WESTCHASE, Fla. (WFLA) — Residents in one Westchase neighborhood say black vultures are ruining their properties, and they have had enough.
USDA employees executed the first step of its plan to take care of the problem by setting off fireworks Monday night to chase them away.
This is just the first step. The community is not big on the next step, but after watching Monday, they now have concerns about this first step too.
Steve Netta has lived in the neighborhood 15 years. He, like several of his neighbors watched as fireworks went up in the sky and towards the trees.
He’s concerned the agency is also targeting the wrong birds.
“I haven’t seen them shooting at the vultures, because the other birds are here now, I think I saw one or two hit a pelican,” Netta said. “I assume the noise will move them along, and that’s what we are hoping for, but from what I’ve seen tonight, with them having disregard for other fowl back there, I’m not overly confident about it.”
The USDA says if the fireworks don’t work after two weeks, it will shoot down some of the vultures and hang their bodies to deter other vultures from coming back.
Many in the community aren’t fans of that plan either.
“In a neighborhood with small children walking around, if you miss with one of those they have to stop when they hit something or someone, bullets do that,” Netta said.
The full statement from the USDA-APHIS is below:
The plan is to have one employee nonlethally disperse the black vultures (there are no turkey vultures there, they are black vultures) using pyrotechnics over the period of up to two weeks. If that doesn’t work, then we may lethally remove a few vultures to create effigies – which are often created using dead vultures and are hung up in trees to discourage roosting as vultures will not roost near dead vultures. There are no plans to kill all the vultures. Effigies are used to reinforce nonlethal harassment techniques.