Immigrants Take On Other Immigrants

At the Free Bacon, Fowl Play: Foreign Nationals Kill and Eat Beloved Town Swan

The three teens accused of killing and eating a beloved swan in an upstate New York village are refugees, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

Manlius Police reported Faye the Swan and her four cygnets missing from the town pond last Monday, which prompted horror from the Manlius, New York, residents. Locals flooded Manlius police with tips the next day, which ended in the arrest of 18-year-old Eman Hussan of Syracuse, New York, and two minors, aged 16 and 17.

Mute Swans can be nasty

From the looks, Faye is was a Mute Swan, an introduced species from Eurasia. In the Chesapeake, they are regarded as a dangerous introduced species, with the potential to out compete our own native waterfowl, and capable of devastating local seagrasses. MDDNR carried out a quiet campaign of elimination, and reduced their population to a tolerable minimum. 

The posse are refugees from Myanmar and attend high school in the neighboring city, Manlius Police Sgt. Ken Hatter told the Free Beacon. Police say the three were able to steal Faye because she was nesting and did not fight back. The suspects devoured Faye with their family in Syracuse.

Faye’s children were also abducted but were later retrieved by authorities unharmed. A biologist who works with the village of Manlius will care for the cygnets for another six weeks.

"I just don’t know how if you were from the area you wouldn’t see the fences or the ‘no fishing’ signage," Hatter told the Free Beacon.

This is the second high-profile incident in recent months related to the murder of a precious bird at the hands of foreign nationals. The Free Beacon reported on two suspected illegal immigrants in Stanton County, Neb. who snuck into protected land and shot a bald eagle. Authorities told the Free Beacon that the two suspects had intended to eat the once-endangered animal, which is considered the United States’ national symbol.

Oh man, you don't want to eat a Bald Eagle! They taste worse than Spotted Owl! 

Eman Hussan and his two co-conspirators are charged with felony grand larceny and criminal mischief. Their court dates are scheduled later this month.

If found guilty, the three risk deportation. The Immigration and Nationality Act states that offenders can be forcibly removed from the United States if they commit aggravated felonies or "crimes involving moral turpitude," which may or may not include the execution and ingestion of a cherished Anatidae.

"This is not ending. We will continue to have swans," Manlius mayor Paul Whorrall said at a Wednesday press conference last week. "We’ll let the four cygnets grow up and at that point, we are hoping that two of those cygnets will mate and we will be back to the way it used to be."

Seriously, though, these immigrants probably come from countries where the idea of conservation of endangered species is minimal, and the idea that law enforcement might care about their eating one is pretty foreign. Maryland has a problem with immigrants from below the Southern border ignoring our fish and game laws. In past years we have seen mass busts of immigrants with Hispanic surnames with out of season, undersized, and over the legal limit rockfish in the past. Tickets are issued, but it's not clear that anything ever happens to them. I suspect DNR officers go out of their way to avoid that these days, with the emphasis on "immigrant rights."

A couple of weeks ago, as we walked up past Matoaka Cottages, a Hispanic speaker proudly showed me a pair of Red Drum he had just caught off the beach. One of them might have made the 19 inch minimum in MD. 

I have an amusing anecdote. Once upon a time, shortly after the end of the Vietnam War, my father sponsored a Hmong refugee family, and for a while, had them live in our house. Their kids went out with slingshots, shot a few of the local pigeons out of the palm trees in the yard, and the wife proudly cooked them for dinner. My Mom was horrified, but Dad ate his share