Fuzz, p.16
Fuzz, page 16
Robinson shared his catchphrase for it. “Natality is more effective than mortality,” he said to the interviewer. Catchy, but a bit abstruse. She changed the subject. He went right back to it. Here I pictured him leaning forward in his chair. “Natality is more effective than mortality,” he repeated. Whereupon the interviewer said she had no more questions, and they looked at some old photos and marveled at how a colleague named Johnson Neff used to have hair.
Another thing I ran across in the oral histories was a mention of the practice of overestimating flock sizes in order to secure federal funds for bird control. The center’s head of bird depredation control was explaining to the interviewer how he’d estimate the size of a flock as it flew between two points overhead. The technique wasn’t perfect, but it was, he said, better than just making up a big number, as some states were doing. “ ‘There’s twenty million birds! We need more money.’ [Chuckles.] Yeah, the farmers would do the same thing. ‘I got two hundred thousand birds in my field!’ I need more! [Chuckles.]”
It wasn’t even clear, in the case of blackbirds eating rice, that the take represented a significant loss. By the estimates of a 1971 Fish and Wildlife Service Resource publication, the average loss per acre was between half a bushel of rice—by volume, about four gallons—and just over one bushel. That is less, the document goes on to say, than the amount that would typically fall to the ground as a combine harvester moved through the crop (a loss of 1.6 to 8 bushels per acre).
And then there’s this: birds provide significant pest and weed control services to the farmer. Based on an examination of nearly five thousand blackbird stomachs, Foster Ellenborough Lascelles Beal of the Bureau of Biological Survey (a forerunner of the NWRC) had this to say: “Judged by the contents of its stomach alone, the redwing is most decidedly a useful bird. The service rendered by the destruction of noxious insects and weed seeds far outweighs the damage due to its consumption of grain.” The report was signed by none other than the secretary of agriculture. Today you have to go to organic farming organizations† to find this sort of information. (The Wild Farm Alliance, for instance: Based on stomach contents, “each Tufted Titmouse is worth about $2,900 to the pecan industry.”)
Bird-bombing was soon abandoned, Dolbeer wrote in the blackbird book, “for various obvious reasons: labor, expense, hazards involved, large rate of crippling … and lack of effectiveness in solving problems.” It was odd, then, that the Arkansas bombing experiment report concluded with a thumbs-up. The results, stated researchers Johnson Neff (Neff! With hair!) and Mortimer Brooke Meanley Jr., indicated “the effectiveness and economy of roost bombing.”
Were Meanley and Neff, like Joe Browder, simply men with a hatred of crop-raiding birds? And/or a love of setting off bombs? Bird-bombing seemed to peak after World War II. I began to wonder if it was the product of some lingering zest for combat, some wartime hangover of misplaced patriotic zeal. An obituary for Meanley put that notion to rest. His World War II service took the form of rehabilitating soldiers by taking them out into nature. “He would comment on the unbelievable good fortune of meeting his military commitment by taking soldiers on bird walks.” Both Meanley and Neff were respected ornithologists.
How, then, did this gentle bird lover, author of Natural History of the Swainson’s Warbler, end up dynamiting blackbirds in an Arkansas bayou? The same way, I suppose, that entomologists end up developing insecticides and wildlife biologists find themselves having to put down bears. The jobs are few, and that’s where they lie. For someone whose know-how is birds, their control was one of few ways to make a living.
I can’t say why Meanley and Neff endorsed bombing. Perhaps they never read Mr. Beal’s blackbird report or the paper on the lackluster outcome of the Oklahoma crow-bombing campaigns. It would seem no one read Neff and Meanley’s paper, either, because blackbird control quickly shifted away from bombs.
And over to chemical warfare. Five years later, Neff and Mean-ley were out in the fields again, scattering strychnine-treated grains around the roosts of blackbirds and cowbirds. Both species, wrote Dolbeer, “generally avoided the baits.” Or maybe just avoided Johnson Neff and Mortimer Brooke Meanley.
