Eagles

My husband took these pictures at the landfill for me. We always have lots of eagles at the landfill - for those of you who have a distorted and regal view of eagles, please don't read any further. I'm going to ruin your fantasy.

Eagles, like many other carnivores, are scavengers. Just like buzzards, ravens and seagulls. It is not uncommon to see as many as 20 to 30 out there, munching away on garbage. We have a bird deprivation program and have contracted with the US Dept of Agriculture to "scare" the birds away from the landfill. We can shoot seagulls, but ravens and eagles are protected species, so we use cracker shells and paintball guns to scare them away. The funny thing is that all of our birds are regulars and they recognize the USDA truck. When one of them come on site, the birds fly away. As soon as the truck leaves they are back. They have to switch vehicles occasionally to keep the birds on their toes.

Why do we not want birds at the landfill you ask. Or maybe you didn't, but am assuming someone may be curious about that. Eating garbage and carrying it off can spread disease. We are also near an airport and part of our permit agreement is to keep the birds to a certain limit. Flocks of birds are a bad thing to have near an airport. They can get sucked into the engines and cause plane crashes. So it's all very serious business to keep birds at bay.

Update on the autoshop. The shop I took my car to today finished it by 1:00 pm and only charged me $380!!!! Compare that to $825 at the first place. I paid $200 to the other shop and got absolutely ZIP. I'm still planning to write a letter of complaint and request a partial refund. I think $100 is fair.