A man who shoots at birds to keep them off a toxic pit [video] | Hacker News Reader

A man who shoots at birds to keep them off a toxic pit [video]

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It's hard to read in this format, but I recommend Kate Beaton's comic, "Ducks". https://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/81993262830/here-is-a-sketc...

Depressing but interesting. Thanks for sharing.

I have many friends from BC/Alberta that spent a year or two in the oil sands and made a boatload of money, I feel like this gives a good glimpse into it.

The interesting thing that this video does not show you, is that they are likely killing some of the animals on purpose.

A USDA Wildlife Management employee once gave a presentation on various pest animal control techniques to my class of wildlife science students. He spent some time controlling birds at airports.

Birds learn that noises do not kill them. Eventually they ignore the noises. To fix this, every once and a while he had to make a kill with the stimulus. Some of the techniques in the video may not require occasional kills. I would love access to their logs. It would be interesting to see if indeed they are making occasional kills and how long it took to find the optimal interval.

I saw this video yesterday and one thing I wondered was, why isn't the company legally, and thus financially and criminally, held responsible for this disaster? If I as an individual dump a bunch of toxic waste, especially something that kills thousands of animals, then I would be held responsible in a vice grip-like manner. I never understand why if something is done by a company, or individual with large wealth, but at massive scale, they can simply get away with it.

>I never understand why if something is done by a company, or individual with large wealth, but at massive scale, they can simply get away with it.

because limited liability. The solution, obviously is to recognize that they have limited liability and not extend them "credit". In this case the "credit" is letting them do environmental damage on the expectation that they'll "pay back" remediation costs. Force them to pay a deposit upfront prior to a mining permit being granted.

see also: "It Pays to Not Pay Your Debts" https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-14/it-pay...

That seems to just partly explain the mechanism by which these companies get away with things.

Because the company in the video -- Atlantic Richfield Company, aka ARCO -- acquired the pit in 1977 only to shut it down in 1982 after discovering what a white elephant it was. The company that actually dug the thousands of miles of tunnels and later the pit was Anaconda Copper (one of the most rapacious, amoral corporations to ever exist) which went belly up in 1983. Anaconda Copper made fortunes for the usual suspects like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds throughout the 20th century. Good luck clawing any restoration money back from them after its been laundered through generations.

If you ever find yourself driving though Butte I highly recommend a stop to see the Berkely pit, the access towers, the enviromental devestation and the excellent mining museum. Its facinating.

Anaconda Copper: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaconda_Copper

Then we hold the people who profited off of Anaconda responsible for it rather than shrugging and going 'oh well, the laws they wrote say we just have to let them keep doing it.'

Easy fix to get it done, the rockefellers and rothschilds are visiting the bottom of the pit naked in 2025. Their choice as to whether it is still full of poison.

They literally own/control the state violence apparatus.

Who said they simply get away with it?

BP is responsible for cleaning up the site, at an estimated cost of $150M. They're responsible because they bought ARCO, which had acquired the site from the original mining company.

They're the ones who built the water treatment plant that's shown in the Tom Scott video that someone linked to, and either they or Montana Resources (a mining company) are paying for everything shown in this video too.

What does "cleaning up" mean?

Wouldn't that mean moving the toxic stuff to some other part of the environment?

>Wouldn't that mean moving the toxic stuff to some other part of the environment?

sounds like we have a problem here

Nearly everything toxic can be made non-toxic. Sometimes it's just expensive or hard to do.

Sounds like the issues here are heavy metals and sulfuric acid. Both of those are treatable.

Presumably just paying this guy is cheaper tho.

Here the open pit mine creates a huge surface area for the oxidation of metals and then the combination of rainfall and metals. In a working mine, this is the function of a closed loop leaching field.

The Britannia copper and zince mine in British Columbia Canada, between Vancouver and Whistler, hosts of the 2010 Olympics, was ignored as a source of heavy metals into the ocean.

A waste treatment plant, water capture and treatment, and deeper discharge into the ocean led to improved water quality and copper extraction.

https://mineclosure.gtk.fi/britannia-mine-british-columbia-c...

Someday we will process our landfill for their precious metals. Before that we should use insitu remediation to extract currently "unprofitable to extract" metals from closed mines.

