Birds are being vacuumed up as part of olive harvesting in the Mediterranean | Hacker News Reader

Birds are being vacuumed up as part of olive harvesting in the Mediterranean

birdguides.com

178 pointsBreadmaker119 comments

I'm an olive producer in Portugal.

I suspect the main reason behind the need for harvesting at night is that the demand exceeds the supply for super high density harvesting service, and contractors harvest day and night in order to face the demand.

As soon as there are enough providers, working extra hours will become less interesting and this kind of practice will go away. This kind of harvesting is a lot quicker than previous practices, so harvesting during the day will be more than enough.

Harvesting is done usually in the winter (ranging from November to January) so only non-migratory birds are afected, and even then only those nesting in super high density orchards.

The harvesters are quite expensive, and usually only larger producers own them. This kind of investment is tricky, because for the most part of the year there is nothing to harvest (although there are some other crops where the harvesters are being tried in order to recover the investment more quickly).

Of course no farmer wants to needlessly kill harmless birds, but I will wait for more data, since there has been some hype regarding super high density orchards in the past months, usually portraying them as something horrible and bad to the environment.

By the way, birds to not get into the oil presses, because olives pass through a mesh in order to remove branches and leaves. Then they're washed, so there is no risk of contamination with dead birds.

I also suspect the decline of bird populations in the south has something to do with the big fires of past years, that forced northern predatory birds to come searching for food at lower latitudes. I have never seen so many eagles like this year.

Or the other side, the Eurasian magpie populations seem to be doing fine, as well as the once endangered storks.

Edit to add: the research cited in the article is not research but an information notice by the Environment Council of the government of Andalucia.

> I suspect the main reason behind the need for harvesting at night is that the demand exceeds the supply

The third paragraph of the article suggests otherwise:

The trees are stripped at night because cool temperatures help preserve the olives' aromatic compounds.

> so only non-migratory birds are afected[sic]

Again, the article begs to differ, these are migratory birds:

Huge numbers of birds from central and northern Europe winter in the Mediterranean

The trees are stripped at night because cool temperatures help preserve the olives' aromatic compounds.

I don't think that is why they do it. First of all, producers are paid according to the titratable acidity of the oil (and classified as extra virgin, virgin, or lampante) and if paid by the tonne of olives delivered, this is adjusted to the oil-to-mass ratio (roughly 20% w/w). These values are determined in laboratory, from samples collected at delivery, and whose results come only at a later time. There is no measure for aroma.

Many times, batches from different producers are mixed before pressing, so there's no point in trying to preserve whatever aromas there might be.

Unless we're talking about producers with their own pressers, producing their own label, trying to preserve aroma is kind of pointless, and subjective at best.

But there is something else: the oil-to-mass ratio improves during dryer weeks, so transportation is cheaper and extraction is better paid. So maybe there is more pressure for a quick harvest in conditions where the oil content reaches 22%, but again I see no point in nightly harvest.

Huge numbers of birds from central and northern Europe winter in the Mediterranean

But they are not being affected, that is, of all the 17 species mentioned in the cited notice, only one is listed as Near Threatened (the redwing, T. iliacus). Vulnerable or endangered species are not being affected as far as I know, and sedentary/endemic species would be in greater danger.

According to the Portuguese Natural Preservation Institute (ICNF) the numbers involved are not statistically relevant for justifying the prohibition of nightly harvests.

> I'm an olive producer in Portugal.

I love this community.

Ot: it's amazing to be able to speak to so many different backgrounds isn't it?

I don't know about the rest of you buy I'm always of two mjnds when recommending hn. I don't want to lose what we have.

This article and the pics of the dead birds broke my heart. :-(

I can’t understand any human not pausing to think twice and to find alternatives when faced with such horrendous death of innocent creatures. Yeah it’s cheap and efficient but it kills millions of birds. Find another way! I don’t want your fancy olives if you don’t care about what you’re doing to the birds.

I understand what you want to say, but taken literally, I am sure you know many humans who would not pause and think twice about the birds. They would think twice about the cheapest way to harvest and that would pretty much be the extend of it.

