Reflecting on the City's Cover Up

Hey there. It's Robin from PRX and I want to take a moment to tell you about a big year long series from this day, a history podcast here at Radio Topia. twenty twenty six is America's two hundred fiftieth birthday this is where. And folks over at this day have requested that I try and say semi quincentennial ten times fast . Anyway, it's been two hundred and fifty years since the Declaration of Independence and over at this day they are in the middle of a year long series called Fifty Weeks That Shaped America . This day is doing deep dives each week on the stories from two hundred fifty years of US history that brought us to this very complicated moment. Some of them are new perspectives on huge moments like the Civil War or Prohibition . Others are lesser discussed stories that still had a massive impact, like the Transcontinental Railroad or the so called hard hat riots of the nineteen seventies. This day is also doing a special weekly newsletter, live shows, collaborations, bonus episodes, and lots more. So as we head towards the fourth of July and beyond, this is a great time to join in. If you need a little help navigating America's big birthday, check out this day . Go to this daypod dot com or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is Hyperfixed . Each week on our show, listeners write in with their problems big and small, and I solve them, or at least I try. And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't. This week cry foul . The story you're about to hear took eleven months to report , and it really shouldn't have. To answer a question like this one, we shouldn't have had to contact experts or lawyers or government agencies , but we did . We ended up having to do all of that stuff because when we started sniffing around this question, we immediately got caught in a campaign of coordinated obfuscation . We just didn't realize it immediately. And that's probably because the question we were chasing it was about ducks . I don't know if it's always had ducks, but if somebody were to come up to me and be like, Hey, do you know the park with the ducks? I'd be like, yeah, Avondale Park. It's kind of known for that. This is John . He lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Spend most of his life there . And this park he's talking about is the epicenter of today's question Avondale Park is one of the oldest and largest public spaces in the city of Birmingham . It sits on more than thirty five acres of hilly wooded land. And in all that space, you can find a little something for everyone. Yeah, I found myself there a lot growing up. I mean, when I was a kid, I was there skating or whatever. And it's just one of those places. You wind up a lot when you're growing up in Birmingham . The park has an amphitheater , and a baseball diamond, and a natural spring that flows down the hillside and into a pond . But one of the park's most popular attractions, if not the most popular attraction , has always been the Ducks . They were just a nice thing and everybody was just like happy to see 'em. I know my niece would go to feed them and they're just a beautiful and happy thing to bring in a little kid to go feed ducks, you know ? But then one day in the summer of twenty twenty two , all the ducks disappeared . And it wasn't just the ducks. It was the geese and the goslings and all the water birds living around the pond in Avondale Park . They just vanished without explanation . And in the wake of that absence, rumors started to fly about what might have happened to them and why . The first time John heard about it was when he was hanging out with some friends. They were just like, Hey, have you heard the ducks are gone? And I'm like, Oh, and I don't know anything about ducks, so I'm like, Did they migrate? And they're like, No, the city removed them for the world games. Okay, help me out here. What are the world games? They're basically just the bargain bin Olympics. I don't know. So John isn't totally wrong. The world games are an international sporting event made up of competitions that didn't quite make it into the Olympics , think, bowling, flag football, softball , but also super niche things like skydiving and parkour . But in terms of athletes, the world games are just as legit as the Olympics. In order to qualify, you have to win some sort of championship tournament or place at the very top of your sport. So in that sense, they're a pretty big deal, and they've been hosted by some pretty major cities like London and the Hague . So when it was announced that the eleventh World Games was going to be held in Birmingham, Alabama in twenty twenty two , it was all hands on deck. For like a year before the world games started, I was seeing signs everywhere that were like, Birmingham, Alabama, home of the twenty twenty two World Games , the mayor was talking about them like this was going to put us on the map. It was going to make us so much money. You know, in the lead up, roads were closing down and event spaces were being built up , these insulting and depressing homeless shelters were built to relocate the unhoused away from event spaces. People were really pissed off about that. And in the middle of all that, I'm hearing that the ducks and the geese just disappeared overnight . Now, the reason these two things felt connected and by that I mean the world games and the missing ducks comes back to Avondale Park because one of the events, the archery competition, was set to take place there . The Birmingham subreddit has a post about it and there's people talking about how the city didn't want the duck poop or something . And once that idea hit the internet, that the city might have wanted the park cleaned up ahead of the archery event there. The rumor mill started whirling. People weren't just speculating as to why the ducks were gone. They were coming up with theories on how . And pretty quickly, one explanation rose above the rest , that the ducks had been rounded up and killed. Again, all of it just doesn't add up to me. And yet we