Nellis killing 50 ducks for safety

Rachael Levy

Thursday, April 17, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

Nellis Air Force Base is destroying about 50 wild ducks roosting near its runway because they pose a safety hazard to aircraft participating in next weekend's Air Force 50th anniversary air show, a base official said.

Recent efforts to move the birds were unsuccessful and noisemakers did not spook them from their locations on the base, the Nellis spokesman said.

So late last week officials shot and killed about 25 koots, a small, black fowl with a white beak. They were living on the base golf course.

This week officials plan to destroy an additional 25 koots and mallards located in a wetland area.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued two permits to Nellis for the destruction of the waterfowl.

"It's a pilot's worst nightmare. Hitting a bird can be deadly. It kills people," Nellis Tech. Sgt. Richard Covington said Wednesday. "By destroying a few of them, the rest of them may be scared away."

Nellis last year reported about a dozen birds striking its aircraft, Covington said. No planes crashed during the collisions. In the past five years, bird strikes resulted in an estimated $250,000 in damage to Nellis property, he said.

The importance of bases' bird-hazard programs was realized after a 1993 accident at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska. Twenty-four crewmen were killed when Canada geese sucked into the two left-side engines brought down an Airborne Warning and Control System jet 43 seconds after takeoff.

The areas where the Las Vegas wild ducks are located -- the golf course at the south end of the runway and a wetland at the north -- place the birds in the direct path of planes as they take off and land.

Although Nellis officials planned to destroy the birds regardless of the April 25-26 air show, the increased air traffic creates an even greater potential hazard, Covington said.

The air show is expected to draw 103 flying aircraft, among them demonstration teams from Chile, Japan and Canada, and Nellis' own Thunderbirds.

"If a plane were to hit a bird on takeoff, it would be too late," Covington said. "(The plane) would plummet into houses."

But the killing of the ducks on the golf-course ponds has alarmed at least one local environmentalist.

"Pretty ugly," Las Vegas Sierra Club conservation Chairman Randy Harness said Wednesday. "This appears to be an ongoing problem. If birds and runways don't get along very well, then eliminate the attraction."

He suggested that Nellis follow the example of another military base, which ripped up the grass bordering its runway and replaced it with cement. The birds, Harness said, left on their own.

"I disagree with continuing to keep the feature that is attracting the birds," said Harness, who suggested that draining the ponds would be the preferable solution.