U.S. Postal Service Sends Baby Birds To Woodchipper

Surviving nestlings in an incubator (Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle)

UPDATE:  The sensational first reports about birds going into the woodchipper turn out to have been wrong, and I apologize for repeating them.  I should also report with dismay that, for once, I agree with U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R–CA), who is protesting that Postal Service employees, and not just the tree guy they hired, should be taking the heat.  Here’s the full story in the New York Times.

And here’s my original post:

The U.S. Post Office, known for being clueless in almost all regards, has now out-done itself, feeding nestling black-crowned night herons into a wood chipper in the middle of Oakland, California.

Here’s the report from SFGate:

Oakland has come to love the squawking black-crowned night herons that have taken up residence downtown. City work crews leave them alone, and residents say they adore the colony’s rain-forest-like cacophony – a bit of nature amid the hardscrabble urban landscape.

But the shorebirds aren’t so cute to the U.S. Postal Service. Officials at the downtown post office ordered nearby trees trimmed Saturday because nesting birds were defecating on the mail trucks.

The result, witnesses said, was a feathery massacre

that ended with nests – and baby birds – fed through a wood chipper …

Read the full story here.