have this friend who is positive , positive that the ducks were killed. And I don't know what to say to that . And the ducks definitely disappeared and they have not been back . So have you talked this over with anyone other than this person who believes it? Like is it basically common wisdom that the ducks were assassinated ? I mean I visited with my mom and my sister and I brought this up to them like just a couple weeks ago and they were like, yeah, we heard that. We heard that maybe they were killed like everybody has heard this. If my mom has heard this, then clearly everybody in town thinks this. That's really nice . I know it's crazy. I mean again, maybe there's a reasonable explanation for this or maybe who knows. I'm just skeptical of somebody who 's so positive that they know that it's definitely they were killed just citation needed. That's that's all I'm saying. Just who says? Okay, so you are a duck truther. You are not convinced that this is necessarily a calling by the city. Do you have an alternate theory ? Well, I guess I don't have an alternate theory no. I mean, there's a lot of disappointing realities that you learn about as an adult . And I fully accepted this may be one of them that like cities do this. Municipalities just ace some ducks sometimes . But like I just don't want the ducks to be dead. Just so dark . Like I mean, they were great. I mean, who doesn't love ducks in a park? I mean if I knew that they didn't die, I'd be like, thank goodness, I don't necessarily need them to be back where they were , but an explanation would be nice. And of course, I'm sure the city of Birmingham, no matter what they did, they don't want to take credit for this. Yeah . Well , we got our work cut out for us, but we will be inquiring with the city in short order. Yeah, I'm so excited to see what you find out. Thanks so much. Thank you. Take care. All right, bye bye. Bye All right, so John wants to know what happened to the ducks. And as far as we can tell, there were really only three possibilities they were killed, moved, or migrated . Now, a spontaneous migration seems unlikely , because it was summertime , and I don't know, seemed like the ducks had a pretty nice life there. But obviously, I don't know anything about ducks, and I don't know much about what was going on in the city of Birmingham, Alabama that summer. And since this show is not yet in a position to pay for us to travel, we started by looking for a reporter who could get us closer to that specific time and place . And sure enough, we were able to find one person who wrote about the mysterious disappearance of the birds that summer. Oh yeah , I remember the column about the geese because that was by far the most red thing on AL dot com about the world games. It was my column about where the heck are all the ducks and the geese. This is Joe Goodman. He's a sports columnist for ALT com which is the largest digital news source in the state of Alabama . And the reason he ended up writing about the Ducks had nothing to do with the Ducks . What happened was that one day about, two weeks before the opening of the games, Joe decided to visit the site of the archery competition . Now, in the Olympic version of this event, targets are placed at a set distance on a flat range , so usually Olympic archery takes place in a stadium . But in the world games, there is a special event called Field Archery, and Field Archery is meant to emulate hunting . So instead of placing targets on a flat range, the targets for field archery are plac ed in more natural environments sometimes they're on a little hill, sometimes they're on the opposite side of a tree . And in the case of the Birmingham World Games, the targets were placed on the opposite side of a pond , specifically the pond where the Avondale ducks live . So Joe's walking around the site taking it all in, and he notices hey, the Avondale Ducks are missing . So he asks someone what's up with that ? I was told that the city had relocated okay the ducks and the geese and you know whatever euphemism you want to use, okay ? It relocated them across the rainbow bridge . Like I don't know. All right. So just to be clear, this does not pass the smell test for you. No terms of not explanations . And they had a large presence of beautiful geese there. It wasn't just like these ugly ducks, okay? It was a lot of beautiful geese that were there, but I mean what were you supposed to do? Clearly you can have a bunch of spectators and you know international archers throwing arrows around and all these birds like they had to do something about the birds. And so yeah , they've never come out and said it all right that they killed off the geese and the ducks, but I suspect very strongly that they were not in fact relocated to East Lake , which is another nearby lake that they were just killed off . So that they told you East Lake . Yes . In the published version of Joe's story, he raised the question about what happened to the Ducks, but he told us that he never actually followed up on that question . And even though the article caused a stir in the community, it seems like nobody else followed up on it either. And maybe that's because just two weeks later, everyone turned their attention to the World Games. And when that was over , their attention turned to the fact that the World Games cost the city more money than it made. And then that controversy was replaced by some other controversy , which was replaced by some other controversy, just like it has been everywhere else. But now , three years after Joe first sounded the alarm , we made it our job to find out what happened to the dogs. So hyperfix producer, Sarah Softwers Sukanic, reached out to the Birmingham Parks Department . And then about a week later, she asked me to join her in a zoo. Okay, Alex, so as you know, I called the Parks and Recreation Department for the city of Birmingham and I was able to get in touch with the PR manager who was a super nice lady, very helpful. Anyway, I told her that we were looking into the disappearance of the