In our economic system, that's kind of how it works. It's a survival-of-the-fittest environment, where anyone who can exploit the rules of the legal system while making the most profit will grow to be the largest. That's why you see so many "unethical" huge corporations in the world, because they were the ones that learned to exploit the system. To actually change the outcome at-scale, you need to change the system, which we haven't figured out how to do yet while still providing a good quality of life.

I doubt it that the quality of life would drop significantly should the olives be harvested during the day rather than at night. There are many problems to solve in the politics and economy which doesn't mean we cannot enforce specific policies for specific problems.

> In our economic system, that's kind of how it works. It's a survival-of-the-fittest environment.

I doubt that the survival-of-the-fittest environment is a product of the economic system. It is the converse which is true. Our society which includes economic system is a product of survival-of-the-fittest because it is hardcoded in our DNA, in fact in the genetic material of every living thing.

This is fallacious

Businesses have decision-makers who are not simply paperclip-maximizers. They read the news and have opinions about right and wrong. This means politics matters; it isn't all economic incentives, let alone genetics.

This doesn't mean it's easy to change people's minds, though.

Like the previous commenter said: You do things ethically and you need to price your product at $1.87 a lbs. Someone else gives them less room, add some crap to make them grow faster and can make e larger profit by pricing at $1.55 or whatever. Guess who will go out of business?

Really sad and shocking. On the other hand, one glance at industrial meat production shows how little we as a species care about our fellow creatures. Live animals (male chicks) thrown in meat grinders, calves separated at birth from their mothers, pigs living with horrendous infections in their own waste, geese force-fed no matter the pain,just to produce fat livers. And then the animals are ferried off to be killed in the most horrendous ways. You and I are both contributing to this by the choices we make to eat the cheapest/easiest/most convenient... meals.

I dont know where are you from but I visited a pig farm near where I live and they are in really clean spaces because they grow faster, and also regulations.

That's not how it works. The space being "clean" doesn't really help much. Consider the transport and killing, and also the fact that by far the largest number of animals killed for meat (excluding fish) are factory-farmed chickens and chicken factory-farming always looks the same

Chicks for example. I don't say it's not clean, but this is how industrial scale production looks like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV-rO2-Rwz4

> but it kills millions of birds

Presumably. Is an hypothese.

The article talks about "nearly 100.000 birds killed in Portugal" but the title extrapolates it somehow to "millions of birds killed in Mediterranean" without more supporting data. 96.000 != "millions".

That extrapolation is assuming that all olives in Mediterranean are from the same variety. Another source of statistical error unchecked and running wild in their extrapolation.

Olives are collected from September (green) to May but mainly between November to January. For some reason, the study forgot to mention that most migrating birds are in Africa in Nov-Jan. Only some common species remain. I see a photo with three dead thrushes and a fringillid. Four dead birds.

What is well known is that Malta or Lebanon kills much more migrating birds each year, including protected species, raptors etc. If you look for 2,5 millions of dissapeared birds each year the correct answer is probably here:

https://conservationaction.co.za/recent-news/stop-killing-le...

The same innocent creatures will experience a horrendous death in the wild any way.

This is an odd comment. If someone has a high chance of having a horrible death, does that justify us killing them in whatever way we see fit?

The natural world is filled with horrible pain and deaths. These do not add to that in quality. Maybe in quantity.

I'm curious whether you feel the same way about windows, which kill hundreds of millions of birds each year. [0]

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/stop-...

But I'm using Linux!

But seriously my guess would be that most people do feel differently about this. The window issue is passive, while those machines actively kill the birds. Makes it seem much more evil.

And windows actively add a significant quality-of-life value for humans worldwide, while one type of olive harvesting machine is less obviously beneficial.

That's rare to hear, on HN.

> The biggest share of the collision deaths comes not from glass massacres at skyscrapers but from occasional collisions with the nation’s many small buildings

We don't really have an alternative for windows on small building, unless you want to go back to living in caves.

We do for olive picking.

We do have actually, there is no need for our windows to be made our of transparent materials.

So what should they be made of?

I do not want to live in a cave, I want sunlight. I also want to be protected from cold, wind and rain.

