I wasn't always a birder. In the beginning, I just wanted to be one.
It started with an undergrad Ornithology class at the University of Montana. Every week, my classmates and I would trail a small cadre of teaching assistants through the woods outside of town. We would strain to hear and see the birds that seemed to flit constantly through their collective awareness. They were forever pausing, smiling, closing their eyes. "Golden-crowned kinglet!" one would murmur, pointing up. "Hear the tsee, tsee, tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee?"
I heard it a little bit, sometimes. But it was hard. They all sounded the same. When it came down to it, they all looked the same, too. At that point in my life, birds varied only according to color scheme; therefore, an American robin was a black-headed grosbeak was a spotted towhee.
Still, I did well in Ornithology class, and soon afterward bought my first pair of binoculars. They were Leupolds, and they cost me nearly $400. With these, I mused, I would become a birder, the intellectual peer of my former TAs, a girl who, wherever she went, could name all that flew.
But I was broke. For weeks after my Leupold purchase, I thought about the myriad more sensible things I could have done with the money. I took my new binoculars out a time or two, and they were nice. But they weren't making me a good birder. Walking through a Ponderosa pine forest with a coworker, I still turned the white tail flashes of a dark-eyed junco into a vesper sparrow. The western tanagers singing in the trees overhead were still robins to me.
I exchanged my Leupolds for a $150 pair of Bushnells. They were more my speed, I reasoned.
And then, I forgot about birding.
Still, I did well in Ornithology class, and soon afterward bought my first pair of binoculars. They were Leupolds, and they cost me nearly $400. With these, I mused, I would become a birder, the intellectual peer of my former TAs, a girl who, wherever she went, could name all that flew.
But I was broke. For weeks after my Leupold purchase, I thought about the myriad more sensible things I could have done with the money. I took my new binoculars out a time or two, and they were nice. But they weren't making me a good birder. Walking through a Ponderosa pine forest with a coworker, I still turned the white tail flashes of a dark-eyed junco into a vesper sparrow. The western tanagers singing in the trees overhead were still robins to me.
I exchanged my Leupolds for a $150 pair of Bushnells. They were more my speed, I reasoned.
And then, I forgot about birding.
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| Northern mockingbird and greater white-fronted geese. Photo courtesy of Susanjoy Aronson. |
Ten years later, in California, I started a job as a biological consultant. In field surveys, I was expected to identify, as best I could, all the plants and animals I encountered. Plant identification overwhelmed and saddened me. There were just so many species to know. And at most of our field sites, even when I got something right, it was only to learn that it was never meant to be there in the first place. On any given day, invasive species dominated the landscape I roamed, and my accompanying plant list.
But birds. Birds were something else altogether. Birds were colorful and airborne, ubiquitous, singing and jazz-handing their way through the even the dreariest of landscapes. In barren fields, there were horned larks, rising and falling all as a unit, like sixteenth notes on a musical staff. On construction sites, there were mockingbirds with their noisy medley of car alarms. In muddy feedlots, there were cattle egrets. In cities, there were house finches, the males pigmented according to their appetites, mostly red, but sometimes orange or yellow. Aided by an avian savant coworker, as well as a new $150 pair of Alpen binoculars, I learned my birds.
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| Male house finch. Photo courtesy of Susanjoy Aronson. |
The MBTA, and its various amendments, codify four treaties to which the United States is party. These treaties--with Canada, Mexico, Russia, and Japan--responded to a string of human-caused avian extinctions by obligating the signatory nations to impose protections for birds. In the absence of a valid permit, the MBTA makes it illegal "by any means or in any manner, to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill... any migratory bird." The term migratory bird is somewhat vestigial at this point. Over the years, the MBTA has been expanded to cover almost all native birds, regardless of whether a particular bird actually travels with the seasons.
With a species list now numbering 1,026, the MBTA protects just about any bird you can think of. For starters, every bird named or pictured in this post. Beyond that, nearly every bird in your yard--the jays, the crows, the blackbirds. The mourning doves that nest in the shrub right outside your front door. The hummingbirds that sip from your feeder. The owls you hear at night.
With a species list now numbering 1,026, the MBTA protects just about any bird you can think of. For starters, every bird named or pictured in this post. Beyond that, nearly every bird in your yard--the jays, the crows, the blackbirds. The mourning doves that nest in the shrub right outside your front door. The hummingbirds that sip from your feeder. The owls you hear at night.
And it's a good thing. According to the Audubon Society, the MBTA has, over its hundred-year history, saved the lives of billions of individual birds, and has prevented the extinction of such iconic species as the snowy egret, wood duck, and sandhill crane.
In the beginning, the MBTA was enforced only against poachers. But in the 1970s, federal prosecutors began charging oil, gas, timber, mining, and utility companies with unintentionally killing birds during their operational activities. Although the law has generally only been enforced for repeated such "incidental take" violations, it has for decades served as a powerful incentive for companies to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to keep their bird deaths to a minimum.
