Don's Jersey Birding: Good bird or bad bird?
Folks used to look up in awe as Canada Geese flew overhead. Now they are looked at in disdain.
All photos courtesy of Mike Malzone
We humans like to keep everything simple and orderly. Sometimes the less we are forced to think about things, the more we like them. It makes the interpretations in our minds easier to sort out.
At times, I believe our thought process regarding wildlife is very similar to a scene in the Frankenstein movie. Frankenstein is in the cabin with the old blind man and makes a very simple assumption after seeing a lit match. “Fire Bad!” he says. Then, when given a cigar he says, “Smoke good!” Obviously Frankenstein couldn’t read the surgeon general’s warning on the box.
Unfortunately, many people tend to think of wildlife and especially birds in simple “good” or “bad” classifications. As a naturalist, I have many conversations with folks who consider themselves birders and nature lovers that insist that certain bird species are bad and others are good, as if somehow certain bird species decided to go bad and take up a life of crime. I wonder if that is where the term “jailbird” came from. They like to make villains of creatures that, through no fault of their own, are either out of place due to man’s interference or are just doing what nature intended them to do.
Case in point: As I have stated many times, I think the Common Grackle is a very cool bird. This statement has subjected me to public ridicule and scorn. Once again, like the Frankenstein movie, the well-meaning town folks of Moonachie have picked up their torches and chased me through the streets of the village for my beliefs.
Why are grackles made out to be bad guys? Because they eat seed that people put out for, guess what…BIRDS? How dare those grackles have the nerve to think that they are birds! I often think that if grackles were much more colorful, let’s say for argument’s sake, pink, I would be getting phone calls asking how to attract them to the backyard. But instead most people think the grackle wears the black leather jacket of backyard hoodlum. 
Bluejays are considered to be bullies so people look at them as "bad" birds.
The wild turkey is a good example of how a magnificent bird that was just about gone from the New Jersey landscape is now thought of as a pest. “Oh those stupid turkeys,” someone said to me recently. “They chase my cats around the yard.”
The Wild Turkey, once gone from the New Jersey landscape is now considered a "bad" bird by some.
Brown-Headed Cowbirds are a favorite whipping-bird especially among birders. They pose a serious problem to nesting birds such as warbler species, but they are here because we changed the landscape from an Eastern woodland habitat to an open one when people decided to cut down the trees. Cowbirds fault? Don’t think so.
And now we come to maybe the most hated bird in New Jersey: the Canada goose. Yes, they have become a major problem at airports, lakes and schoolyards, but instead of landscaping with native shrubs, trees and tall grasses which deter geese, we insist on creating places that the geese love like large corporate lawns and parks with huge expanses of low growing non-native grass. Homeowners plant Kentucky bluegrass in their front yards, and then they wonder why the geese keep coming.
The definition of insanity is that we keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result. Does that make the Canada goose the most evil creature alive? Or does it just show how much we have to learn about living with wildlife? I remember how people used to look up in awe as they watched a flock of migrating Canadas cruise overhead. How times change.
In the end, there are no good or bad birds. Wildlife does not exist to either please or displease the human race. That concept is just man’s arrogance. Calling wildlife “bad” just cheapens its existence. We owe it to all creatures to learn a little more about them and how to better live with them before we create a creature that is looked at as bad. 
Don Torino is the Education Chairperson for Bergen County Audubon Society. 
Categories: Don's Jersey Birding
Tags: Birding canada geese bluejay grackle Brown Headed Cowbird
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