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Fowl Play
Federal wildlife officers are cracking down on hobbyists who kill raptors that prey on the pigeons they raise. But criminals rarely get more than a slap on the wrist because the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, an effective and versatile tool for 90 years, has lost its edge and needs sharpening.
Audubon May/June 2008
Another way the thin green line compensates for its size is by winning convictions on nearly 100 percent of its cases, a record maintained by, among other strategies, keeping tight-lipped about evidence. For example, until the law-enforcement division charged roller flyers, it didn’t tell anyone there had been undercover work or that agents had audio and video evidence that plainly showed that the defendants had been killing raptors. Agents the defendants hadn’t seen (or, in at least one case, didn’t recognize because the formerly bearded agent was clean shaven and wearing federal raid gear) merely asked if they had killed any raptors. In virtually every case the defendants said they had not. So during plea bargaining, U.S. attorneys informed them that if they fought the MBTA Class B misdemeanor charges, the prosecution would add the felony charge of lying to federal officers.
While the MBTA has weak penalties, agents file collateral charges when they discover unrelated crimes. For instance, Newcomer has referred several roller club members to district attorneys for such state felonies as negligent discharge of a firearm and animal cruelty.
One of the defendants facing animal-cruelty charges is the NBRC’s president, Juan Navarro. In the same document, it says that Rayvon Hall of Rialto, California, told Newcomer that after he catches hawks at the rate of about one per week (in traps baited with live pigeons and, at the time, openly sold at roller shows), he “pummels them with a stick” and that it is a “great thing . . . you’ll see, you get a lot of frustration out.”
“We just didn’t have the manpower or time to go after everybody,” says Newcomer. “And at some point you’ve got to ask, ‘Gee, how long am I going to let hawks get killed?’ So I decided to target the club president and the people who were most brazen about this. It was sickening to have to hang out with these guys and listen to them.”
I saw what Newcomer meant from the court documents and the Internet roller chatter I’d collected (now mostly deleted online). For example, according to the search-warrant affidavit, Darik McGhee of San Bernardino, California, proudly informed Newcomer that he had filled a five-gallon bucket with talons from hawks he’d killed.
According to the same document, Rayvon Hall presented Newcomer with severed Cooper’s hawk talons and explained that he made chlorine gas with bleach and ammonia and used it to kill trapped hawks by spraying it in their mouths and eyes.
But the preferred method of execution, on which Newcomer, Hoy, and their fellow agents were carefully instructed by their eager tutors, was to discreetly and silently pump air-rifle rounds into the trapped hawks’ heads and chests.
In April 2003 Bob Sallinger, conservation director for the Audubon Society of Portland, rescued four peregrine falcon eggs from a bridge under construction, rappelling down to the nest. The society hatched the eggs and raised the chicks. Clark Public Utilities donated a crew and supplies to build a release tower on Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, and a volunteer, Ken Barron, lived on the refuge with the young falcons for six weeks as they acclimated to the wild. The four fledglings—much in evidence in and around the refuge—won the hearts of the public and the press. But one day they disappeared, never to be seen again.
According to Ivan Hanchett of Hillsboro, Oregon, a fellow roller pigeon defender shot them. Herewith, from the Birmingham Roller Pigeon Discussion Board, Hanchett’s take on the incident, posted shortly before he was convicted for hawk killing and meriting the additional charge of cruelty to language: “Well low and behold just across the street from the wildlife refuge lives a roller flyer and when the young became airbourne they found alot of led in the air space across the street where the rollers were flying LOL!! I laughed and laughed when I heard this story because of all the pain staking measures they took to get these birds to adolescence and than to have somone take them out simply was bliss!!” (Special Agent Hoy reports that when he was working undercover, Hanchett bragged to him that he shot many hawks but instructed him on quieter, more creative methods: “angling” for them with live feeder mice rigged with fish hooks, and catching them in live traps, then suffocating them in plastic bags.)
Other commentary cut and pasted from the Birmingham Roller Pigeon Discussion Board:
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