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| Sandhill cranes. Photo courtesy of Susanjoy Aronson. |
In the beginning, the MBTA was enforced only against poachers. But in the 1970s, federal prosecutors began charging oil, gas, timber, mining, and utility companies with unintentionally killing birds during their operational activities. Although the law has generally only been enforced for repeated such "incidental take" violations, it has for decades served as a powerful incentive for companies to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to keep their bird deaths to a minimum.
For industries that kill a lot of birds, this makes a big difference. For example, an estimated 64 million birds per year are killed by power lines. This number would be even higher if it weren't for the MBTA, which prompts electricity companies to adopt bird-friendly design strategies like proper circuit spacing and "perch deterrent" structures on distribution poles.
And when industrial disasters happen, the MBTA may be leveraged to ensure the responsible party cleans up their mess. Violation of the MBTA was among the charges brought against the Exxon Corporation for the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, and the BP Corporation for the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010. The millions of dollars in criminal fines collected from these companies--in the case of BP, $4 billion--went a long way toward undoing the damage caused by the spills. Over $2.5 billion of BP's criminal fines went to the National Wildlife Federation for gulf restoration projects. Other settlements by BP included mandatory contributions to a fund intended to help migratory birds and other wildlife affected by the spill.
Although interpreting the MBTA's prohibitions to include incidental take of birds has been the federal government's practice for over 40 years, it wasn't formalized by a presidential administration until January 10, 2017. As one of its last acts, President Obama's Department of the Interior issued a legal opinion that synthesized all of the MBTA's legislative and case history up to that point, and concluded that the "prohibitions of the MBTA apply to take incidentally and proximately caused by any activity."
Enter Trump and his toady-on-horseback, Ryan Zinke. Just before Christmas, in its new role as principal saboteur of America's longstanding environmental protections, the Department of the Interior permanently withdrew its January 2017 memorandum, and issued an antithetical replacement. Drawing on the same legislative and case history that had been considered in the Obama-era memo, the new memo relied on a common law definition of "take" to conclude that the MBTA "applies only to direct and affirmative purposeful actions that reduce migratory birds... by killing or capturing, to human control."
And with that, industry breathed a collective sigh of relief. It was its sixtieth such sigh in 2017. You'd think they'd be hyperventilating by now.
With the Trump administration refusing to prosecute incidental take under the MBTA, where does that leave the birds? Up a sludge-filled creek without a paddle. Measures to reduce bird mortality, or to compensate for mortality that has already happened, can be costly. If there is one thing big business is trying to avoid, it is cost--of the monetary variety, in any case. Ecological costs aren't as big of a deal. They are less immediate, less tangible. Depending on your media diet, they might even be fake. At any rate, they are nothing to worry the shareholders over. Nothing to disrupt the Dow.
I consider my media diet to be pretty nutritious. I subscribe to the online edition of the New York Times, and peruse it via a phone app several times a day. I cross-reference other sources now and then, like the Washington Post and the L.A. Times. I sometimes check out Fox News, but only for shits and giggles, or to remind myself to stay infuriated, or both.
The procedural gutting of the MBTA came and went without my noticing. Every day, the New York Times helped me refine my understanding of #MeToo celebrity offenses. I learned all about every player, every personality, every motive involved in our nation's ephemeral government shutdown. I stayed up to date on Trump tweets. I got all the breaking news on our president's past affair with a porn star. But I did not hear a single word about migratory birds.
To date, to the best of my Googling, the New York Times has yet to produce an article about the December 2017 blow to the MBTA. The publication's only mention of the incident appears here, in a regularly updated list of the Trump Administration's environmental overhauls. Overhaul number 30 refers to the administration's having "rolled back an Obama-era policy aimed at protecting migratory birds." Reducing the prosecution of incidental take under the MBTA to "an Obama-era policy" dangerously oversimplifies the story. It's almost like they lifted a headline from Fox News.
As luck would have it, I am a biological consultant. That is how I finally came to hear about the Department of the Interior's new anti-bird philosophy. My boss mentioned it to me on the phone one day, almost in passing. He probably wasn't prepared for how angry I would get. He reminded me that in California, all is not lost, because state law also protects native birds.
Currently, though, I am in Kentucky, where the default is no protection for anything. Every day, I watch birds still new to me, still magical--cardinals, blue jays, Carolina wrens, white-throated sparrows--hop around the yard, unsuspecting. For these species, and many others, the worst is yet to come.
There are bird lovers on the front lines. On January 10, 2018, a group of former Department of the Interior officials, hailing from all previous administrations since Richard Nixon, formally decried Interior's about-face on the MBTA, and asked it to reconsider its position. And environmental advocacy groups are preparing for battle. Hopefully, with enough pressure on our legislators--and on the corporations we support with our dollars--we can keep Interior's new policy from becoming a death knell for migratory birds.
