Why North Korea is a safe haven for birds | Hacker News Reader

Why North Korea is a safe haven for birds

bbc.com

124 pointstomkat078969 comments

In the US, shorebirds declined tremendously not because of habitat loss, but because of market hunting. [1] For example, in the South San Francisco Bay, market hunters killed everything in sight and shipped the birds to San Francisco for food. Around 1900, SF consumed around 250,000 ducks annually.

Considering the food situation in North Korea, I'm really surprised those flocks exist. Perhaps it is due to a lack of shotguns outside of the military?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_hunters

[2] PDF http://downloads.ice.ucdavis.edu/sfestuary/skinner/archive10...

Now shorebirds are declining because of overfed geese which we don't shoot enough of.

http://netnebraska.org/article/news/1028942/farmland-buffet-...

It's a shame since they'd be practically impossible to miss on their landing approach and are very hesitant to take flight once on the ground. Wouldn't be hard to fill a freezer in one go.

The thing is that if you shoot them when they're on the ground, say with a .22 caliber, then they will move because they'll know they're not safe. You will fill a freezer in one go and that will be it for this year, they'll move on their migratory path.

And plenty of hunters miss them on their landing approach, it's not so easy for people who shoot one or twice a year when they go on their hunting trip.

That makes a pretty good case for farming the geese as well. Every year, near thanks giving, I listen to the food banks implore people to donate turkeys for the meals they prepare for the homeless and poor. And every year I hear this while walking around piles of Canadian Goose crap from birds that have stopped being migratory having found enough food and comfort in the Bay Area. And every year I think, "There is a very simple solution to this problem, at least for the short term."

I've never eaten one, but I've read they taste terrible.

I've never had a wild Canadian goose that I know of, but roasted gooose is quite tasty, used to have it every Christmas as a kid.

I'm waiting for Wabbit Season.

Taste is subjective. I've eaten wild goose (at a nice little restaurant in Zurich) and it was quite delicious, "smokier" than duck and "smoother" than venison. Doing a brief search for "Wild Goose Recipe" tells me there are lots and lots of ways to prepare them.

Where did you read that?

Goose meat tastes roughly like steak. It tends to sell for over $10 per pound. I know price isn't perfectly correlated with quality, but it didn't get high prices from nonexistent demand.

But are those wild Canadian geese, or are those some other variety that were raised on a farm?

They won't eat it. Too gamey. Folks are used to mild chicken and turkey. Geese are more like duck.

Not even in stew?

The poor want the same things that everyone else want. If other families are not having goose by choice, they're going to perceive it as being a second-rate substitute.

It's a bit like getting a kid MegaBloks for his birthday. Yeah, he should be thankful that he got a gift at all. On the other hand, you should definitely try to give gifts that the receiver will actually like. That kid's probably not going to be happy if what he really wanted was blocks that fit together properly with his Lego, like the set that Sally got for her birthday.

> The poor want the same things that everyone else want. If other families are not having goose by choice, they're going to perceive it as being a second-rate substitute.

People stopped eating goose because of the expense. It tastes like flying steak. I would make it every holiday if it wasn't so expensive.

"Flying steak" you just made my night. In Chinese cuisine, there is definitely still goose served but my recollection of it is as a very fatty bird, even more so than duck.

Lobster and oysters used to be cheap food for the poor as well. Expense is a lot of what makes food desirable, though.

They're not a particularly delicious bird IMO, which is frankly why other birds are more popular, such as duck. Goose is also extremely fatty, more so than duck, which makes it stupidly easy to cook badly.

The fat is obnoxious.

You're more likely to make a mistake though by treating the legs and the breasts equally, they need to cook different amounts. Of course, that's the same way people ruin turkey. They want that whole bird to come out of the oven like in a magazine, even though the different parts of the bird have different volumes, densities, and protein chains.

On the other hand, maybe everyone's just making dry turkey as an excuse for gravy...

Gravy needs no excuses. Gravy is love. Gravy is life. "Turkey drippings are my favorite part of the bird. It's like... the caviar of turkey." -Sean Lock

Huh, interesting. In Virginia we have problems with resident Canada geese. They eat everything, shit on everything, and taste terrible.

http://www.dgif.virginia.gov/wildlife/problems/canada-geese/

Even if they were available, how much would a shotgun + rounds cost in the DPRK? Where are you getting your Cosmoline, and such? Maybe the first thing you do is sell your gun and buy as much rice as you can.

Uncontrolled market hunting is dangerous to birds, but the biggest problem is habitat loss.

Louisiana used to produce more food calories in wild birds hunted for human consumption than all the farms that were denuded for commercial growth produce today. The birds are mostly gone. [0]

[0] Game Wars, by Marc Reisner, the greatest environmental journalist of the 20th century.

The famine ended a long time ago. Most North Koreans, while not wealthy, are also not starving.

Wikipedia says the latest famine is still ongoing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine

North Korea has warned citizens that famine is coming.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/north-korea-tel...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/29/north-koreans-tol...

These make me believe that people in North Korea do still go hungry, and that even if they're not in famine they have severe food shortages.

The first link describes "occasional recurrences" since 2002 with a citation I can't follow. The second article describes efforts to hoard food to protect against a famine. Doesn't seem like evidence that there is, currently, a famine in North Korea.

On a related note, during the Chinese cultural revolution Mao declared war on sparrows(Great Sparrow Campaign) and billions of birds were killed (not only sparrows...). It's considered as one of that catalysts of The Great Famine that killed 15 million Chinese. They had to import birds from Canada and USSR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign

Chief, this was not the cultural revolution, this was the Great Leap Forward. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution started in 1966.

