Pluggers by Rick McKee for September 24, 2012

Good memories of the Pond a few blocks from my Grandma’s house, Thanx!

Don’t let the bureaucrats catch you, more and more places don’t allow you to feed the ducks or geese anymore

So in this world Chickens walk upright and ducks are inferior. I guess it’s like Pluto & Goofy.

Brings back childhood memories!

Around here (D.C. area) the geese are year round, swarm open areas, parks and golf courses, and although fat, are rather unhealthy due to a diet of almost nothing but refined white flour in the bread people feed them.

Great way to destroy natural habits.

Crummy biblical allusion.

Hope they get what they deserve.

Love plus ignorance equals unintended consequences.

I work at a Nature Museum by which there’s a rather sizable pond with plenty of wildlife and waterfowl. People have the romantic delusion that they’re “helping” our feathered friends by feeding them when in fact – for reasons already cited – they’re actually doing them more harm than good. Bread, especially, might fill them up but it has no nutritional value to them as their digestive systems are not designed to handle it well, ending up with overstuffed, unhealthy, over-populating (and defecating, leading to pollution of the water) birds of all sorts.

Please, people, don’t “help” our wildlife in this manner. You’d be hurting more than helping.

…and don’t get me started on unleashed dogs, whose owners think it’s funny when their dogs go chasing after the waterfowl, saying that the mutts are “just having some fun”. Yeah, at the expense of the wildlife, ya ignorant (expletives deleted). We have leash laws that are seldom enforced, dagnabbit.

As a resident of SW Florida, our community has feed especially made for wild waterfowl and we welcome them at our community lake. It is sad that it is also inhabited by snapping turtles.

A fun activity . . . until they become extremely aggressive, trying to get more food out of you. Scary!