The war on thieving birds has occasionally strayed beyond the realm of metaphor and taken the form of an actual military operation. In October 1932, the Australian minister for defense agreed to dispatch a pair of machine-gunners, led by a Major G. P. W. Meredith, to rout mobs of emus trampling and helping themselves to farmers’ wheat in the state of Western Australia. (The defense minister had denied the farmers’ original request, which was to borrow some machine guns.) In return, the military asked only for the feathers of the fallen, to be used as a flourish on the hats of the nation’s light-horsemen.
The emu proved a tougher adversary than Major Meredith and his gunners had anticipated. Though flightless, the bird is a fast sprinter, reaching 30 mph with proper motivation. Emus blend with their surroundings and travel with a lookout that, in this case, would sound a warning long before the birds were within range of the guns, whereupon the flock would scatter in a rising billow of dust. On day three, with a confirmed body count of just twenty-six birds, Major Meredith shifted tactics. He set up an ambush, concealing his gunners in the scrub above a dam where emus would come to drink. Around 4:00 p.m., a sizable flock was spotted in the distance.
“The constant craning of necks and the cautious manner of their approach showed they had not forgotten the happenings of the last few days, but relentless thirst drove them on,” wrote a correspondent for the West Australian. When the birds were a few hundred yards out, Major Meredith gave the order to fire. As the dust settled, the men got up to count the bodies. An under-whelming fifty birds lay dead. Excuses were made. The machine gun jammed, someone told a reporter. Someone else conjectured that the majority of the bullets were passing harmlessly through the birds’ plumage, because the emu has “more feathers than flesh.” Major Meredith believed hundreds more had been hit but survived. He credited the emu with an almost supernatural ability to “face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.” He sounded wistful. “If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world.”
On day six, Major Meredith withdrew in defeat. “Emus appeared in huge flocks along the road,” observed the Perth Daily News, “as if to give a mocking farewell.” And that was that, almost. Twelve years later, as World War II raged, the upstart wheat farmers of Western Australia would again ask for military intervention. This time they wanted “light bombs dropped from low-flying planes.” The request was denied.
Meanwhile, out on the Pacific Ocean, the albatrosses of Midway Atoll were shaping up to be an equally insuperable foe.
The islands of Midway sit halfway between North America and Asia, in the Pacific Ocean. As such, Midway Atoll was strategically important to the United States, and in 1941, the nation built a naval air station there. Midway was (and is) also important to a dozen or so species of seabird, including the tens of thousands of Laysan and black-footed albatrosses that return to the islands each year to lay eggs and raise their chicks. Because the birds had had no predators on the islands, they greeted newcomers—both human and mechanical—not with fear but with a mix of nonchalance and curiosity. They soared over the navy’s runways with blithe disregard for the large, loud metal birds with which they shared airspace. Collisions—bird strikes—became an issue.
“We got a bird in the carburetor air scoop.” An aviator machinist named Jerry is speaking into the microphone of a navy public affairs man in a 1959 government filmstrip. “Caused a total loss of power in our number three engine.”
The microphone tilts back to the interviewer’s mouth. His moustache is trimmed to an inverted V, a soaring upside-down albatross of a mustache. “What would happen if you took a gooney bird in the air intake of a Super Constellation radar plane?” (“Gooney bird” was the de facto military handle for albatrosses.) “Do you think you would crash on takeoff? Total loss of plane and personnel?”
“Yes, sir, more than likely.”
The interviewer turns to face the camera. “And there you have it. From people who know what they’re talking about. It’s hard for them to understand the continued existence of these gooney birds here on Midway.”
The scene shifts to an office at Naval Air Station Barbers Point on Oahu. We are introduced to Rear Admiral Benjamin E. Moore and his pointer. Admiral Moore stands beside an easel on which is propped a posterboard highlighting key gooney bird cost statistics. “We had five hundred thirty-eight strikes last year.” The pointer taps the text BIRD STRIKES 538. He then breaks down the cost of these strikes, beginning with the wages of the men who repair the damage. “Two thousand five hundred twenty man-hours times two dollars an hour equals five thousand forty dollars.” Admiral Moore steps to a second easel. The pointer taps FLIGHTS ABORTED 33. Each aborted flight requires the pilot to dump three thousand gallons of fuel to reach a safe landing weight. The pointer directs our gazes to JETTISONED FUEL 99,200 GALLONS and below that, $17,500 cost. The admiral returns to the first easel, where someone off-camera has snuck in and changed the posterboard. A final, decisive tap of the pointer: $156,000 TOTAL.
