Grey

Geese exterminator Arie den Hertog is doing his part to help Amsterdam avoid facing its own "Miracle on the Hudson.'' Thousands of three-kilogram geese make the waterways around Amsterdam's busy Schiphol Airport their home, a fraction of the 500,000 to 600,000 in the Netherlands that have boomed in numbers with no natural predators. To reduce the risk of bird-airplane collisions, like the one that forced Capt. Sully Sullenberger to land his Airbus A320 in the middle of the Hudson river, goose catcher Arie den Hertog and his workers patrol the wetlands around the airport. He stalks the large flocks of geese and then corrals them in to waiting fences. Den Hertog targets the geese during their molting period when the geese lack the feathers to take flight and escape. That way, he can nab 10,000 geese in a single year. The easiest way to kill them is by gas in an improvised vehicle he himself built. That has prompted bird lovers to bombard Den Hertog with e-mails calling him a Nazi and equating the birds' deaths with the fate of millions of Jews in World War Two. The geese are killed because they threaten the safety of air traffic and to prevent agricultural damage, says Den Hertog. And his work has really only just begun. The Dutch government wants the population cut from above 500,000 to 100,000.