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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"

• blamazon 5y ago
  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.
  • tofof 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      Good catch, so they are probably ‘cooked’ from both ends topologically.
    • Retric 5y ago
      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.
  • pvaldes 5y ago
    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?.
    • ceejayoz 5y ago
      > 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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
          > 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.
    • Justin_K 5y ago
      Lol before making your rant, you should know they don't shoot the animals, the shoot near them to scare them away.
      • pvaldes 5y ago
        The effects of lead pellets in marshes as bird mass poisoner is a well known problem in ecology. They are worsening the problem.
• dboreham 5y ago
  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.
• readme 5y ago
  right near the beginning they explained how ground water fills the quarry with sulfuric acid
• kortilla 5y ago
  The acidity isn’t the problem, it’s the metals. The acidity is about the same as a Coke.