Admiral Moore steps to his desk. To his left, an American flag hangs on a pole in the sad, limp manner of all indoor flags. The admiral sits. The mood darkens. “It’s either remove the gooney birds from Midway and keep the men, or keep the birds and eventually bury a flight crew of twenty-two men. I hope I’ll never have the task of explaining to some mother or wife that her son or husband was killed by …” Admiral Moore pauses to raise a photograph that the easel sprite has slipped onto his desk. He glowers over the top of an enlarged photograph of an albatross standing calmly on a lawn. “… this.” A dramatic orchestral swell accompanies a fadeout and the words THE END.
The filmstrip is titled The Second Battle of Midway. And the battle was a lengthy one, longer than the first, longer than World War II itself. In the beginning, the strategy was straightforward massacre. Because the birds were many, the cost of ammunition high, and the admiral budget-minded, the initial assault was done without guns. It took place in 1941 and is detailed in a Fish and Wildlife Service Special Scientific Report, under the heading “Large Scale Elimination Experiment.” Two hundred men carrying lengths of pipe or wooden clubs “spent 6 or 7 hours a day” hitting albatrosses on the back of the head. An estimated eighty thousand birds were killed. “For a brief time the hazard to aircraft was reduced,” the paragraph concludes. “The following season there appeared to be as many albatrosses as before.”
The strategy shifted to harassment. To persuade the albatross to nest elsewhere, personnel fired off everything they had. Under the heading “Disturbance,” a 1963 government review of albatross control efforts at Midway lists “rifles, pistols, bazookas, mortars.” “Some birds registered discomfort” but “no appreciable number” left their nests. Ten carbide exploders were set up at intervals of 135 feet along the edge of the runways where the nests were densest. “No decrease in number of flying birds.” Personnel burned rubber tires and lit flares to roust the birds with noxious smoke. They tried blasting an “ultrasonic siren,” thinking, mistakenly, that the birds could hear ultrasound. At one point a Lockheed WV-2 Warning Star radar surveillance aircraft taxied to within a hundred feet of the nest area and switched on a high-intensity radar beam. With no observed effect.
Unable to harass the birds off the island, the navy entertained the possibility of physically moving them. In another test program, eighteen albatrosses were plucked from the nesting site near the runways, banded, and put on outgoing military transport flights: to Japan, the Philippines, Guam, Kwajalein, and—aieeee!—Naval Air Station Barbers Point on Oahu, nesting site of the military’s highest-ranking albatross hater, Admiral Benjamin E. Moore. Fourteen of the eighteen flew (sans airplane) back to Midway in time for nesting season. The navy had not realized that although an albatross wanders thousands of miles, it always returns to the same spot to nest.
And no, you cannot just move the nest. The navy tried this, too. The birds would consult their internal GPS, see that the nest had been moved, go back to their actual birthplace, and proceed to construct a new nest. Next the navy tried moving the eggs. Ten thousand albatross eggs were carried to the adjacent island, where the sailors chased the local birds off their nests and quickly installed the kidnapped eggs. It was like those Folgers ads from the 1970s. We’ve secretly replaced these birds’ eggs with eggs from the neighboring island. The birds, unlike the instant-coffee dupes, were not fooled.