Treating the water and returning it to the environment as clean water. It’s simple chemistry to remove the metals. The process isn’t unknown, it’s just expensive.

Tom Scott made a great video on this: https://youtu.be/n-Ej2EtE744

It's frustrating that the description of the video and the first few seconds of the video both establish a narrative of "acid cooking birds from the inside out" if they spend a few hours in the water, which makes absolutley zero sense.

At no point in the entire video is that claim revisisted or explained.

Migrating birds stopping to rest in water tend to drink the water. Once inside the body, if the water is too acidic, it begins breaking down cell walls and denaturing proteins. These actions are analogous to cooking.

Except that the photos of injury they showed were damage to the duck's feet - i.e. not part of the digestive tract, and very much part of the body that's submerged in water the entire time the bird floats on a lake.

Good catch, so they are probably ‘cooked’ from both ends topologically.

They don’t extract those birds at the moment of death, it’s likely most of that damage occurred after death.

So sure, every part of bird exposed to the acid is causing harm, it’s just death is caused from the inside rather than damage to the birds skin. Further it’s likely their exposure is mostly from drinking thus inside out.

If you put acid in a gut you have just more acid. Why we don't "cook from inside" each day then?

This birds live and nest in the tundra; not a place short of acid soils and acid water. Again, why they don't dissolve resting all day in permafrost mud?

So maybe they should consider a different explanation? Lack of food in tired migrant birds?, because nothing grows in that waters... plus poisons in water. Lead maybe?. Keep shooting.

Birds remaining too much time in the water could be solved providing a few artificial islands in the center. Even building a second pond with healthy water a few thousand meters away would be more simple and even cheaper that shooting at birds all the time for years (after all they have a lot of digging machines available yet). Smaller pool with food or big pool without any food? Does not seem like a difficult choice. Give them protection and food and will say goodbye in a heartbeat.

More simple but less funny, of course. Apart of that, the number of man-hours spent on this looks like a total waste.

And putting chalk in the water would fix it and should be doable, because you just need to reach safe tundra levels, that are very acidic yet. Chalk is relatively cheap. Why is that "too expensive" for the company?. Better kill the animals instead to do something really useful?.

> If you put acid in a gut you have just more acid. Why we don't "cook from inside" each day then?

If you reflux a lot, it'll scar your mouth and esophagus. That the stomach is built to handle acid doesn't mean the tubes leading to it necessarily are.

Good point. A problem that is mitigated if you are herbivorous, and chomp all day a lot of grass and other things that contain calcium, like goose do. Aquatic birds can deal or at least understand the concept of extreme conditions in water. You will not see a flamingo dissolving, and they live in extreme alkaline waters. They know were is time to go.

In any case there are several solutions that would put an end to the problem or alleviate a lot it at least. Is a question of money, but also of will.

If there are a lot of birds dying in your pool, maybe you should admit that the water is not only acidic but also poisonous and that they are desperate for the lack of suitable habitats. Solution, just build a second damned pool close and keep it clean and full of shrubs, reeds and plants. As long as birds can choose to stand or fly and feel safe, they would favor the correct pond.

Or even better, fix your water in the main pond.

> If there are a lot of birds dying in your pool, maybe you should admit that the water is not only acidic but also poisonous...

It's an abandoned copper mine. I suspect they're aware. It's a Superfund site.

Lol before making your rant, you should know they don't shoot the animals, the shoot near them to scare them away.

The effects of lead pellets in marshes as bird mass poisoner is a well known problem in ecology. They are worsening the problem.

It's not a marsh, it's a deep pit left over from mining

I think you might need to just remember that what you've watched is a little 10 minute simplified video for public consumption. We didn't see any of the planning that went into this, we just saw a bit of footage of some drones, some other equipment and a rifle. So as complete outsiders it is a bit naive of any of us to assume they're making basic mistakes (like - they haven't considered alternative methods, whether their solutions are making it worse, whether they're even using lead pellets ...) and we know a better course of action.

The area is so toxic, a few lead rounds is the least if concern.

Lead shot has been federally banned for almost three decades.

I live near this site (well, 120 miles away, which in Montana is "near"). They scare the birds away because in the past a ton of birds have died after landing on the water. I don't know the mechanism but it's a real thing.

right near the beginning they explained how ground water fills the quarry with sulfuric acid

The acidity isn’t the problem, it’s the metals. The acidity is about the same as a Coke.

