Red Baiting

It is difficult for swamp Yankees to write objectively about how best to kill red-winged blackbirds for the alleged benefit of agribusiness, particularly when the plan reeks of politics. In our circles, the arrival of the males in late February, or sometimes early March, is important news and no less cause for celebration than the first tentative chimes of spring peepers a few weeks later. In the Northeast, as in most of the nation, redwings serve as palace guards to ancient snappers and their courts of lesser turtles, frogs, muskrats, ducks, herons, pickerel, and trout. Few are the days when, sprung from work or winter, I am not gladdened by at least one redwing, fluttering up from her nest, riding a bobbing cattail, or flashing his scarlet epaulets and shouting "Okareeee!" into the sweet wind.

The scene is different in the Dakotas and western Minnesota, where the arrival of redwings, especially southbound in late summer, elicits only bile. Here, some 40 million strong, they waft across the smooth horizon like unscrubbed coal smoke. Probably, these flights are the nearest thing anyone will ever see to the movement of passenger pigeons. In fact, some scientists speculate that it was the demise of the passenger pigeon, also a ground gleaner, that enabled the irruption of redwings. Assisting in this irruption, of course, have been vast plantations of rice, corn, wheat, and sunflowers.

Sunflower seeds, especially the black kind, half oil, are the most succulent, nutritious food available to redwings. Occasionally assisted by a few yellow-headed blackbirds and common grackles, they will descend like hail on a 50-acre sunflower field, consuming a third, half, or all of the crop, and like hail, there is no predicting where they'll hit next. Most of America's 10,000 sunflower growers are in the Dakotas and Minnesota, where they produce 80 percent of the nation's crop--mostly for oil, some for wild-bird seed, and some for human "confection" (the striped, salted kind one bites and spits). Estimates of blackbird damage to sunflowers vary from about $10 million to $20 million a year, and this doesn't include the enormous cost of trying to drive them away. The loss sounds trivial when one considers that the annual worth of the nation's sunflower crop approaches half a billion dollars, but the damage is not evenly distributed. About 500 growers lose more than a quarter of their crop in any given year.

So the wildlife-damage-control section of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is proposing to poison 2 million blackbirds a year, for at least three years, during their spring migration. APHIS has no reason to believe that this will provide relief for sunflower growers, but the agency has been facing withering political pressure from the growers, who want to see redwing carcasses and who speak through the National Sunflower Association (a funder of APHIS research).

APHIS has found that the damage is caused by local nesting birds but that something like 70 percent of the spring migrants continue on to Canada. Such scientific subtleties, however, are lost on the growers. Scott Nelson, who chaired the National Sunflower Association until July and who has been raising sunflowers in Lakota, North Dakota, for 17 years, puts it this way: "If you kill one blackbird, I do know that that one will not eat your sunflowers." Blackbird control--as it has been practiced on a limited, experimental basis in the past and as it is being proposed on a large-scale "operational" basis for the future--provides a fine example of how a good, effective agency that employs excellent scientists can be coerced by special interests into chasing its tail. There are, however, at least two alternatives to killing blackbirds that promise genuine relief to sunflower growers.

Any critique of APHIS needs to be prefaced with some facts about the agency--facts a large element of the American public doesn't want to know. Herewith, some of the most important.

• Most animal-damage control done by APHIS is nonlethal.
• Most animal-damage control done by APHIS is innovative and effective.
• A great deal of the agency's work is directed at endangered-species recovery. There have been stunning successes.
• APHIS doesn't casually festoon the American landscape with biocides. In controlled experiments it has been killing blackbirds with rice laced with DRC-1339, a short-lived, rapidly metabolized poison with a long track record of effectiveness, safety, and selectivity. For 30 years DRC-1339 has been successfully used on ravens, crows, pigeons, starlings, cowbirds, grackles, red-winged blackbirds, magpies, and sundry gulls. Because it is quickly metabolized, the possibility of secondary poisoning (in which a bird or mammal dies from eating a stricken blackbird) is remote. Direct mortality of nontargets is probably inevitable but, in this case at least, utterly unacceptable in any quantity because the proposed program is basically a political gesture that is unlikely to succeed. APHIS minimizes the threat by 1) using caged redwings to decoy wild ones; 2) "pre-baiting" an area with unpoisoned rice, so that when the hot bait goes out, the birds stream in and consume huge amounts, leaving little for nontargets; and 3) keeping baited areas small. To annually take out 2 million blackbirds, APHIS would have to bait a maximum of only 50 acres a year and more likely less than 30.



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