The headline of the Wall Street Journal's column dealing with Catherine's work was inelegant but eye-catching; "New Scarecrows for Vineyards: Car Dealer's Inflatable 'Dancing' Tube Men." * It reported how Dr. Catherine Lindell, an ecologist at Michigan State University was selected as the principal investigator of a US Department of Agriculture multi year Specialty Crop Research Initiative - "Limiting Bird Damage in Fruit Crops." USDA allocated $2 million to academic researchers to discover sustainable strategies to limit and control bird damage in a $15 billion industry - specifically losses to blueberries, cherries, wine grapes and "Honeycrisp" apples in Michigan, New York and the Northwest. The Initiative called for integrating economic, biological and consumer information in order to "provide producers with cost effective, environmentally sustainable bird management strategies." Dr. Lindell's team includes 20 researchers from three regions - the Northeast, Great Lakes and the Pacific Northwest.
With enormous pride and boring repetition I had informed friends, "My daughter has been awarded a grant from USDA to discover ways to prevent bird damage to fruit crops . . ." All I approached seemed pleased. But the responses I received from three male friends with strong, conservative proclivities surprised me. Each responded invoking a final solution with the same phrase; "Kill them!" Such a stark, yet truly simple idea for dealing with birds eating fruit had not occurred to me.
I had been trained in "birding" by Dr. Lindell and worked for her many times as a "field assistant" in Costa Rica. (But perhaps you have already seen my name in a footnote or two in an avian scientific journal!) My job involved hauling poles, rebar and mist nets (and sometimes my son-in-law's GPS equipment) in total darkness, sometimes clutching a flashlight with my teeth - "Dad, watch out for snakes near the stream!" - into rainforest or abandoned coffee fields. Nets had to be erected before 5:00 AM. Then we carefully extracted birds that flew into the nets taking them to Dr. Lindell who would treat them to a physical exam, perhaps tagging and quick release. In late morning the nets, rebar and poles were collected and hauled out. Every single bird was important to Catherine - and her crew. In my hands I have held some of the most exquisite life forms on earth. To simply touch a Brown billed Scythebill, or have fingers chewed by a Buff throated Saltator or pooped on by a Blue-crowned Manakin - these were to me great privileges and high honors. Simply killing birds would not have occurred to me.
But it has been thought of by others and even tried. Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists initiated the "Great Leap Forward" circa 1958 - 1962, in order to rapidly expand the industrial and agricultural production of a poverty stricken nation. To this end they implemented the "Great Sparrow Campaign" also known as the "Kill a Sparrow Campaign" and the "Four Pests Campaign." The principal objective of these campaigns was the elimination of the English Tree Sparrow that in China eats prodigious amounts of rice and other grains. Other pests to be exterminated were rats, flies and mosquitoes. Methods included village populations banging noisemakers forcing birds to fly. When exhausted from flight and coming within stick range they were killed. The use of poisons and pesticides was also widespread. The "Kill a Sparrow" program was enormously successful and ". . . resulted in the near extinction of the birds in China." ** But by April 1960, the commissars realized - too late - that sparrows also ate locust and this now flourishing population swarmed across China devouring everything in its path. Rice yields declined. The ecological catastrophe created by the Great Leap Forward was now underway. Too late the word came down from Mao - "Stop killing the birds!" The sparrow was removed from the list of four pests and replaced by the bedbug.
The policies of the GLF included massive deforestation projects, the utterly irresponsible misuse of pesticides, poisons and "backyard steel furnaces" that ultimately produced tons of unusable, worthless metal. But the GLF did create what is now regarded as the greatest famine in the nation's history. The number of Chinese who starved to death as a result of its policies range from 20 to 40 million. ***
Early morning sun cut through the mist shrouding the coffee trees in Las Alturas, Costa Rica. The nets twelve feet high, stretched in a line between two rows of trees for about two hundred yards. From a net I had just extracted a yellowish flycatcher also known as a Scale crested Pigmy Tyrant - a beautiful little bird with an attitude. Its legs trapped between my index and middle fingers the Tyrant stared up at me - angry. It then began an attack hammering my thumb like a woodpecker. At that moment on my hand precisely behind the Tyrant's head landed a thick, black insect. The flycatcher's head blurred as it swiveled 180 degrees and scoffed up the treat - it's never a bad time to eat. With head feathers now rakishly askew it returned to punishing my thumb. Eventually it stopped and looked up.
"Had enough? Give up?"
* Jon Kamp, Wall Street Journal Nov. 28, 2013 p.1.
** Frank Dikotter, Mao's Great Famine. 2010. See Wikipedia; The Four Pests Campaign.
*** Summers-Smith, In Search of Sparrows 1992. Also see Dikotter.
Photos - Brown billed Scythebill, Dr. Catherine Lindell. English Sparrows, Wikipedia.
