Feathered family stuck on a rooftop gets a fairytale ending
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A family of seven recently overstayed their welcome at a swanky, boutique hotel in Atlanta's trendy Old Fourth Ward neighborhood.
They didn't have a reservation — but that wasn't the problem.
This was a gaggle of Canada geese, nesting on the hotel's rooftop garden patio. Mom and dad had been on the rooftop for awhile, but their five goslings — who were too young to fly — had no way to follow their parents down to a nearby pond, four stories below.
Michael Waters, a longtime volunteer with AWARE Wildlife Center, came to the rescue. Even as an experienced wildlife rescuer, Waters said saving the geese was tricky due to their behavior and strong gusts of wind.
'There were five little goslings, and they were all running in a fright,' Waters said. 'The mother and father goose were both present and they both were sort of in their guardian mode and were being very protective.'
The goal of the rescue, Waters said, was to collect the entire family to keep them together and relocate them to a pond below.
'The first thing I thought was to collect the little ones because I was just so concerned about them at the precarity of the ledge,' he said.
After Waters collected the goslings in a box, he tried to capture the father goose.
'He fought me off of his wing and flew off the building,' Waters said. 'He flew all the way down to the ground and was just honking like a little horror at the base of the building.'
Next, Waters tried to save the mother goose, but he realized she was also trying to escape. To prevent her from leaving, Waters released all the goslings, and she came after him trying to protect her babies.
'I was able to secure her in her enclosure, then I was able to collect all the babies again,' Waters said.
With the goslings and the mother goose captured, Waters took them outside to release them in the pond.
'Who was waiting there at the pond but the father goose!' Waters said. 'So, it was just perfect.'
While the rooftop goslings had never been on the ground or in water before, Waters said they adjusted quickly.
'It was so lovely to see their little instincts step forward,' he said. 'They immediately became amphibious and just waddled out and went out with mom and dad, and they all went to go live their wild lives.'
But how did the geese get themselves into this situation? Why would they want to nest on a hotel rooftop?
Kara Nitschke, migratory and game bird biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, said Canada geese are very adaptable and easily assimilate.
'In urban and suburban areas, we keep our grass short like golf courses, parks, neighborhoods,' Nitschke said. 'Geese like that because they can walk through that easily.'
And she said it's a 'bonus' for the geese if these green spaces have a nearby pond.
'They can run to the water and hop in (if they feel threatened), and they feel perfectly safe and comfy,' she said.
The state of Georgia is home to about 250,000 Canada geese, according to Nitschke. Being a migratory species, the birds would make their yearly trip south from Canada. But in the 1970s and '80s when migration slowed, Nitschke said the state stocked the environment with around 8,000 geese — and since then, the population has boomed.
Canada geese are federally protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. That means if someone comes across an injured or orphaned goose or wants to relocate a goose, that person would need a permit to handle it, Nitschke said.
If anyone finds a goose or any wildlife that might need help, Nitschke and Waters recommend they call their state wildlife department or a local wildlife rehabilitation center, like Atlanta's AWARE, before interacting with the animal.
For Waters, who regularly works with and rescues animals, idealism keeps him motivated to continue his work.
'In any way that we can ameliorate or make better the effects that have consequences for these other beings,' Waters said, 'I want to be someone who gives at least the effort for things to be made better.'
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Earlier estimates of the manuscripts' age came from radiocarbon dating conducted in the 1990s. Chemist Willard Libby developed this method — used to ascertain the age of organic materials — in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago. Also known as carbon 14 dating, a chemical analysis of a sample, such as a fossil or manuscript, determines the quantity of carbon 14 atoms it contains. All living organisms absorb this element, but it starts to decay as soon as death occurs, so looking at how much is left can give a fairly accurate age of an organic specimen as old as about 60,000 years. Carbon dating has downsides, however. The analyzed sample is destroyed during the process, and some results can be misleading. 'The problem with earlier tests (on the scrolls) is that they didn't address the issue of castor oil,' Popović said. 'Castor oil is a modern invention, and it was used in the 1950s by the original scholars to make the text more legible. But it's a modern contaminant, and it skews the radiocarbon result to a much more modern date.' The study team first used new radiocarbon dating, applying more modern techniques, on 30 manuscripts, which revealed that most of them were older than previously thought. Only two were younger. The researchers then used high-resolution images of these newly dated documents to train an AI they developed, called Enoch after the Biblical figure who was the father of Methuselah. The scientists presented Enoch with more documents they had carbon-dated, but withheld the dating information, and the AI correctly guessed the age 85% of the time, according to Popović. 'In a number of cases, the AI even gave a narrower date range for the manuscripts than the carbon 14 did,' he said. Next, Popović and his colleagues fed Enoch more images from 135 different Dead Sea Scrolls that were not carbon-dated and asked the AI to estimate their age. The scientists rated the results as 'realistic' or 'unrealistic,' based on their own paleographic experience, and found that Enoch had given realistic results on 79% of the samples. Some of the manuscripts in the study were found to be 50 to 100 years older than formerly thought, Popović said. One sample from a scroll known to contain verse from the Book of Daniel was once believed to date to the second century BC. 'That was a generation after the original author,' Popović said, 'and now with the carbon 14, we securely move it (further back) to the time of the author.' Another manuscript, with verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes, also dates older, Popović added. 'The manuscript was previously dated on paleographic grounds to 175 to 125 BCE, but now Enoch suggests 300 to 240 BCE,' he said. Eventually, artificial intelligence could supplant carbon 14 as a method of dating manuscripts, Popović suggested. 'Carbon 14 is destructive,' he said, 'because you need to cut off a little piece of the Dead Sea Scroll, and then it's gone. It's only 7 milligrams, but it's still stuff that you lose. With Enoch, you don't have to do any of this. This a first step. There are all sorts of possibilities to improve Enoch further.' If the team pushes forward with Enoch's development, Popović believes it could be used to assess scripts such as Syriac, Arabic, Greek and Latin. Scholars who were not involved with the study were encouraged by the findings. Having both AI and an enhanced carbon 14 dating method allows a level of calibration across both methodologies that is helpful, according to Charlotte Hempel, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. 'The pronounced pattern seems to be that AI offers a narrower window within the Carbon 14 window,' she said via email. 'I wonder whether this suggests a higher level of precision, which would be extremely exciting.' The study represents a first attempt to harness AI technology to extend existing scientific knowledge from carbon 14 dating of certain manuscripts to other manuscripts, said Lawrence H. Schiffman, Global Distinguished Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. 'To some extent, it is not yet clear whether or not the new method will provide us with reliable information on texts that have not yet been Carbon-14 dated,' he added via email. 'The interesting comments regarding revision of the dating of some manuscripts that may be expected through further development of this approach or new carbon-14 dating, while not new to this study, constitute a very important observation about the field of Dead Sea Scrolls in general.' Commenting on the computational aspects of the study, Brent Seales, the Alumni Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky, said the approach taken by the authors seems rigorous even if the sample sizes are small. Using AI to completely replace carbon dating may be premature, however. '(AI) is a useful tool to incorporate into the broader picture, and to make estimates in the absence of Carbon-14 based on the witness of other similar fragments,' Seales wrote in an email. 'Like everything with machine learning, and like a fine wine, it should get better over time and with more samples. The dating of ancient manuscripts is an extremely difficult problem, with sparse data and heavy constraints on access and expertise. Bravo to the team for this data-driven contribution that takes a massive step forward.'
