjoying themselves. They don't have to be packed shoulder to shoulder in crates their whole life.
- kranner 7y agoI think the terror of understanding that your companions are disappearing day by day and any day now your number will be up combined with the final moments until execution probably exceed the fun of running about in fields. We may have no way to know. But then we have no right to assume this isn’t the case.
- sethammons 7y agoConsider this exact situation, as you described it (edit: minor change, sub execution for some other death), plays out for aging humans. Dying is usually not pleasant and it happens to us all.
- chongli 7y agoYes, and many people don't get the quick death of a captive-bolt pistol to the forehead. Many people die in a hospital after years of suffering from gradual organ failure, dementia, cancer, or other terminal diseases. Besides that, I don't think we know if cattle are aware that when their herdmates disappear that they are dying. Herd animals in the wild such as zebras and wildebeest witness their herdmates being killed by predatory cats on a daily basis, something I think would be far more traumatizing than just having them disappear on a truck. Maybe I'm wrong, though.
- ak39 7y agoThis article and the pics of the dead birds broke my heart. :-( I can’t understand any human not pausing to think twice and to find alternatives when faced with such horrendous death of innocent creatures. Yeah it’s cheap and efficient but it kills millions of birds. Find another way! I don’t want your fancy olives if you don’t care about what you’re doing to the birds.
- Amygaz 7y agoI understand what you want to say, but taken literally, I am sure you know many humans who would not pause and think twice about the birds. They would think twice about the cheapest way to harvest and that would pretty much be the extend of it.
- TheAdamAndChe 7y agoIn our economic system, that's kind of how it works. It's a survival-of-the-fittest environment, where anyone who can exploit the rules of the legal system while making the most profit will grow to be the largest. That's why you see so many "unethical" huge corporations in the world, because they were the ones that learned to exploit the system. To actually change the outcome at-scale, you need to change the system, which we haven't figured out how to do yet while still providing a good quality of life.
- nihilismislove 7y agoI doubt it that the quality of life would drop significantly should the olives be harvested during the day rather than at night. There are many problems to solve in the politics and economy which doesn't mean we cannot enforce specific policies for specific problems.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- qazpot 7y ago> In our economic system, that's kind of how it works. It's a survival-of-the-fittest environment. I doubt that the survival-of-the-fittest environment is a product of the economic system. It is the converse which is true. Our society which includes economic system is a product of survival-of-the-fittest because it is hardcoded in our DNA, in fact in the genetic material of every living thing.
- BasDirks 7y agoWhat kind of species are affected?
- smackay 7y agoThe photo in the article shows three Song Thrushes (Turdus philomelos) (the larger ones); the smaller one in the middle of the picture is most likely a Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita). The small bird, the in background, next to one of the Song Thrushes appears to be a Serin (Serinus serinus). All are typical of Olive groves in winter. The first two species are migrants from northern Europe. These successfully survived the Autumn migration so this has a more severe impact on their populations in general.
- BasDirks 7y agoAre these in any way endangered?
- turrini 7y agoWould not it be the case to implement a way to scare birds with ultrasonic tools? Attach them to harvesters. There are ultrasonic tools that scare away dogs, there must be one for birds.
- aij 7y agoI'm not sure how adding more noise would help if "The loud noise and dazzling illumination of the lights is thought to disorientate the birds" according to the article.
- jdmoreira 7y agoI’m from this area of Portugal and one day I realized there were way fewer sparrows than I remembered. I wonder if this is the cause
- icebraining 7y agoI have to say, I'm kinda surprised our farmers can afford such machinery. I thought we mostly used gas-powered or electric tree shakers ("varejadores").
- twervle 7y agoA giant blocking window with a green button that cannot be pressed on iPhone.
- aij 7y agoSo, the main problem is that they are harvesting at night, when the birds are going to be super docile. Birds really don't like to move during their resting period. (I can confirm, at least for chickens. Even super skittish chickens will let you grab/handle them at night, with little more than some clucks of protest.) Other than not running the harvesters at night, I'm not sure what they could do about it. Even if they light up the whole grove as bright as day, I'd expect circadian rhythms to kick in eventually, though it might be enough to harvest first.
- chicob 7y agoI'm an olive producer in Portugal. I suspect the main reason behind the need for harvesting at night is that the demand exceeds the supply for super high density harvesting service, and contractors harvest day and night in order to face the demand. As soon as there are enough providers, working extra hours will become less interesting and this kind of practice will go away. This kind of harvesting is a lot quicker than previous practices, so harvesting during the day will be more than enough. Harvesting is done usually in the winter (ranging from November to January) so only non-migratory birds are afected, and even then only those nesting in super high density orchards. The harvesters are quite expensive, and usually only larger producers own them. This kind of investment is tricky, because for the most part of the year there is nothing to harvest (although there are some other crops where the harvesters are being tried in order to recover the investment more quickly). Of course no farmer wants to needlessly kill harmless birds, but I will wait for more data, since there has been some hype regarding super high density orchards in the past months, usually portraying them as something horrible and bad to the environment. By the way, birds to not get into the oil presses, because olives pass through a mesh in order to remove branches and leaves. Then they're washed, so there is no risk of contamination with dead birds. I also suspect the decline of bird populations in the south has something to do with the big fires of past years, that forced northern predatory birds to come searching for food at lower latitudes. I have never seen so many eagles like this year. Or the other side, the Eurasian magpie populations seem to be doing fine, as well as the once endangered storks. Edit to add: the research cited in the article is not research but an information notice by the Environment Council of the government of Andalucia.
- teh_klev 7y ago> I suspect the main reason behind the need for harvesting at night is that the demand exceeds the supply The third paragraph of the article suggests otherwise: The trees are stripped at night because cool temperatures help preserve the olives' aromatic compounds. > so only non-migratory birds are afected[sic] Again, the article begs to differ, these are migratory birds: Huge numbers of birds from central and northern Europe winter in the Mediterranean
- 7y ago
- ip26 7y agoWonder if this will come back to bite them. Birds can be a form of free pest management.
- hshshshshss 7y agoHopefully it does
- projektfu 7y agoDoes this make olives non-vegan since it’s now known that harvesting them kills animals?
- dredmorbius 7y agoThat principle extends readily to virtualy all plant-based foods.
- ThrowawayR2 7y agoIf so, then nothing but greenhouse grown plants are vegan. Millions of rodents and rabbits are killed each year (not really an exaggeration, they reproduce prolifically) using a variety of methods to prevent them from damaging crops. One amusing example is removal of burrowing animals with FAEs; propane and oxygen is injected into a burrow and detonated. (Google for "rodent blaster" if you're curious.) It does have the advantage of being an entirely organic method of agricultural pest control.
- crsmithdev 7y agoHad to read about this from another source, the cookies popup can't be dismissed and even when deleted from the DOM, the story is still unreadable.
- chicob 7y agoOn Firefox, open about:reader?url=https://www.birdguides.com/news/millions-of-birds-vacuumed-to-death-annually-in-mediterranean/ It won't show the comments, but at least you can read it.
- susanagonzaga 7y agoGreece is where olive was born. Today, Greeks harvest olives during the day and by hand. This is the natural way. Vaccuming olives at night for a slightly different taste in olive oil and killing so many birds which are members of our community does not make commonsense. I am Portuguese and if this tragedy does not stop by October 2019 rest assured that I will buy Greek only olive oil for a long time.