ducks and that we'd heard that perhaps the city might have moved them . Now, this lady wasn't working with the parks department back in twenty twenty two, so she actually didn't know what happened with the ducks, but she told me she'd look into it and get back to me. And when she gets back to me, she says, Hey, I spoke to the department's facilities manager and they said that the ducks relocated on their own . Apparently they told her that this is a natural occurrence and that ducks often relocate in search of more food and favorable nesting conditions. I'm sorry, that does not pass the snow test for me . Yeah, I thought so too because like the ducks have been at this park for decades . And as John told us, they're getting hand fed by children . Exactly. Like unless the conditions at the park have suddenly changed, why would the ducks need to move? So I asked her directly like, did the conditions at the park suddenly change? And she said, Yes . What? So you remember how John was saying that the city had this whole cleanup campaign in the lead up to the World Games . Well, one of the things they decided to clean was the pond at Avondale Park. Apparently the algae in the pond had gotten a little out of control. It was looking a bit gross and causing some other kinds of problems that she didn't get into , but the point is that in order to clean it up, she said they decided to drain the pond . Shit . Yeah . So the reason the ducks disappeared is because they like fucked with the environment in which they lived . I think that might be what happened , but I'm not ready to say that definitively because when I reached out to the company that handled the dredging, they're called Alabama Aquarium. They confirmed that they did this work and they did it before the World Games, but they also said that they didn't really remember seeing any ducks at the park while they were working . And I'm sure that's more of a memory issue than anything , but I don't know, it just left me with some doubt, so I want to find some wildlife people for us to talk to, just to see if this narrative makes any sense to them. It doesn't make sense to me. This is Chris Sykes. He's the executive director of the Alabama Wildlife Center, which is a nonprofit bird hospital located in Birmingham . And when we told him the story that the city told us about the ducks leaving of their own volition because the pond got dredged. He was like, yeah, that's definitely not the whole story. Because while he conceded that dredging the pond would definitely disrupt the lives of the duck s. The problem with this narrative about them leaving is that some of these ducks had physically lost the ability to do that. Do you have a lot of people that will be feeding these ducks and geese? So oftentimes they're fat, they're overweight, they're not healthy . They have disabilities that are forming. They don't really have a need to fly or migrate because hey, that's where they live. And so they've kind of lost that ability to , you know, migrate on and jump around from pond to pond just because they're just they're city geese, city geese and ducks. And this is not just a matter of being too fat to fly. Apparently, when you feed bread to ducks, which as you know, is just one of those things people love to do at the park , all the carbs and sugars in the bread can cause a visible distortion in their wings . Their feathers can start to spl ay outward , causing a condition called angel wing , which really affects their ability to fly. So yeah, according to Chris, some of these ducks might have been able to fly away , but certainly not all of them. And since we know that all the docks disappeared from the park , there's really only two other explanations for what happened . And based on Chris's own past experiences , he's pretty sure they weren't moved. It only leaves the logical explanation that these birds were rounded up and cold and euthanized . And it's happened time and time again . There was an incident in twenty nineteen in Pike Road, Alabama that essentially the same thing happened. There was overpopulation and they were pooping on the grounds and there were concerns of health and safety. And they euthanized one hundred fifty and geese essentially overnight . Now, to do that kind of work, the city would have to get permits . And while these permits aren't hard to get, apparently excessive pooping actually does meet the criteria for culling , these permits are a matter of public record, which means that if the city killed the ducks at Avondale Park , honestly if they even just moved to them, we should be able to find documentation of it . And the way to do that is by submitting a public records request to the city of Birmingham . Now everyone on this show, both for hyperfixed and in our lives before it have all requested our fair share of government documents . But every state's a little bit different . And depending on what you're asking for, the way you ask for it can make a really big difference . Because even though states are required to provide you with certain types of information , they don't always have to make it easy. And when the information you're requesting is sensitive information , I can understand why they might actually try to make the process hard. So before we wrote this request, we teamed up with a freedom of Information Act expert and she gave us some really great tips, which our premium members will be able to hear on the next bonus episode. For now, though , I just want to tell you what we sent the city . Okay, here we go . In our request to the city of Birmingham, we asked for any information related to the ducks and geese in Avondale Park. We ask for emails both internal and external discussing the movement, relocation, or calling of the ducks and geese . We asked for any permits that may have been submitted, approved, or denied . We also asked for information related to the draining of the pond . And finally, to make sure that we didn't end up drowning in documents , we asked that all records be contained to the two year period leading