USDA plans to poison 6 million blackbirds to cut sunflower losses

Tom Meersman
Star Tribune
Published Sept. 29, 2001

The U.S. Agriculture Department, rejecting concerns about the environmental consequences, is moving ahead with a plan to poison about 6 million blackbirds to reduce damage to sunflower crops in the Upper Midwest.

USDA officials have finished a preliminary environmental report, to be published by mid-October, that recommends poisoning 2 million birds a year beginning in 2003.

Poisoned rice would be placed in east-central South Dakota fields during spring migration. Officials say the program is one of the largest bird-killing efforts undertaken by the Agriculture Department.

The proposal has pitted environmentalists against farmers and has put the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at odds with the Agriculture Department. The debate is far from over because the plan must undergo further environmental review.

Farmers say blackbirds destroy up to $10 million worth of sunflowers each year in North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota.

Most damage occurs just before harvest as huge flocks of birds migrate south for winter.

Environmentalists and some government agencies say the blackbird-control project may not save crops, but probably will kill thousands of other birds and wildlife.

The program aims to kill red-winged blackbirds, yellow-headed blackbirds and common grackles, which are estimated to number 34 million in the region.

Earlier trials

The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), an arm of the Agriculture Department, proposed the program earlier this year after conducting smaller-scale efforts in the Dakotas from 1994 to 1999.

Phil Mastrangelo, director of the wildlife services program for APHIS in North Dakota, said those trials killed relatively few "non-target" species.

Under the current plan, he said, federal officials would put brown rice coated with poison on about 15 to 20 two-acre plots in east-central South Dakota each spring.

The strategy, he said, is to offer the poison bait to blackbirds flying north in late March or early April. The birds migrate between the Gulf Coast and Mexico and the Dakotas, Minnesota and Canada.

The poison, called DRC-1339, kills by shutting down the birds' kidneys. Death usually occurs within 12 to 36 hours. Mastrangelo said the birds probably would die in their roosting areas in marshes.

"Blackbirds are more susceptible to the active ingredient [of the poison] than other birds," he said. "One grain of treated rice will be enough to kill a blackbird." Because the poisoned rice is mixed with clean rice in a 1 to 25 ratio, Mastrangelo said it is unlikely that other birds, especially larger ones, would die from eating the mixture.

Environment concerns

The proposal has raised concerns at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and among environmentalists. Perry Plumart, director of government relations for the National Audubon Society, said the poison will kill other species besides blackbirds, including grassland birds whose populations have been declining in recent years.

Mike McEnroe, a supervisory wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in North Dakota, said his agency is not convinced that the poisoning will be effective.

"We don't know if the birds they'd be killing are the ones that are eating the seed in the Dakotas, or whether those birds were on their way to nest in Canada," he said.

Wildlife officials have reported that 68 species of birds other than blackbirds have been observed in or near sunflower fields in the spring, including 32 species that eat grain. The agency also says little is known about what will happen to predators that might eat poisoned blackbirds.

Defending the plan

APHIS officials have said that scavengers are not likely to be poisoned because the active ingredient in the poison decomposes rapidly, and is mostly gone before the blackbird is dead. Officials also have said the concern about disease is minimal because the poisoned birds would die in widely scattered locations.

Debate about those and other issues will continue as APHIS prepares a environmental impact study -- this fall and winter.

Larry Kleingartner, executive director of the National Sunflower Association in Bismarck, N.D., said that some sunflower growers are beginning to switch crops because of the large losses to blackbirds. Farmers have used high-powered rifles, propane cannons, electronic noise devices and even aircraft to scare birds away, he said, but the measures are not enough to prevent significant crop damage.

He estimated that blackbirds consume 2 percent of the $315 million sunflower crop in the Upper Midwest each year. "If everybody had a little bit of the loss it would be fine," he said. "But it's not unusual for producers to have 25 to 30 percent losses or more in a given year."

Last year North Dakota produced 44 percent of the nation's sunflower crop, South Dakota 25 percent, and western Minnesota 2 percent, Kleingartner said. About 70 percent of the sunflower seeds are processed into oil, he said, and the rest is used for human food, birdseed and other products.

Kleingartner said that crop losses seem to be growing, and that a wet climate cycle in North Dakota has increased the size and number of wetlands where an increasing number of blackbirds are able to live.

"We're not a bunch of bubbas out here looking to kill stuff," Kleingartner said. "We wish we didn't have this problem but we do, and it's a serious problem."