I would think that some enterprising university could get the funds to set up an automated system with AI to recognize and shoot near the birds at a distance. Some decent learning in optics and AI to be had there. Sure that guy would lose his job, but it seems pointless to dedicate one man to do this all day.

I'm wondering why they don't fire up the original pump system that drained the pit back in the mining days?

I wondered the same thing. I imagine it's because it used to pump the water out before it became toxic from absorbing the metals.

That was my first thought too. They are spending so much money on gear and employing someone full time - wouldn't it be cheaper to just drain it? There must be a reason they aren't doing it.

Also, he can't be there 24 hours - what happens if a bird lands on the water at night?

I assume the reason is that draining it just moves the toxins elsewhere. No one else wants to drink this stuff or have it in their surface water either.

Might also be an issue of rainwater collection, and then the enormous cost of filling the pit.

They are pumping water out, treating it and returning the water at a higher pH (more alkaline). But oxidized metal minerals plus rain water results in acid.

More likely the water was pumped out when the mine was operating because digging, blasting, and other mining activities are easier when the equipment and people can breathe the atmosphere.

I don't know when the pumps were turned off but it would have been after the mine ceased operations, possibly after the owners threatened to walk away completely. Because they could do that in the USA, and many other parts of the world.

In the Tom Scott video linked upthread, they cover this. The pit is being used as a hydraulic control device-collecting all the badness from a ridiculously vast (~10,000 miles) network of tunnels into one huge dilute volume. Then, they pipe it out to a water treatment plant and then back to the pit. They’ve been able to raise the pH from mid-2 to mid-4 this way.

The filtration and pumps in Butte are suprisingly world class.

I spent the last week in Butte for Thanksgiving. We made our way up to an overlook of the pit on Friday. We got to hear the wailers mentioned; there were no other actions but the dump trucks running material from the still open parts of the mine.

It's odd visiting the thing that's messed up so much of what I call home in Montana. I grew up in Missoula, downstream of Butte. That city also had a nearby superfund site, Milltown Dam, that had captured mining tailings washed downstream from Butte and the other town I visited Anaconda.

Of course to escape Missoula once they removed the dam I moved to East Helena, home of the East Helena Slag Pile a remnant of when the ASARCO lead smelter spewed smoke all over the town.

So are they going to have this person or persons man the pit indefinitely? I see they have some automated measures like the propane cannon but at some point shouldn’t they just put a net on top of the whole pit to keep birds off it?

Or float those plastic balls [1] on it, like they do for some reservoirs to stop evaporation. It'd take a lot of them, but that'd work and could be both cheaper and more permanent.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxPdPpi5W4o

I was wondering the same thing about a net, and those plastic balls are interesting. The manual solution(s) just don't seem that efficient.

I also wondered about the net. Never considered the ball idea, that's very interesting. One thing the video doesn't cover is potential other solutions there are for protecting birds. Maybe they have just been doing it for such a long time that nobody thinks about alternative solutions, combined with the fact that they have already spent money into the bird hut and other equipment and further investments in alternatives would just not have a higher net present value.

not indefinitely, just until people stop paying attention

This case in Butte is somewhat better than usual because BP is actually footing the remediation bill.

More typical is having the taxpayers foot the bill, like with the fascinating example of Giant Mine, 5km outside of Yellowknife, the capital of Canada's Northwest Territories. Some 200 kilotonnes of arsenic trioxide were created as byproducts of the mining process, enough arsenic dust to kill off every human and animal on earth. Once the company (and the company that bought the company) that mined the gold went belly up, the government is stuck footing the bill for remediation.

The remediation plan is to indefinitely freeze, using compressors like used for hockey rinks, the arsenic underground. An eternal, ongoing operation, costing >$1bn, costing more in present-day dollars than gold was even extracted from the mine, in order to avoid the arsenic seeping into the groundwater.

Kind of hilarious the implicit bet on a stable society that this remediation plan entails.

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

Wow I didn’t realize it costs more to clean up than the actual value of the mine’s production. That definitely seems broken in some way. It doesn’t seem practical to predict future costs and price them in though, so I’m not sure what a better solution looks like.

Arsenic trioxide needs a bottle deposit.

That's so backwards it's just depressing.

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