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Bob McFarlane [00:00:00] Well, they were, they were building the airport right in the middle of the largest concentration of wintering waterfowl in North America, particularly geese. It is not a place that you should select to build an airport.

Bob McFarlane [00:00:15] But the deal had been put together by the landowners and developers and they had sold the City at four times market rate. They sold it at more than 4000 dollars an acre. And out there you could buy land for a thousand dollars an acre or less, anywhere. And they had the City totally boxed in. It was a trapezoidal site and it had an entrance way, I think at most a hundred yards wide. And then, of course, these same people had sold the City the land owned all the land around it. And that's where they were going to make their killing: they were going to repeat this Johnson Space Center all over again.

Bob McFarlane [00:00:56] And so I got a call asking if I'd come to a meeting. So I went to a meeting and we talked about doing some airport studies. And I told them my qualifications for doing this. And I made very sure that they understood that I was the same Bob McFarlane that had opposed the City in the Wallisville issue. And they did. And I was hired. I was surprised, but I was hired. So I said, "OK."

Bob McFarlane [00:01:32] So we went out there one day in November of 1987, the prime contractor and the City's representative. And we went to the airport site. And this was the first time I'd been out there. So here we are standing on the future runway of the airport site. And the guy said, from the Airport Department, said, "See there are no birds out here." And I said, "Stop. Be quiet. Listen. Can you hear that murmur on the wind, on the horizon, coming from somewhere around here? That murmur is geese. I don't know where they are, or how far away they are. But that sound that we're hearing is the murmur of geese on the ground."

Bob McFarlane [00:02:29] It wasn't five minutes later, while we were still out at the runway, a shotgun went off and ten thousand birds hit the sky. It was spectacular, all around that airport site. And so I said, there's your problem. You have got to have some solid numbers. OK?

Bob McFarlane [00:02:58] So I started collecting data. And I would go out there. I found a spot on the airport that I could drive to, and from that spot, being flat terrain, I could see the entire airport site and there was some tall landmarks on the horizon, so I could tell distances from where I was. And I knew that I could see the entire airport site. And I simply started counting geese. I'd get out there before dawn and count birds until noontime or I would go out just before noon and count birds until dark. And so I did that for a number of weeks.

Bob McFarlane [00:03:39] And we had a big technical advisory board for the project. And the Parks and Wildlife people were there, and Fish and Wildlife Service people were there. And the Department of, the State Department of Aviation were there. And we had this board and we were interacting. And we're gonna do this right.

Bob McFarlane [00:04:00] So then my numbers start coming up. And I found there were four hundred and twenty seven geese per hour, I think it was, average, flying over that airport site and a larger number flying in and around the periphery!