up to the World Games twenty twenty to twenty twenty two Our request was submitted in March of twenty twenty five , and then six months later , we got a response from the city of Birmingham. In their official response, which was written on the city's official stationery , they told us the records we requested did not exist . And for that reason , our request had been denied. Now, obviously this didn't make any sense to us because even if the city never touched the ducks, we knew they drained the pond, they told us they had, and we confirmed it with the contractors , which meant there had to be some records somewhere, even if they were just receipts for the work that was done. But when we followed up with the city asking for clarification, they doubled down on their original response. They said there were no records, and they would not agree to discuss it in an interview . And I think that was the moment we realized that they had definitely done something to the ducks . We just couldn't prove it , and we didn't know if we would ever be able to the break , we prove it. Welcome back to the show . So before the break, our reporting hit a brick wall . We'd gone from thinking that we were chasing a cute little local mystery to a full on government cover up . And even though we felt certain the city had done something to the ducks, they wouldn't give us the documents to prove it. They wouldn't even acknowledge that documents existed , and we don't have the resources to sue for them. Hyperfixpod. com slash join if you want to become a premium member to support independent journalism and give us the resources to sue municipalities we believe aligned to us. So we started working on a conting ency plan . This contingency plan was actually a very thinly veiled revenge plot , and we didn't move forward with it. But I do need to talk about it because this very silly idea is what inadvertent ly set off a chain of events that led us to the answer to John's question. When the city denied our request for documents, we were kind of losing our mind. So we huddled up as a team, and I'm not gonna say who said what , but someone on our team was like, They're trying to make sure everyone forgets the ducks. And then someone else was like, We need to make sure people never forget . So we came up with this idea that we were going to buy a bench at Avondale Park with a plaque that read in honor of the ducks of Avondale Park , gone , but not forgotten. Again, I know this is a ridiculous idea, but at the time we thought it was a great idea . And we very sincerely took steps toward making it a reality. We contacted the Birmingham Parks Department and got ourselves on the agenda to present the plan at the next meeting of the Parks committee . But on the day we were scheduled to present, we were suddenly removed from the agenda . And of course, we were like, What the fuck just happened? And that's when we were contacted by the president of a local nonprofit called the Friends of Avandale Park. Friends of Avandale Park is comprised of volunteers and it uses donations for maintenance and restoration projects within the park . And the President made it clear to us that he did not want our silly bench in his beautiful park, but he was very sweet about it. And as a kind of consolation prize, he offered to post a message from us on the Facebook page for the Friends of Avandale P . So Sari wrote a post explaining we were looking for any factual information that could help us get to the bottom of this mystery . And that's how we ended up connecting with this guy . My name's Skip Brock. I'm from Birmingham, Alabama . I've lived right down the street from Avondale Park for I think six years . And yeah, that's that's about my only qualifications regarding Avandale Park . Actually, Skip has one more qualification that made him extremely useful to us . He is super tapped into the Facebook page for the friends of Avondale Park, and he has been for years, which is why when he saw our post asking for information about the missing ducks, a light bulb went off in his head. You see, back in twenty twenty two, when the ducks first disappeared, people were pissed . Everyone assumed that the ducks had been killed or relocated, but regardless of what happened, people just wanted answers and nobody was giving them . And things were getting tense. At some point , I think it's the president of the board of the park posted on Facebook and said , you know, here's what happened to the ducks and the geese. The US Fish and Wildlife Service came and they removed them I want to quickly clarify that the president who wrote this post is not the same president we talked to about the bench . Apparently, friends of Avondale Park has new officers come in about every three years, and this particular president was in her position for only about eleven months. So when we contacted her for comment about how she knew that U. S. Fish and Wildlife handled the removal, she said she didn't remember. But at that point, it didn't matter because suddenly a new government agency had entered the chat , which meant that there was a new place for us to send our records requests. In October of twenty twenty five, we decided to send out two separate FOIA requests. The first went to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the second went to an agency that's called the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or AF IS . And the reason we sent the second request is because we had been told that AFIS often gets contracted by other agencies to carry out their callings . Like, remember that twenty nineteen calling that Chris mentioned in our interview with him? There was overpopulation, and they were pooping on the grounds, and there were concerns of health and safety, and they euthanized one hundred fifty geese essentially overnight. Aphis was the agency that carried out that calling . And three months after we submitted our FoA request, we got an answer from Afas . Hey, Alex, you recording? Just about give me, just a second and I'm rolling . If you're a regular listener