An East Hampton Town trustee on Monday angrily defended his actions with respect to the disposal of hundreds of geese killed by highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu, dismissing “social media comments” by “nobody that’s actually there” and singling out a former trustee who no longer lives in the town.
The trustees’ meeting began with public comment. Cynthia Daniels told the board that “infected bird carcasses have been buried directly in beach sand within areas that are actively used by the public. The method is not bio-secure and creates an ongoing risk.” Recently, she added, “a den of foxes got into one of the burial sites, and the den has been infected and their cubs.”
A Marine Patrol officer had alerted the trustees and the town to dead geese around Georgica Pond on Feb. 27, and Jim Grimes collected around 200 of them, he said on Monday. The trustees have jurisdiction over most beaches and waterways outside of Montauk, and the town board had communicated that the removal of the bird carcasses was a trustee matter, Mr. Grimes said. The trustees called the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and an officer sent a link of the recommended protocols. These included incineration, he said, “but the first thing that was mentioned is burial in place” with a minimum of three feet of cover.
There were 10,000 cubic yards of dredged sand “in a pile right there,” he said, and he asked the contractor performing the dredging work if four feet of sand could be placed atop “the two feet of material that was already there.”
“I didn’t want to let this sit,” he said. “My career started in high school dealing with an equine encephalitis outbreak. I do have some understanding of situations like this. And the first policy usually is sanitation: Collect the birds, dispose of the birds as quickly and efficiently as you can.”
With rising temperatures forecast, East Hampton Village officials agreed to allow burial of hundreds more dead geese at its Department of Public Works property on Accabonac Road. “We were there, we were responsive, we dealt with it immediately,” Mr. Grimes said. “I’m actually happy with how I handled the problem.”
Turning to social media, he returned to Ms. Daniels’s comment about the foxes. “I would like to see the hole, I’d like to see the exposed birds, and I would like to meet the fox,” he said. “It would be considered atypical for, in April, a fox to be digging up carrion when you’ve got an ample supply of songbirds, rabbits, other quarry for the fox to feed upon.” The report about foxes was hearsay, Ms. Daniels acknowledged.
Dell Cullum, a former trustee and a wildlife rescue and removal specialist, has been highly critical of the trustees’ actions with respect to the dead birds. Last week, he wrote on social media that a friend who lives near the north side of Georgica Pond had told him that foxes had dug up bird carcasses twice, and that two decomposing birds were exposed. An April 8 story in The New York Times quoted Mr. Cullum predicting that “foxes are going to be digging in the soil,” and assertions made on social media about foxes exhuming and consuming the dead birds were raised at the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee meeting on Saturday.
“I didn’t have Dell Cullum,” Mr. Grimes said on Monday. “I didn’t have anybody there advising me other than the D.E.C. I took the best advice that I could get and I acted on it.”
Ms. Daniels said she was not unhappy with the trustees’ prior actions, but rather, “I’m trying to establish and help establish for the public, people who are coming to me, and I as their representative, how they can feel more safe when we keep walking our dogs down the beach and they keep finding dead birds.” Her dog had walked up to a dead Canada goose at Wiborg’s Beach last week, she said.
“We haven’t chased down every ill or dead bird,” Mr. Grimes said. “The bird that you found at Wiborg’s might well have died in Georgica Pond, might well have been flushed out into the ocean, and may very well have washed up.” He had collected multiple bird species, he said. “In my discussions with D.E.C. . . . these other birds in all likelihood probably didn’t die of the avian flu, because this coincided with two foot of snow cover, a completely iced-over pond, and there are natural casualties in circumstances like we had.”
People are afraid for their pets, Ms. Daniels repeated, “and they’re afraid to walk on the beaches.”
“Well, none of those birds that we interred, I can be quite confident, have been dug up,” Mr. Grimes said, and were the specific locations of the buried birds disclosed, “some knucklehead would be down there trying to prove a point, a little like the comments about the fox digging up the dead geese.” The trustees visit the Georgica site regularly, he said, recounting his own recent walk at the south end of Georgica Pond and to the first jetty at Georgica Beach, during which he collected 10 more dead birds.
“Shouldn’t you have more people helping you?” Ms. Daniels asked. The question seemed to anger Mr. Grimes. “That’s an easy thing to say,” he replied. “What the hell are you doing at 5:30? I’ll give you a ring.” Ms. Daniels said she was volunteering to do just that, but Mr. Grimes said it was “my duty as an elected official to follow up, no matter how bizarre some of those comments are, because we heard the hearsay comment about the fox that was digging up the dead geese, and you know what? As dumb as that sounded, well, god damn it, if this turned out to be true, I would be flabbergasted. I would also want to know that it happened.”
“You don’t need to explain anymore,” Ms. Daniels said.
“Railing on the internet,” Mr. Grimes continued, “railing on social media without ever once interacting. . . .”
“That’s not what I’m here for,” Ms. Daniels protested.
“But I’m going to target you, Mrs. Daniels,” he said. “I’m going to speak to the fact that you seem to be the representative of that.”
This time, it was Ms. Daniels who was angered. “Wait, wait,” she said. “You’re going to target me?” She pressed him on the remark, asking where exactly the target was. “Because I came here in peace, and I don’t want to hear the word ‘target.’ I don’t want to hear the word ‘target.’ “
It was a poor choice of words, Mr. Grimes conceded.
