Bad Bird Roundup

-Vacation dangers: In the seaside town of Bridlington, England, seagulls that hang out at fish and chip shops aren't just waiting for partrons to drop a chip on the sidewalk anymore. They're actually attacking and stealing their food. One shop fears being driven out of business due to the cost of replacing the meals of complaning customers.

-Memorable final performance: At the Taronga Zoo in Australia, an eagle at a free-flight performance took a detour and landed on an toddler in the audience, leaving a gash on the boy's head. Understandly unhappy with this bit of improvisation, the zoo has retired the eagle from show business.

-Useless public servants: Some more birds are bad at their jobs in Germany as well, where a program to train vultures to replace dogs for sniffing out dead bodies has been declared a "disaster." Critics of the scheme had earlier pointed out the possibility that the evidence would disappear down the birds' gullets, but it turned out there was no risk of that: The three vultures failed to find any of the test cadavers. One refused to fly at all, waddling like a duck instead, and the other two did nothing but fight. A trainer admitted:

'They don't seem to be able to do anything other than attack each other.... It seems they are rather cowardly birds - they would rather hide in the woods than be out and about in the open.'

Photo of ambitiously-named failed vulture detective Miss Marple from Der Spiegel.

They're at it again

The Middle East is full of animal espionage. Iranians caught 14 spying squirrels in 2007, and then, spying pigeons in 2008.

Now, authorities in Saudi Arabia have detained a vulture on suspicion of being an Israeli agent.

The vulture was wearing a GPS transmitter labelled as belonging to Tel Aviv University, so what other explanation could there be, right?

Israeli authorities claim that the transmitter is simply part of a conservation project. But the pigeons that spied on Iran aren't the only birds who've done international undercover work: Pigeons were used to deliver messages during the two World Wars, and were even awarded medals. And showing that they're not picky about who they work for, more recently, pigeons smuggled cellphones into a prison in Brazil.

And it's not just birds and small land-based furry things. When sharks attacked tourists in the Red Sea last year, an Egyptian official suggested it was an Israeli intelligence plot to disrupt tourism in his country. Many thought it was ridiculous to imagine ocean wildlife being used in espionage. But did you know that the US Navy has a Marine Mammal Training Program? Sure, they're supposedly just used for protection and mine detection and that sort of thing. But that's what they'd tell us, right?

So let's hope the vulture receives a fair trial, but without speciesism: as readers of this blog well know, just being an animal is the last thing that should be enough to get it off the hook.


Vultures suspiciously interested in our communications technology by Flickr user Starwatcher307.