On Saturday, flyers discovered a Swainson’s Hawk trapped in a tangle of monofilament in the Baylands Giant Yuke.

One wing was wrapped tight to its body.

During the past few months, people have tried multiple times to rescue planes from this tree. Some of the attempts were successful. Many were not.

Those efforts left a nasty spiderweb of monofilament snaking through the tree.

The Fetchomatic 3000 is partly to blame. But people have also tried to scale the tree with bow & arrows and fishing poles, not to mention bottles of water, rocks and other weights attached to a variety of lines.

When the lines snagged in the thick foliage, they broke, leaving yards of line stretched through the tree.

A Bad Idea. Saturday’s events made it clear: shooting lengths of monofilament into dense branches or brush is a terrible idea.

Gary Morgan nicely documented the all-day Hawk Rescue here. Big thanks go to the City of Sunnyvale, Santa Clara County Animal Control and two tree climbers from Coastal Tree Cutting Service.

The climbers cleared bunches of line in the process of sawing off the limb on which the bird was trapped.

They gently lowered the limb with, as Gary wrote, “the Hawk in a vertical position looking like he had arrived on a chariot for a coronation.”

Gary and Melissa Iida from Animal Control covered the bird with a blanket, snipped off the lines and Melissa took the bird to a rehabilitation facility to check it out. The hawk appeared to be in good condition, despite its mishap.

Not Our Fault. Meanwhile, a spokesman for Fetchomatic Industries at first denied any responsibility.

“Monofilament is a perfectly natural substance,” he said.

Dwight just happened to be there. “Actually,” Dwight said, “monofilament is manufactured by extruding a polymer, quenching the monofilament to solidify it, stretching with heat to achieve molecular orientation and strength and, optionally, annealing it to relieve internal stresses.”

For once I was glad to hear from Dwight.

“Most monofilament is non-biodegradable,” he continued. “It lasts about 600 years.”

The Fetchomatic spokesman then blamed offshore manufacturing for quality control problems. “Besides,” he said, “this problem is limited to just a few Fetchomatic units.”

“How many?” we asked.

“One,” he said. “That’s all we ever made.”

Don’t Do It. Based on this incident, I strongly advise people not to try to retrieve planes trapped in heavy brush or thick foliage with devices such as this.

If you must, use a short length of lightweight leader between the weight and the monofilament, so if you get snagged you don’t leave yards of fishing line behind. Even then, you still risk polluting the environment with lead weights or other projectiles.

In the wake of this story, I’m locking up my Fetchomatic 3000. I will only haul it out for rescues where we can clean up after ourselves: shots across water, for instance.

I’ve also replaced the line on the reel with much heavier line: 50-pound test yellow braided line, which is easy to see in the tree but still light enough to spool easily. The 10-pound-test monofilament that came with the reel was poor quality — it broke at about 30 feet on my first cast, with no pressure. If I use this rig again, I’m going to attach the weight with a 4-inch leader of 4-pound-test monofilament, which will snap off easily in case of a hang-up.

Meanwhile, if your plane gets stuck in a tree, pray for wind.

I figure a plane is worth about $300, give or take $100 depending on the sophistication of its electronic gear.

Birds, other wild animals and the beauty of a park such as Baylands are worth lots more.

Tags: Baylands, Birds, Crashes, Tools, Trees.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 18th, 2007 at 11:35 am and is filed under Baylands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.