Sorry, I simply can't trust anything that comes out of the DPRK. Everything over there is a propaganda photo op.

>>> But we were able to show local people shorebirds through our telescopes.

North Korea regular issues propaganda about staying away from foreigners. The fact that these guys were 'mingling' with the locals tells me that the whole thing was staged.

For all we know these guys visited the one place in the country where there are birds, and they were then instructed to write how the 'great leader' is protecting the environment for animals elsewhere the country.

Notice how the kids in the photo seem well dressed and well feed....

I don't know what someone who is 'well feed' looks like.

And I suppose the birds are actually robots?

This is probably the first time in my life that I read something not negative about North Korea.

Western propaganda is not what it used to be ;-)

Eh, even this ends up being pretty negative. It's basically, "Birds thrive because North Korea is a total shithole, which leaves lots of undeveloped shoreline."

That was my first thought too.

Would it be even possible in today's world to have a country that is purposefully underdeveloped/feudal, but without an oppressive regime?

Bhutan would appear to fit the bill.

Nope. Bhutan created a mess of a refugee crisis when they evicted all Nepalese-speaking citizens in 1990. [0], [1]

There are still some refugees living in camps in Nepal, and it took over 10 years before some Western countries agreed to take them in. They are still slowly being resettled.

I know some of these refugees who spent the first 17 or 18 years of their lives in squalid camp conditions. They are lovely people.

[0] http://www.oocities.org/bhutaneserefugees/forcedeviction.htm...

[1] http://www.hurights.or.jp/wcar/E/doc/other/Refugee/AHURA.htm

Does the Amish country count?

and do native american countries/territories count too?

It might depend on which one. Modest lifestyles in those places isn't always by choice

What? I'm a little confused about what you think Native American areas are like and why?

My point was less about what they are like, but more alluding to the fact that they are their own nations.

That would be a myth, and not quite what "sovereignty" means in that context.

I wouldn't call North Korea purposefully underdeveloped. It just refuses to accept foreign investment like every other country on the face of the planet. It's modernizing, albeit slowly and on its own terms.

> It's modernizing, albeit slowly and on its own terms.

On the terms of its dictatorship. Not on the terms of the people.

South Korea also modernized on the terms of its dictatorship. It did so very quickly, though.

Rate of modernization has little to do with the form of government.

The trade embargoes haven't help.

If we'd been more active in engaging North Korea on friendly terms, maybe they would have developed along a similar route as China.

It seems like we're trying to squeeze them till they collapse, and North Korea are understandably doing all they can to be self-sufficient and not appear weak and desperate.

The problem is NK is nothing like China. NK leadership is nothing like China, opening them up would only make them militarily more dangerous to deal with. But I agree with you that there needs to be and end to this, but I have no idea how.

It actually describes Australia, which for the most part is uninhabited and undeveloped, and has massive amounts of mostly untouched wilderness.

Take a land mass the size of the lower 48 states, and take out all the people except for Oregon on the west coast and Florida on the east coast. Remove nearly all the interstates and all but three of the railroads. That is Australia.

And yet their hills are virtually stripped bare of trees as they are cut down for fuel.

There's a negative side:

I'm fairly certain that if the greater North Korean people could catch these birds to eat, they would disappear. But the birds are in a security zone. Because the people can't get to the birds (or any other food) the people are starving to death.

Thanks to this coverage, NK will likely begin to send out military groups seasonally to harvest the birds.

They're not starving because they can't get to the birds. There are different reasons for that.

But, if they could reach the birds they wouldn't be starving.

NK has 25 million people. If their government can't feed the population, catching some birds won't make a meaningful difference.

... Unless you're one of the people eating the birds.

IMHO, you should use term "Planet Earth Propaganda", because more than half of our planet is against NK. ;-)

It's one of those things that makes perfect sense, but you probably didn't think about.

It's probably up there with the Korean DMZ, Chernobyl, and Bikini Atoll as unintentional nature preserves.

I'm a engineer inspecting an unrelated project next to a superfund site in NJ (Toms River). The superfund site is now 22,000 acres of untouched wilderness. The municipal workers say it's now filled with all sorts of wildlife including coyote and turkeys.

I recently read an article describing how NK was way more willing to get on board climate change proposals than, say, curbing their Nuclear ambitions. This is because they're peninsula is particularly sensitive to ocean and climate change.

Climate change also serves to hobble their rich industrialized enemies and provide an excuse for building nuclear plants.

It seems to me that the situation is very fragile and worrisome, mainly for 2 reasons. China once (1958-1962) had a Four Pests Campaign (除四害运动), which defined four pests to be eliminated: rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. In less than 1 year, nearly 2 billion sparrows were systematically exterminated. I'm not saying that North Korea will do the same thing, but a starving country with a totalitarianism government is one of the worst threats to nature, as China has clearly shown. On the other hand, should the political situation change in North Korea (in any direction), nature will as well be the first to suffer, as China has clearly shown.

Well I think the situation in the US, Europe, and others shows that it's not like other political arrangements do better here.

All non-korean bird photographers are bearded. Is that's where SD cards with real pictures are hidden?

Meanwhile, in Lebanon...

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/lebanon-bird-hunt.html#...

"Stalinism - Lovely weather for ducks"

*Juche

Joseph Stalin is well known for the lack of industrial development under his leadership?

Papa Joe was no environmentalist. There are still places that were completely wrecked by his policies 80 years ago.

Yep. To overclarify: my post was a joke about the (surface level) environmental benefits of an unde(r)veloped economy within North-Korea's current form of bizarro pseudo-stalinism.

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