For Bead 27, I am asking the New York Times why they have failed to cover this important environmental story, and am encouraging them to tell it, even if belatedly. Should I hear back from their editors, I will update this post to reflect that.
And when industrial disasters happen, the MBTA may be leveraged to ensure the responsible party cleans up their mess. Violation of the MBTA was among the charges brought against the Exxon Corporation for the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, and the BP Corporation for the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010. The millions of dollars in criminal fines collected from these companies--in the case of BP, $4 billion--went a long way toward undoing the damage caused by the spills. Over $2.5 billion of BP's criminal fines went to the National Wildlife Federation for gulf restoration projects. Other settlements by BP included mandatory contributions to a fund intended to help migratory birds and other wildlife affected by the spill.
 |
| Brown pelican. Photo courtesy of Susanjoy Aronson. |
Although interpreting the MBTA's prohibitions to include incidental take of birds has been the federal government's practice for over 40 years, it wasn't formalized by a presidential administration until January 10, 2017. As one of its last acts, President Obama's Department of the Interior issued a legal opinion that synthesized all of the MBTA's legislative and case history up to that point, and concluded that the "prohibitions of the MBTA apply to take incidentally and proximately caused by any activity."
Enter Trump and his toady-on-horseback, Ryan Zinke. Just before Christmas, in its new role as principal saboteur of America's longstanding environmental protections, the Department of the Interior permanently withdrew its January 2017 memorandum, and issued an antithetical replacement. Drawing on the same legislative and case history that had been considered in the Obama-era memo, the new memo relied on a common law definition of "take" to conclude that the MBTA "applies only to direct and affirmative purposeful actions that reduce migratory birds... by killing or capturing, to human control."
And with that, industry breathed a collective sigh of relief. It was its sixtieth such sigh in 2017. You'd think they'd be hyperventilating by now.
With the Trump administration refusing to prosecute incidental take under the MBTA, where does that leave the birds? Up a sludge-filled creek without a paddle. Measures to reduce bird mortality, or to compensate for mortality that has already happened, can be costly. If there is one thing big business is trying to avoid, it is cost--of the monetary variety, in any case. Ecological costs aren't as big of a deal. They are less immediate, less tangible. Depending on your media diet, they might even be fake. At any rate, they are nothing to worry the shareholders over. Nothing to disrupt the Dow.
 |
| Turkey vulture. Photo courtesy of Susanjoy Aronson. |
I consider my media diet to be pretty nutritious. I subscribe to the online edition of the New York Times, and peruse it via a phone app several times a day. I cross-reference other sources now and then, like the Washington Post and the L.A. Times. I sometimes check out Fox News, but only for shits and giggles, or to remind myself to stay infuriated, or both.
The procedural gutting of the MBTA came and went without my noticing. Every day, the New York Times helped me refine my understanding of #MeToo celebrity offenses. I learned all about every player, every personality, every motive involved in our nation's ephemeral government shutdown. I stayed up to date on Trump tweets. I got all the breaking news on our president's past affair with a porn star. But I did not hear a single word about migratory birds.
To date, to the best of my Googling, the New York Times has yet to produce an article about the December 2017 blow to the MBTA. The publication's only mention of the incident appears here, in a regularly updated list of the Trump Administration's environmental overhauls. Overhaul number 30 refers to the administration's having "rolled back an Obama-era policy aimed at protecting migratory birds." Reducing the prosecution of incidental take under the MBTA to "an Obama-era policy" dangerously oversimplifies the story. It's almost like they lifted a headline from Fox News.
 |
| Wilson's phalaropes. Photo courtesy of Susanjoy Aronson. |
As luck would have it, I am a biological consultant. That is how I finally came to hear about the Department of the Interior's new anti-bird philosophy. My boss mentioned it to me on the phone one day, almost in passing. He probably wasn't prepared for how angry I would get. He reminded me that in California, all is not lost, because state law also protects native birds.
Currently, though, I am in Kentucky, where the default is no protection for anything. Every day, I watch birds still new to me, still magical--cardinals, blue jays, Carolina wrens, white-throated sparrows--hop around the yard, unsuspecting. For these species, and many others, the worst is yet to come.
 |
| House finch nest. Photo courtesy of Susanjoy Aronson. |
There are bird lovers on the front lines. On January 10, 2018, a group of former Department of the Interior officials, hailing from all previous administrations since Richard Nixon, formally decried Interior's about-face on the MBTA, and asked it to reconsider its position. And environmental advocacy groups are preparing for battle. Hopefully, with enough pressure on our legislators--and on the corporations we support with our dollars--we can keep Interior's new policy from becoming a death knell for migratory birds.
For Bead 27, I am asking the New York Times why they have failed to cover this important environmental story, and am encouraging them to tell it, even if belatedly. Should I hear back from their editors, I will update this post to reflect that.