to the show, you know that this is usually the point where we reach back out to the person who submitted the question and tell them what we found . But it had been so long since we first spoke to John that we couldn't reach him anymore. So what you're hearing now is the moment that I first heard what happened. Here's Sari again . Okay , so as you know, I got a response from Afis. It's nearly seventy pages long, and overall , I feel like it paints a pretty clear picture of what happened to the ducks , but there were also some pieces that I didn't totally understand , just like different terms of the trade, I guess, and different kinds of documents . So before I called you, I got on the phone with an environmental lawyer at the University of Denver Law School, and he talked me through the documents and helped me sort of tie up loose ends. And yeah, I guess do you want me to just start from the top? Yeah, go for it. Okay . The headline here is that the docs were definitely euthanized. On the night of june fourteenth, twenty twenty two, Aphis dispatched a team to Birmingham, Alabama. They landed at the airport at eight thirty PM and then worked their way around the city, rounding up geese and ducks at four different locations , including Avondale Park . And when they were finished, it appears that their bodies were discarded at a place called Oak WMA , which I've been told is a wildlife management area. Now I don't think anyone's going to want to hear exactly how they were killed, so I'm just going to leave that part out . But Apropoe John's question about whether or not they were killed for the World Games, the answer is yes, without a doubt . In one email actually, it's very explicitly stated our goal is to have this project completed in advance of the world games. Okay , but who initi ated this project ? Was it the city? Was it Aphis? Like what's going on here? Honestly , I don't know. I can tell you that the parks department definitely knew about it. And in em theails I have here , they appear to be orchestrating the entire thing . So the idea that they couldn't fulfill our records request because they didn't have any records, that's now proably false . But there's also something else I found in the records that gave me some pause , which is that in January of twenty twenty two , Afis sent an email to someone whose address has been completely redacted , which is unusual because for most of all the other correspond ence that I have here, I can see that the domain is at least to or from a government agency . But this one is totally blacked out . And the subject of the email is Friends of Avandale Park. The message discusses some contract details for the Culling project , and in it, Aphis identifies the Friends of Avandale Park as a cooperator. But what does it mean to be a cooperator? Exactly. So the lawyer I spoke to told me that a cooperator is essentially the person or entity that orders the job and pays for it. So I reached back out to the previous president of the Friends group, the one that posted that Facebook message about the ducks and geese being removed by U. S. Fish and Wildlife , and I said to her, Look , we know that's not what happened, and now we have reason to suspect that the friends of Avandale Park know that too . And she replied back insisting that she knew nothing about the Afis project, that she wasn't even president when this email was sent, so maybe we should reach out to the guy who was president before her . So I got in touch with that guy and his official comment was no comment . Holy shit . But I'm still not totally sure who paid for this because in the final work initiation document, the cooperator listed is a member of the city park s and rec ommend . So yeah, kind of unclear who asked for or paid for the calling in the end . But the big takeaways here are one, the ducks were euthanized . Two , it was definitely connected to the world games . And three, the parks department was definitely looped into the project, and it appears the friends of Avandell Park were too. So yeah, that's what I was able to glean from the documents, but again, we still really don't know who initiated this and why this even needed to happen because I don't know, just saying that it happened for the world's games doesn't feel like enough of a justification. Yeah, I feel like I still have so many questions . I'm gonna try and call some people and see if we can get a real explanation for this . Thanks so much, Sari. Yeah, of course. I am recording this outro hours before this episode gets released . And the reason I'm doing this now and not, you know, days ago when everything else got recorded is because I wanted to give everyone involved an opportunity to comment . But not only have they refused to comment , they have been bafflingly combative about it. When I called the former president of the Friends of Avandale Park, he told me emphatically that they were not involved before saying that he couldn't remember . And then he said he had no comment . And then he made a statement that I took as a vague threat of a lawsuit. As for the city, when I called the parks department yesterday , they doubled down on the lie that the birds hadn't been killed . And when I showed them documents, proving that the birds had been killed, and that the parks department was involved , they finally acknowledged that the ducks had been quote unquote, removed , but refused to explain why this happened or who paid for it, or why they told us there were no documents related to this culling, when clearly there were. I am looking at them right now . And at this point, I can only guess at why they might still be trying to hide stuff . But also I'm not sure it really matters anymore . Because it turns out the thing that was so interesting about this question wasn't the answer to it. I mean, everyone in town already believed that the ducks had been killed. The thing that feels so interesting here, at least to me , is how hard the city worked to hide something that everyone knew . And now , everyone knows that they did that too.