I find it hard to believe that Mr. Hamilton made it through NIU, considering his lack of reasoning skills. I don’t know if Mr. Hamilton has ever made it out of DeKalb to see wild ducks—he is an alumnus yet he remains here to provide us with this keen, erroneous insight.

Wild waterfowl and ecology—corrected:

1. Ducks fly. As Mr. Hamilton states, they fly “to look for food, water, and other ducks.” If you think about it, all of those are available here, in abundance. Why fly?

2. In some cases ducks like to be around people. This is not due to their social instincts, but rather their equating of humans with food. An elementary course in psychology would tell you that animals do change behavior in response to food rewards.

Just go out into the real “wild” and swing a bag of bread around, John. The ducks will not swarm you, but rather fly away faster than you can say “Pavlov’s dogs” (ring a bell?—no pun intended).

3. A goose is not a duck. True. Too bad Mr. Hamilton had to go on to assure us that most biology students do not know this difference. Gosh, Mr. Hamilton, we had better scrap any proposal of studying the lagoon and study this universal feeblemindedness of biology students.

4. Many of the ducks and geese (Duhhh, I think!? … I am a biology student) seen at the lagoon are either permanent residents, or stay much longer than nature would have them. I don’t need a study to confirm this, I see them everyday. Feeding them snuffs out their natural instinct to fly south, where food and water are abundant naturally.

5. When you hear pounding hoofs, you look for horses, not zebras or unicorns (in your case). There is an obvious problem with waterfowl overcrowding at the lagoon.

The chance of hazardous material causing these problems is slim, at best. Let’s call in the EPA. If they can get near the water without being honked and hissed at, or bitten, they can test it.

Feeding ducks is fun for people. At what expense to nature do we derive this pleasure? Mr. Hamilton, you spoke of “what little is left of nature”. By feeding the ducks so much, aren’t we changing what would normally take place in nature?

The problem of shrinking wildlife areas should not be solved by creating little manmade nature areas that are so out of synch with nature itself. In the wild, different species do not go around freely giving each other abundances of food.

Michael Gorski

Graduate student

Biology