So it goes...
Some things never change.
(Listen to the radio version here.)
I’ve been producing “For the Birds” since 1986—that’s almost four decades now—and year after year I’ve been heartbroken all over again about the same things hurting birds.
From the start, I’ve emphasized how critical it is for hunters to switch from lead to non-toxic ammo. The battle to get waterfowl hunters to switch was a long, hard one. The NRA and many hunters resisted belligerently despite the fact that many of their most beloved ducks and geese were being poisoned after ingesting lead in the mucky bottoms of ponds, lakes, and streams. That battle was over just about the time this program began—starting with the 1987-88 hunting season, the ban on the use of lead shot for hunting waterfowl was phased-in, becoming nationwide in 1991.
Yet many hunters, and of course the NRA, are to this day demanding that the ban never be extended to upland birds nor to any other forms of hunting, despite the well-established facts that many gallinaceous birds, doves, and songbirds pick up spent lead pellets as grit; that the gut piles left by deer hunters are ridden with lead that poisons Bald Eagles as well as other scavengers; and that a great many hunters and their families ingest lead particles themselves in venison. In divisive times, an “us versus them” mentality can cause people to act against their own self-interest just to “own the libs,” even when it also involves exposing their own families to lead.
So every year I get heartbreaking news releases from rehab centers treating yet more eagles, like a distressing report of a dying eagle posted Monday on Facebook from Humane Indiana. I especially follow news from Minnesota’s Raptor Center and Wisconsin’s Raptor Education Group. Every year they receive a disturbing number of birds, especially large, conspicuous Bald Eagles, suffering from lead poisoning, numbers spiking in the aftermath of deer season.
Many state DNRs provide all kinds of hunter education about the issue, including how bullets fragment in a “snowstorm,” contaminated deer meat with microscopic lead fragments many inches from the entry wound, the tiny particle size increasing the likelihood of uptake into the bloodstream. Many hunters have taken this to heart, but a great many stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the danger. As long as the NRA gets huge contributions with their scare tactics about Second Amendment rights, we’ll continue to see dead and dying Bald Eagles every year even as many thousands of smaller, less conspicuous birds continue to die out of sight.
We had a huge Great Gray Owl invasion in the winter of 2004–2005. I didn’t write much about baiting owls—that is, setting out live rodents or pulling fake ones on a fishing line to draw the owls closer (practices that weren’t on my radar back then)—but in subsequent years I’ve learned more about people tossing out mice and gerbils to get closeup photos. This is exceptionally dangerous for the baited owls, drawing them closer to roads (the number one cause of owl deaths during that invasion was from car collisions), acclimating them to humans (again drawing them to roads), subjecting them to salmonella (present in a dangerous percentage of pet store rodents), and other dangers.
In 2014, I wrote a long, detailed blogpost and some radio programs (Part 1 and Part 2) about the practice. Yet, discouragingly, despite strong admonishments about how dangerous and unethical this practice is from knowledgeable people and organizations such as the Raptor Center, the Owl Foundation, the Raptor Education Group, and Project SNOWstorm, many unethical photographers continue to do this. I had reports just this January about one unethical birder luring a Northern Shrike closer with a white mouse at the bog.
I had gerbils, hamsters, and white mice as a child, so the cruelty of baiting for the rodent as well as the owl distresses me, but I guess in a country where there isn’t a huge outcry about the Texas National Guard blocking Border Patrol agents from rescuing a drowning mother and her small children, there certainly won’t be an outcry over someone tossing a mouse on the snow and, if the shrike misses, grabbing the little rodent and tossing it back into a cage to endure the same treatment again and, maybe, again.
But you’d think, with all the information we have about how dangerous baiting is for the owl itself, that the practice would disappear. Sadly, you’d be wrong.
