Fowl Play

Still, as NBRC members tirelessly point out, there are ethical roller flyers. After searching for a month I was able to find one (at least a former one)—Will Brown of Stanardsville, Virginia. He offers this: “One of the reasons I stopped flying rollers is that they’re hawk food. They mimic sick or injured birds, the kind hawks are supposed to eat. I’m not going to fight nature. So I switched to different pigeons—thief powders. They don’t flop around in the sky and attract hawks. . . . I was pleased to hear about this sting. Roller flyers are quite belligerent. If you mention that hawks are part of nature and maybe we should work with nature, you’re quickly ostracized. . . . I still lose a few birds, and I accept it as part of what happens when you let birds fly in the real world. The real world has raptors.”

Unfortunately, there is nothing aberrant about roller flyers. Similar jihads are being waged by other groups that find themselves inconvenienced by migratory birds.

In fact, MBTA flouting is an American tradition. Back in 1991, on a stakeout with Special Agent Roger Gephart in California’s San Joaquin Valley, I watched a fish farmer shoot great egrets. Several days later I interviewed another fish farmer, Marvin Carpenter, at his Merced, California, goldfish farm. He claimed to have been ruined by birds and feds. “All fish farmers shoot birds,” he explained, without much exaggeration from what I’ve been able to learn. “Fish farmers are producers, and the government is knocking us out. The environmentalists have [the government] right by the nose.”

Carpenter was especially bitter about the way special agents showed up uninvited and started digging up his property with a backhoe, thereby unearthing some 700 migratory bird carcasses. The total kill was estimated at 20,000. “If it flies it dies,” was the battle cry at Carpenter’s Goldfish Farm. All large birds, even non-fish eaters such as avocets, gallinules, willets, stilts, and hawks, were splashed as soon as they violated company air space. Cyanide-coated goldfish accounted for as many as 200 herons per day. Three hundred beaver traps constantly splintered the legs of wading birds. Carpenter got a 13-month jail sentence and a $34,000 fine, but this was mostly for the felony conviction of lying to federal agents.

Because the MBTA carries such weak penalties, nothing much has changed since Carpenter was making the world safer for goldfish, except that for a while fish farmers shot fewer birds (see “Killer Fish Farms,” Audubon, March-April 1992). Now roller flyers will be careful to obey the MBTA, or at least not get caught violating it, for maybe another year. “These things are always cyclic,” says Special Agent Hoy. “They’ll get comfortable again; some will start violating again; and we’ll be there.” Even so, the violators won’t have a whole lot to worry about unless the law is amended to provide for felony charges at the discretion of the U.S. attorney.

When Bob Sallinger started work at the Audubon Society of Portland’s rehabilitation center in 1992, he was astonished at how many raptors were coming in with gunshot wounds. The carnage hasn’t diminished. He still gets a steady stream of shot-up owls, ospreys, harriers, buteos, accipiters, falcons, and eagles.

When the thin green line took down the roller flyers, the Audubon Society of Portland initiated an aggressive campaign for stiff penalties. It lobbied the prosecutors, engaged the press, whipped up the membership, and got the mayor of Portland and the president of the Metro Region to write blistering letters prominently displayed on the Internet and quoted in newspapers. All this helped inspire prosecutors to seek the almost unheard-of fine of $10,000.

These and defendants from other states who pled out were placed on probation and some were required to do community service. But there was no jail time. So with the possible exception of the NBRC’s Navarro, who was convicted on 16 MBTA counts and fined $25,000, the raptor killers were bothered only by a business-as-usual expense that wasn’t much more painful than purchasing a shotgun, a pellet gun, ammo, and a few live traps.

DeFazio sent me this e-mail: “I was shocked that members of the pigeon clubs openly bragged in meetings and on publicly accessible websites about killing magnificent raptors, and that they killed these birds with brutal methods that included guns, poisons, suffocation in plastic bags, baiting with pigeons covered in fishing hooks, and luring hawks into glass panels. Upon hearing this, I decided that it was time for federal legislation to stop those who abuse migratory birds.”

The fine was $750, exactly half of the reward Sallinger paid the woman from his organization’s migratory bird protection fund.