I do not see any alternative with current technology

I'm inclined to agree with you, but how different is this from saying "I don't want to pay more for olives"?

edit: on the other hand, one of the other comments in this thread links to an article that suggests that closely spaced decals or visible screens can greatly decrease the amount of birds that fly into windows and die. we could still have natural light indoors, but we might need to make some aesthetic compromises with our buildings.

> I do not want to live in a cave

You don't have to though. I am pretty sure that most of the European population until at least the 17th century did not have glass windows, and neither did the far-eastern cultures, which used paper instead - yet at the same time they did not live in caves.

> I want sunlight. I also want to be protected from cold, wind and rain.

If the windows are fully opaque just open them when you want sunlight - having sunlight while it is cold, windy, and raining is not that common after all.

Frosted glass, screens, and ability to open windows.

Do you know what happens when a bird 'runs into' a window that was open? You have to spend the next half hour chasing it around your house with a broom. I'm speaking from experience here.

It's not so bad. I lived in a south east Asian nation for a few years with no glass windows (but large shutters). We would get a bird once week or so. Trick is to leave the window open and close off other exits.

However, with frosted glass and screens you would keep birds out.

When a dove came into my classroom in high school it started to fly in circles and perched at the projector in the ceiling.

Apparently it got confused by the artificial lightning (6500k fluorescent tubes) because once we killed the lights it went straight to the closed windows instead of the open door at the opposite side. We had to draw the curtains of every window except one for the dove to get out :(

Maintenance guy here. I work at apartment complexes and get calls around once a week during winter and spring about birds( mostly doves and hummingbirds) that are bashing themselves repeatedly on residents upper story windows. It's sad because the birds just need to turn around and fly lower to escape but they seem unable to do that. They are transfixed on the window itself. The only solution I've been able to come up with is to open the window from inside( not always possible) or just allow nature to take it's course. I'd like to help these creatures but climbing a ladder three stories up is not acceptable to me. I hesitate to say that it's nature's way of culling out the dumb ones. We make our own olives here in southern California. It's very easy although picking them is labor intensive. It's very satisfying to make delicious food from things growing on trees and doesn't take a long time or a lot of space

> We don't really have an alternative for windows on small building, unless you want to go back to living in caves.

That's not true at all. Glass windows didn't become commonplace until after the middle ages. Surely there would be something you could do to windows that makes birds not fly into them:

https://www.audubon.org/news/help-birds-avoid-deadly-collisi...

You're not arguing on principle, you're just saying that killing birds for cheaper olives is less acceptable than killing birds for "clean" glass windows.

I was fascinated when I learned that many universities have discussion groups within their Biology/Natural Sciences/Ornithology departments dedicated to identifying and cataloging dead birds, and most of their urban finds died from colliding with windows.

Also don't forget about wind turbines. Those result in some magnitude of thousands of bird kills (why is this such a contested figure‽) but are still necessary if we don't want to start rationing out electricity.

Edit: Wrong reply chain

It’s a contested figure because groups against renewable energy exaggerate the figures to try to push a hypocrisy angle on environmentalists.

The figure is disputed because it depends upon the kind of wind turbines. Old wind turbines were much smaller, they had more blades, and they turned much faster. My understanding is that this led to many more bird deaths.

>I'm curious whether you feel the same way about windows, which kill hundreds of millions of birds each year.

I do feel the same way, which is why I take steps to remediate it on all of my windows duh. I put up screens on many windows year round (higher light pass through meshes like UltraVue make this much less of an impact on views vs older ones, and the tech could improve farther), ultraviolet decals/solutions (also lower view impact, they look milky clear to humans but strongly reflect UV which most birds can see, though since they're chemical they must be refreshed), golden spiderweb decals on some higher windows, etc. On new buildings thought can be put into materials, how the windows face vs light and surrounding environments, and so on as well. There are plenty of remediation steps available even for existing structures though and yes those steps should be taken.

You casting this as some zero-sum game is confusing regardless, because even if no steps were possible for windows rather then many, why the heck would you suggest that meant we shouldn't encourage what action could be taken?

You seem obvious to the real world

Actually in the real world there are plenty of people who will learn about this and change how they buy olives.

Are you a vegetarian?

Humans kill 50 billion chickens a year. Does your sympathy extend far enough to eat a purely plant-based diet?

