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| A macaque tearing down a nest. (Internet photo) |
To cope
with bird hazards, a major threat to flight safety at airports, China's air
force has made significant headway with the extraordinary assistance of
monkeys, reports our sister newspaper Want Daily.
At a
military airbase in northern China, which runs smack into the flying route of
several migrant birds, hundreds of nests can crop up overnight on a single tree
in the areas bordering the base. The ground crew is forced to form bird-hunting
squads to clear the nests and disperse the birds, but removal of the nests has
proved to be a very tricky task. One nest could take a costly 10 bullets to
remove, and sending a soldier up to take it down is dangerous.
Two months
ago, one soldier came up with the idea of having monkeys remove the nests,
remembering how good the monkeys back in his hometown in southern China were at
removing bird nests atop trees. Now the sergeant on duty at the airbase rides
an electric motorbike carrying a pair of trained monkeys to spots under trees,
blows the whistle and sits back as the monkeys scramble quickly to the top and
remove the nests. One monkey can typically clear six to eight nests a day,
greatly reducing the number of birds which would otherwise be sucked into jet
fighter engines.
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