Illinois spending $1166 each to put chickens on airplanes

[Adam]

Illinois spending $1,166 per bird to bring in prairie chickens

[size=3]SPRINGFIELD – Our cash-strapped state government has found a new use for its fleet of aircraft – flying birds into Illinois.

I kid you not.

State aircraft are flying to Kansas and transporting prairie chickens back to the Land of Lincoln. And at a time state lawmakers are looking at raising the state income tax, Illinois state employees have been hiking across Kansas trapping these chickens.

Talk about fowl fiscal deeds.

State pilots have flown between Illinois and Kansas not once, not twice but 14 times this year taking prairie chickens to downstate Jasper and Marion counties.

“Illinois is the Prairie State and prairie chickens are an endangered species here, so we thought it would be a good idea to bring them back,” said Scott Simpson, site manager for Prairie Ridge State Natural Area in Newton, Ill.

The feds are chipping in $337,000 toward the program and the state will pay $117,000. Some of the cost to state government may be offset by private fundraising done by the Audubon Society, Simpson said.

That puts the total cost of the program at $455,000 for the next three years.

That's just idiotic on a mammoth scale. I wouldn't really care, beyond mild bemusement, if it was just state money being used for this, but it's mostly being funded with federal money.

According to this, there is a concentration of prairie chickens in the Topeka area. If the state were to rent a full-sized car for a week, sent one of their trappers to Topeka, had him trap the bird, and then drive it back to the Prairie Ridge Natural Area, and then drove the car back to Springfield and dropped it off, it would cost less than half what it does right now to bring in one bird. And I think it's safe to say that in a typical Taurus, one guy could probably get at least three birds in the car. And if they did something really wild and crazy like rent a cargo van, then Katie bar the door! Why, they could probably bring back twenty chickens or more at a time that way. Amazing!


Good grief.

[phillygirl]

That's just idiotic on a mammoth scale. I wouldn't really care, beyond mild bemusement, if it was just state money being used for this, but it's mostly being funded with federal money.

According to this, there is a concentration of prairie chickens in the Topeka area. If the state were to rent a full-sized car for a week, sent one of their trappers to Topeka, had him trap the bird, and then drive it back to the Prairie Ridge Natural Area, and then drove the car back to Springfield and dropped it off, it would cost less than half what it does right now to bring in one bird. And I think it's safe to say that in a typical Taurus, one guy could probably get at least three birds in the car. And if they did something really wild and crazy like rent a cargo van, then Katie bar the door! Why, they could probably bring back twenty chickens or more at a time that way. Amazing!


Good grief.

I think that's the third time in a week you've used that phrase...and yet I'd never heard it before. What's up with that??

[Gingersnap]

I think that's the third time in a week you've used that phrase...and yet I'd never heard it before. What's up with that??

You've never heard it? It's common out here (maybe not as common as "Yo, Dude"). It describes a state of unusual excitement. Today, it's usually used facetiously as in, "To hell with it, I'm buying two packages of underwear - Katie bar the door!".

[Adam]

I think that's the third time in a week you've used that phrase...and yet I'd never heard it before. What's up with that??

I think I've used it twice this week and Michele has used it once.

Etymology.

I've always heard it as something more common to the South, particularly the "frontier South," and the Southwest, as "barring," or barricading, against an Indian (feathers, not dots) invasion.

[RobJohnson]

First I have heard of the term also. Who is Katy?