Red Baiting

It's not hard to understand why Scott Nelson wants to kill all the blackbirds he sees, including Canada's. Last year he planted 1,500 acres in sunflowers; this year, because of blackbirds, he planted only 500. "We've had nine years of incredibly wet weather, so now every little dimple is standing in cattails," he says. "On top of that a lot of the land here is under easement to the Fish and Wildlife Service, which prevents it from being drained and farmed as it should be. I've been forced to take nearly all the fields near cattails out of production. Last year on half our crop we lost 90 percent to blackbirds, and on the other half we lost 30 percent to 50 percent." When I asked how much that came to, he started punching a calculator. "The number's so big I hate to even see it," he muttered. "Probably about $200,000."

APHIS and the growers have tried all manner of hazing methods. Propane cannons triggered by electric timers sometimes scare redwings; more often they provide perches. Growers attempt to frighten redwings with firecrackers, occasionally burning up their fields in the process. They buzz redwings with airplanes, blast them with sirens, strafe them with shotguns, and frighten them with a sparsely applied pesticide called Avitrol, which makes the few that ingest it squawk and flap around before it kills them. One grower uses hawk kites suspended from helium balloons. Another, having equipped his helicopter with a tape deck and amplifier, hovers over his sunflowers playing Willie Nelson Live in Concert. Even APHIS admits that success at nonlethal redwing control means driving the birds to another field, hopefully the neighbor's.

So lethal control has a special allure. APHIS is proceeding with an environmental-impact study (EIS) in pursuit of its plan to poison 2 million redwings annually for at least three years during the spring migration. As early as 1991, however, the agency published a paper stating that spring baiting probably wouldn't protect sunflowers because the birds disperse widely during breeding season.

In 1993 and 1994 APHIS had tried poisoning blackbirds during the fall migration, when the birds were doing the damage, which would seem a more direct and efficient approach. But in 1996 it published a paper concluding that fall baiting doesn't work. The reason: Blackbirds don't like rice (or any other bait) nearly so well as sunflower seeds. Why should they pick up bad hamburger on the ground when they can get prime rib eye on the sagging seedheads? Then, in 1998, under fierce pressure from powerful, articulate, well-organized, ignorant growers, the agency extended fall baiting to 460 fields.

APHIS argues passionately, though not very convincingly, that it wasn't posturing for the sunflower industry. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service--a traditionally meek outfit that shuns confrontation of any sort--loudly says that posturing was precisely what APHIS was doing, and when Fish and Wildlife shouts, the public better listen. In fact, it has been attacking APHIS with such vitriol that it now tries to have only one agency official talk to the press about blackbird control--Larry Gamble, environmental contaminants coordinator for the mountain-prairie region. "Fall baiting was pure politics," he told me. "We received the environmental assessment the day APHIS started baiting. The researchers would have done a better job, but they were rushed by their superiors. They were supposed to collect data; they didn't. They didn't follow the parts of the label intended to protect nontarget birds [which forbids the use of DRC-1339 when nontargets are eating unpoisoned bait put out to condition blackbirds]. They were supposed to document the number of blackbirds at the bait sites, and they said they'd seen 2,000. Someone asked, 'You only saw that many at each?' And they kind of lowered their heads and said, 'No, that was the total number we counted on all 460 sites.' Then they said the 1998 fall-baiting study was too small and they needed a bigger one. So we acquiesced and gave them the permit because we knew the results would be no different." Fall baiting in 1999 and 2000, which APHIS decided to scale way back, also proved utterly ineffective. Now it has given up on fall baiting, and even the sunflower growers agree it doesn't work.

The spring baiting APHIS is now proposing is a very different concept, in which northbound birds are to be poisoned as they funnel through a narrow migration corridor in South Dakota. APHIS had been doing spring baiting, too--also on a small-scale, experimental basis--from 1994 to 1999. In spring redwings don't have the luxury of ripe sunflower seeds, so poisoned rice looks a whole lot better to them. But spring baiting has its own set of daunting, maybe insurmountable, challenges. For one thing, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act appears not to allow killing birds six months before they depredate. So APHIS may need a special depredation permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service, which, at this writing, seems unlikely to be coughed up. For another, a large percentage of the birds moving through the Dakotas in the spring don't eat sunflower seeds in the fall.

"Spring baiting is more about convenience," says Gamble. "It's another case of APHIS ignoring its own research. They studied these roosts, while the males were migrating, marked the birds with fluorescent paint. It turned out that 70 percent of them nested in Canada, but the damage is caused by local nesting birds. APHIS wants to target females [which migrate after the males]. They assume that the females from these roosts are going to nest in the Dakotas, but there's absolutely no data. During the last four years of [experimental] spring baiting, the nesting population increased by 33 percent, but damage remained the same. So it doesn't appear that nesting population size is related to damage. We've asked them about this and haven't received a response. . . . I'm troubled by a federal agency selling this program to farmers as a tool that works when their own data shows it doesn't."

When APHIS requested a scientific collector's permit under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to kill 2 million blackbirds in the spring of 2000, supposedly as an expanded study, the Fish and Wildlife Service denied the permit. APHIS responded to this affront by abandoning the scientific-research approach and instead seeking a large-scale, operational program via an EIS.

The Fish and Wildlife Service asked scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey's Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, Colorado State University, and New Mexico State University to review the spring-baiting proposal. The scientists, too, had major problems with it.