A Bird in the Hand is Worth Several in the Phragmites

It began with a glance at the true cost of Christmas index, a tongue-in-cheek look at the cost of buying all of the items/animals/performers in the 12 Days of Christmas song (it turns out to be $78,608.02 this year).

The one expensive verse that really caught my eye however was the estimated cost of $4,200 for "Seven Swans-a-Swimming." That's $600 per swan. Apparently the avian flu is driving up the price of large birds.

As most Bay-area residents know by now, thanks to five captive mute swans which escaped in 1962, we've got around 4,000 invasive, hungry, large, but admittedly beautiful birds roaming the Bay, munching crucial sub-aquatic vegetation (SAV) and rousting the native bird populations.

Could DNR be convinced to capture, neuter/spay, and sell these birds for a total of $2.4 million? Seems like a solution that the animal rights folks might prefer to the alternative, one that could raise a bit of revenue for the state, and one that could perhaps halt that ever-menacing avian inflation index.

Once that's done, they can start on the geese-a-laying.