Exasperated, the navy turned to science for help. On October 2, 1957, Hubert Frings, a Pennsylvania State University professor of zoology, got a call from Washington. Would he be willing to come to Midway Atoll for the December/January nesting season? In other words, would Frings make the supreme sacrifice of spending his between-semester break on a tropical island in lieu of hanging around Altoona, Pennsylvania? You bet. Accompanying him would be his wife, Mable, a librarian and bioacoustician with a special interest in cricket and grasshopper “chirp sequences.”‡
On the Frings’ very first day at Midway, another “large-scale elimination” was taking place. Despite the documented failure of earlier mass killings, there was talk of clubbing the entire Midway population. Mable went out into the fray with her reel-to-reel, thinking to record the albatrosses’ alarm and distress cries, so that these might later be played in a more ornithologically informed effort to scare them away. There were no cries to record. “The birds,” Hubert wrote in his memoir, “mostly sat quietly in place until clubbed.” Mable’s tapes captured only “the crack of ash on skulls” and, at one point, the distress cry of a young sailor: “I didn’t join the Navy to crush the heads of innocent birds.”
Hubert quietly raised the issue of morale and, if word got out, “the reaction of people stateside.” His concerns were ignored. As before, the slaughter failed to meet its objective. Though 21,000 birds had been killed, “there were,” observed Hubert, “almost as many still wandering around near the runways, and counts of bird strikes by planes remained the same.” Besides, he continued, “even if total annihilation on Midway were achieved, it would probably be only a short time until the land available sign would bring in new settlers.”
Hubert and Mable did what they could to provide kinder alternatives. They suggested clearing sea grape from the beaches on nearby islands to make them more appealing to house-hunting albatrosses. The plan has a cameo in the navy publicity film. We see Admiral Moore’s pointer tapping a photographic blowup of Kure Atoll. The Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, he states in the film, planned to raze the shrubbery, but I could learn nothing more about it.
The navy did try its hand at “terrain modification,” though this was on Midway itself. Someone had suggested that a row of dunes near the runways was creating updrafts and that the albatrosses needed these to fly. And that leveling the dunes would therefore solve the problem. Hubert didn’t think so. The wind off the ocean, combined with the sizable surface area of albatrosses’ wings, provided all the lift required. He pointed this out, but the dunes were bulldozed anyway. If anything, there were now more albatrosses soaring over the runway, as the demolition opened up easier access to the area.
The weeks passed, and Hubert had to return to his teaching. He and Mable agreed to do some experimenting back in Pennsylvania. The pair were keen to develop an albatross repellent. The navy, by now experienced shippers of live albatrosses, promptly dispatched two to the Fringses. A photograph in Hubert’s memoir shows Mable in a short-sleeved dress and two-tone flats, lifting the lid on a plywood crate. Poking up over the rim are the heads of two Laysan albatrosses fresh from the final leg of their journey, the express train to Altoona. The birds appear, as ever, utterly unfazed by the strange things humans do to them.
The albatross-repellent trials were a disappointment. Mothballs did not bother them. Live snakes were presented and ignored. Recordings of distress and alarm calls likewise caused no reaction. This was more or less expected, because in order to elicit and record these calls, a Midway albatross was swung in a circle, and while this went on, nesting birds a few feet away “did not even look over to see what was causing the commotion.” The albatross is a largely unflappable bird.
The Fringses returned to Midway the following January. They were running out of ideas. One day Hubert noticed a group of navy wives effortlessly shooing a flock of loafing albatrosses by walking onto their lawns holding tablecloths in front of themselves. “We made tests with various surfaces held in front of us, walking toward the birds,” he wrote. “… A sizable flat surface was … quite repellent.” Excited by his findings, Hubert set a meeting with Midway command. With an “integrated program” of men holding large colored squares, he believed, they “might very well be able to clear the island of nesting birds.” He estimated that twenty to thirty personnel would be needed, daily, for the duration of the albatrosses’ return to their nests.
The proposal was not embraced. It had followed on the heels of a proposal to harass the albatrosses by stringing low wires across the nesting area—by tripping them. Hubert’s final suggestion was inspired by an observation that no albatross was ever seen flying under the metal aprons suspended from some of the hangar roofs. He wondered whether suspending long panels of fabric might stymie any albatross seeking to nest where it oughtn’t. He envisioned colored panels 10 feet long by 3 feet wide, suspended between 20-foot poles in the beach along the runway. It sounded marvelous, if you were a wedding planner, or Christo. Less so to a navy pilot. Hubert broached the idea at the Officers’ Club one evening. “Opinion,” he wrote in his memoir, “was not unanimous on this.”