So, the main problem is that they are harvesting at night, when the birds are going to be super docile. Birds really don't like to move during their resting period. (I can confirm, at least for chickens. Even super skittish chickens will let you grab/handle them at night, with little more than some clucks of protest.)

Other than not running the harvesters at night, I'm not sure what they could do about it. Even if they light up the whole grove as bright as day, I'd expect circadian rhythms to kick in eventually, though it might be enough to harvest first.

So are we eating olives mixed with dead birds remains? It has to be impossible to clean up completely, no?

Considering the birds seem to come out more or less whole (alas none too healthy), it's probably trivial to sieve the olives from the much larger bird corpses.

As a Mediterranean with olives of my own, no.

Olives are sieved and separated.

Well, dying animals usually release their contents pretty quickly. I'm still a bit worried.

Fruits and vegetables grow out in the open. A significant portion of the produce people consume is statistically guaranteed to have been anointed (so to speak) by passing birds and other wildlife already.

They sieve, blow and wash any foreign bodies out.

Be curious to know how they wash it.

Because having olives lying next to dead birds sure sounds like a disease risk.

Olives have to be cured in e.g. lye to become edible. Wouldn’t that kill off pathogens?

Not to mention the salt

Curing olives implies to wash the raw fruit in saltwater and spices and discard the water after some hours or days. The procedure is redone as times as necessary to ged rid of the sour flavour. You can not eat it raw and green, they taste horrible.

If this were a real concern as you're hypothesizing, then we'd already have the data of olive oil making tons of people sick. Even relatively tiny outbreaks of food borne illness from spinach make the news, so where are all the people getting salmonella from olive oil? When the observed data doesn't fit your theory, then you need to reevaluate your theory no matter how much common sense it seems to make.

If the figures of the article are accurate, there is something in the neighborhood of one dead bird per ton of olive oil from Portugal. That's enough that if it were poisoning the oil, people would be dropping dead in droves. Consuming olive oil would be like playing Russian roulette.. but it's not.

I guess the time between them killed and olives sorted and cleaned is minutes to hours, not enough for birds to rot

I don't know about birds, but dead mammals pee/poo themselves very quickly. I just assume it's similar.

I guess plenty of bird poo is already with the harvest. If birds sit on trees, a lot of poo is bound to get stuck on branches

Birds shit on the olives when they're still alive too. Olives grow outside. Outside is not a sterile environment.

When I was working at a green bean processing plant years ago, my first job was picking non-bean objects out by hand. Usually the non-bean objects were sticks, but many times a day it was a dead snake or frog. That's just the nature of those harvesters. The beans get rinsed and nobody worries about it.

We eat olives mixed with dead fish remains and nobody bats an eye...

Tell that to my coworkers. They think I'm nuts for eating sardines for lunch.

Can the process be slowed down, so that the birds are first woken up and given time to escape before the vacuuming starts?

I think something like this would work, or maybe trees should be "pre-shaken"/"pre-illuminated" to allow the birds to fly off

Or have refregirated harvesters to operate during daytime.

I think the best choice would be to do something at sunset the day before. So birds go somewhere else.

Would not it be the case to implement a way to scare birds with ultrasonic tools? Attach them to harvesters. There are ultrasonic tools that scare away dogs, there must be one for birds.

I'm not sure how adding more noise would help if "The loud noise and dazzling illumination of the lights is thought to disorientate the birds" according to the article.

I’m from this area of Portugal and one day I realized there were way fewer sparrows than I remembered. I wonder if this is the cause

I have to say, I'm kinda surprised our farmers can afford such machinery. I thought we mostly used gas-powered or electric tree shakers ("varejadores").

Greece is where olive was born. Today, Greeks harvest olives during the day and by hand. This is the natural way. Vaccuming olives at night for a slightly different taste in olive oil and killing so many birds which are members of our community does not make commonsense. I am Portuguese and if this tragedy does not stop by October 2019 rest assured that I will buy Greek only olive oil for a long time.

Had to read about this from another source, the cookies popup can't be dismissed and even when deleted from the DOM, the story is still unreadable.

On Firefox, open

  about:reader?url=https://www.birdguides.com/news/millions-of-birds-vacuumed-to-death-annually-in-mediterranean/

It won't show the comments, but at least you can read it.

