Red Baiting

But APHIS defends its position. "There's a difference between a researcher who has worked in this field for 20 years and outside reviewing scientists who are not very familiar with migration patterns of blackbirds," remarked George Linz, APHIS's proj-ect leader for blackbird research on the Great Plains, when I read him some of the comments of his critics. "I do not 'ignore' any data, or I would not be the project leader of this very tough problem. It's the interpretation of the data where we differ." Linz is a superb scientist with a well-earned reputation for professionalism and honesty. Moreover, he's a member of every major bird group, as well as Audubon, and his farm is a forest of nest boxes. He likes wildlife, but he understands it, too, and that takes considerably more doing. When I asked him if political pressure had pushed his superiors into fall and spring blackbird baiting against their better judgment, he said this: "Well, every agency has a special-interest group it responds to. The Fish and Wildlife Service has theirs. Ours is agriculture. I'll let it go at that."

Linz is a researcher. Researchers love to do research; setting time limits, using it to frame management, and making decisions about whether or not to proceed with major wildlife-damage-control programs is up to someone else.

In addition to understanding the good work APHIS does, environmentalists need to perceive its failures in the correct context. Bending with the political breeze may not be excusable for a resource agency, but it is universal. The Fish and Wildlife Service, formerly the parent of APHIS's wildlife-damage-control section, is no less guilty. For instance, in 1996 it called in APHIS to clear a 125-acre beachhead with DRC-1339 to help black skimmers, threatened piping plovers, and terns on gull-plagued, 7,600-acre Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge, at the elbow of Cape Cod. Before 1961 there had been no nesting gulls on the refuge; in 1995 there were 5,200 pairs of herring gulls and 7,350 pairs of greater black-backs. As requested, APHIS took out 15 percent of the gulls, killing no nontargets in the process. That year nesting pairs of common terns soared from 231 to 694, least terns from 28 to 103, roseate terns (endangered) from zero to 3, piping plovers from 14 to 20, and black skimmers from zero to 5. But the public tends not to distinguish between light-colored seabirds smaller than a bread box, valuing all equally, regardless of species or abundance. So badly did the Fish and Wildlife Service get beaten up by animal-rights advocates and even mainstream environmentalists that it quit using DRC-1339 at the refuge. Now, at enormous cost in man-hours, it harasses nesting gulls daily on 75 acres and punctures eggs on 50. While this works, too, resources desperately needed by wildlife are being siphoned off merely to appease ecological illiterates.

I am beginning to suspect that the travails of APHIS in the Upper Midwest are due not just to its own timidity but also to the simple fact that reducing damage to sunflowers by killing blackbirds is not practical, maybe not even possible. By contrast, protecting livestock from wolves in Minnesota is a piece of cake (see Living With Wolves). "Fifteen years ago farmers could handle 10 percent to 15 percent loss to blackbirds," says Larry Kleingartner, executive director of the National Sunflower Association. "But in today's economic environment, it's not in the cards. So they're going to other crops." Maybe that's just the way it has to be.

Still, there are measures that might help. The most promising--an alternative that will be listed in the EIS--is herbiciding more of the cattail monocultures blackbirds roost in, doubling treated areas from about 4,000 to 8,000 acres a year. Maybe even the 8,000 acres should be doubled. At something like $60 per acre, the program would be expensive but an infinitely better investment than spring baiting. "I'm a big believer in cattail reduction, because it addresses the problem at hand," says Linz. "The damage is in the fall, and it occurs because a lot of birds congregate in wetlands that have some water in them. The reason the program's in place is that we do think it disperses damage."

With about 750,000 acres of cattails in North Dakota alone, 8,000 or 16,000 acres wouldn't be missed, even if they were an ecological asset. But they aren't. What makes cattail reduction even more attractive is that at the same time it destroys redwing habitat, it restores lost biodiversity. Most of the cattails that provide roosts for redwings in the Upper Midwest are an invasive hybrid of the narrow-leafed variety, which moved east into the Dakotas about 60 years ago, and the native common cattail. The herbicide used--glyphosate--is relatively innocuous and used in low concentrations, posing little threat to other organisms. "We have no concerns about toxicity," comments Michael McEnroe, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service's refuge division. In fact, the service has retained APHIS to use glyphosate on its own waterfowl production areas.

In one experiment APHIS found that 17 wetlands choked with cattail monocultures harbored 197 dabbling ducks and 6 diving ducks. During the two post-treatment years, those wetlands harbored 782 dabblers and 244 divers. In other wetlands, populations of six classes of invertebrates remained stable after herbiciding, but gastropods increased. The Fish and Wildlife Service did have some concerns about species that depend on thick cattail cover, mainly marsh wrens and rails, so on marshes that it doesn't control, it talked APHIS into leaving at least 30 percent of the cattails, thereby creating a mosaic of vegetation and open water not unlike the natural marshes of old. On its own marshes, the Fish and Wildlife Service welcomed blackbird control. "Fortunately, we've been able to partner with APHIS," declares Roger Hollevoet, district director of the Devils Lake Waterfowl Management District, in northeastern North Dakota. "We get free management that way--a good interspersion of cattails and open water. First we see a reduction in blackbirds. Then we start seeing many of the wading birds coming back, then waterfowl--both divers and dabblers--and, finally, bitterns, black-crowned night herons, great blues, and black terns. We might displace some marsh wrens and some sora and Virginia rails, but they still have plenty of habitat along the fringes."

In Venezuela, where dickcissels ravage crops of rice and sorghum, farmers had been getting no relief by poisoning the birds by the hundreds of thousands on their nocturnal roosts. Now, under a cooperative venture with the Venezuelan Audubon Society and several universities, they've agreed to hold off on the pesticides and try nonlethal alternatives. "There is no silver bullet," points out Alejandro Grajal, Audubon's vice-president for Latin America and the Caribbean. And most of the alternatives being tested wouldn't work on blackbirds. But one strategy--insurance--holds tremendous promise for sunflower growers. Like dickcissels, blackbirds touch down with no predictability, sparing most farmers in any given year but blitzing a few. While funding has yet to be procured, an insurance-style model is being set up in Venezuela in which the farmers' co-op, with the support of government and nongovernment organizations, would compensate farmers who suffer major losses. In our Upper Midwest, such a system would probably be far more cost-effective than trying to effect population control on superabundant blackbirds, especially if it were combined with aggressive cattail reduction.

After Audubon published a short piece on blackbird poisoning (Bye-Bye Blackbirds), a reader wrote us expressing dismay that he was "supporting this heinous behavior by Dakota farmers and the federal government" by buying "hundreds of pounds of sunflower seeds a year."

But I don't see anyone behaving heinously--just stupidly and cravenly. A national boycott, as the reader urged, would be ineffective because only a small fraction of the crop is sold as bird food. Instead, I suggest putting the same kind of pressure on APHIS that it gets from the National Sunflower Association. Under the EIS process, the agency is asking for your comments. Don't disappoint it.