Does this make olives non-vegan since it’s now known that harvesting them kills animals?

That principle extends readily to virtualy all plant-based foods.

If so, then nothing but greenhouse grown plants are vegan. Millions of rodents and rabbits are killed each year (not really an exaggeration, they reproduce prolifically) using a variety of methods to prevent them from damaging crops.

One amusing example is removal of burrowing animals with FAEs; propane and oxygen is injected into a burrow and detonated. (Google for "rodent blaster" if you're curious.) It does have the advantage of being an entirely organic method of agricultural pest control.

Wonder if this will come back to bite them. Birds can be a form of free pest management.

What kind of species are affected?

The photo in the article shows three Song Thrushes (Turdus philomelos) (the larger ones); the smaller one in the middle of the picture is most likely a Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita). The small bird, the in background, next to one of the Song Thrushes appears to be a Serin (Serinus serinus). All are typical of Olive groves in winter.

The first two species are migrants from northern Europe. These successfully survived the Autumn migration so this has a more severe impact on their populations in general.

Are these in any way endangered?

If you eat our food, if you compete with our food, or if you live close to our food: we will kill you.

Or if you simply exist, we'll also kill you in our factory farms.

Consider that a cow or other animal raised for slaughter would not have otherwise existed. Is it better to never have existed, or to live and be harvested? As for the factory part, I live in cattle country in Montana. I see acres of open spaces, and cows frolicking and enjoying themselves. They don't have to be packed shoulder to shoulder in crates their whole life.

I think the terror of understanding that your companions are disappearing day by day and any day now your number will be up combined with the final moments until execution probably exceed the fun of running about in fields. We may have no way to know. But then we have no right to assume this isn’t the case.

Consider this exact situation, as you described it (edit: minor change, sub execution for some other death), plays out for aging humans. Dying is usually not pleasant and it happens to us all.

Yes, and many people don't get the quick death of a captive-bolt pistol to the forehead. Many people die in a hospital after years of suffering from gradual organ failure, dementia, cancer, or other terminal diseases.

Besides that, I don't think we know if cattle are aware that when their herdmates disappear that they are dying. Herd animals in the wild such as zebras and wildebeest witness their herdmates being killed by predatory cats on a daily basis, something I think would be far more traumatizing than just having them disappear on a truck. Maybe I'm wrong, though.

But the point here is that these creature are executed and that too either young or in the prime of their lives.

You dodged the question. Is it better to live a life in terror than not having lived at all?

If these animals lived in the wild in such numbers, they would eventually overbreed and starve, unless there was a predator animal that kept their numbers in check.

Ok, in my opinion it would be better for them not to have existed at all.

Does that not translate to all life? Humans included? No kids for you? Honestly asking. Not being snide. Lots of people feel this way.

I haven’t considered the case for humans, but probably yes. All life might include simple organisms that don’t have the capacity to suffer, and in their case it obviously won’t matter. Yes, no kids for me.

That isn’t a good question. You are asking if a creature who doesn’t exist is less happy than a creature who exists to suffer.

The creature who doesn’t exist has no sentience and shouldn’t be considered as a perspective in the decision.

On top of that, the choice isn’t to breed these creatures in captivity by the millions or have them living in the wild by the millions. The choice is to breed millions of animals who will live a life of suffering, or do nothing, and no one exists to suffer. We aren’t going to see a huge wild farm animal population come into existence if we stop breeding them - nature could never support their population.

> You are asking if a creature who doesn’t exist is less happy than a creature who exists to suffer.

No, you are changing the question. I'm not asking "a creature that doesn't exist", I am asking you which is better: To never have lived, or to have lived in terror. I'm also not talking about happiness. Life isn't about happiness and life in nature isn't "happy" either.

Perhaps you can answer a different question: Would you rather die (i.e. not exist) than live such a "life of terror"? If you knew you were slaughtered at age thirty, would you kill yourself at any earlier age?

> We aren’t going to see a huge wild farm animal population come into existence if we stop breeding them - nature could never support their population.

Even so, nature's answer for population control is starvation and predation. Natural life is a constant struggle for survival. Life on a farm is not such a struggle.

You forgot a biggie.. if you are tasty!

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