Bald Eagle Hunt!

Bald Eagle on the Missouri River, Montana

You know, I’ve been thinking about this whole dustup over hunting cranes in Tennessee and now Kentucky. And my thinking has come around 180 degrees from where it was. I get it now, I really do. I think it’s time to hunt Sandhill Cranes. And while we’re at it, I think it’s time to open a limited season on Bald Eagles. Look at the facts, lay your emotions aside and listen to reason—exactly the same reasoning that’s been so persuasive in convincing me that hunting cranes is the right thing to do.

1. We’ve always hunted Bald Eagles.

Bald Eagles were nearly exterminated from the Lower 48 by the mid 1970’s. There was a lot of hunting for Bald Eagles—it is traditionally a game species.  There was a bounty on them in Alaska from 1917 until 1952—up to $2 a head! Yes, they have been an endangered species for as long as most of us can recall, but remember, they were traditionally a hunted species. Now they’re off the red list and bouncing back into the black. The total population in the continental US has risen to around 100,000 individuals. In my home state, Bald Eagles are breeding in 35 Ohio counties. Soon, they may overrun available habitat.

2. Bald Eagles are doing well enough now to support a hunt.

Each Bald Eagle pair has the potential to produce 1.7 young per year. All regional populations have nest success >50% and are showing the productivity required to produce stable populations. So there will be an ample supply of young birds coming up for harvest.

3. Bald Eagles will provide a sporting challenge for hunters.

Bald Eagles are big and slow-flying, and they will readily come in to bait. Hunters don’t even need to use decoys. However they are wary and have famously sharp eyes, so bagging eagles will be a true sporting challenge for hunters. The Bald Eagle has the potential to be the Holy Grail of game birds.

4. Hunting eagles will not hurt, but enhance non-consumptive wildlife viewing opportunitites.

Many people like Bald Eagles—it’s almost as if they consider them sacred. These passive wildlife enthusiasts like to go places, especially in winter, to watch them. Having a hunting season on eagles won’t affect those opportunities. In fact, hunting eagles will enhance the birdwatchers’ viewing opportunities by concentrating the birds in places where they aren’t being shot at. Imagine big flocks of Bald Eagles massing on our wildlife refuges. Birder viewing opportunities will be even more spectacular.

5. We need to give hunters new opportunities and new species to hunt.

Many people similarly feel sentimental about Bald Eagles, what with their being the national symbol, but that is just an example of misplaced emotion. No bird species should be exempt from harvest. It’s our right to hunt whatever wildlife is abundant enough to support the harvest. We need to give hunters new opportunities to hunt.

6. People who protest our proposed hunt are trying to strip rights from the hunting public.

Anyone who protests this hunt is making an assault on the American way, on our right to harvest our native wildlife—a right that we have held since the first colonist fired a blunderbuss in what was to be America.

6. Bald Eagles are delicious.

Some people say Bald Eagle doesn’t taste good, but they probably have never tried it. Most people who’ve eaten eagle say it is delicious. With the right marinade, Bald Eagle is indistinguishable from a good New York strip steak. With a rapidly growing population exceeding 100,000 birds, Bald Eagle could easily become our National Dish.

So I hereby propose a season on Bald Eagles in Ohio, with the anticipation that many other states will follow suit. Let Ohio be the first to re-open a season on this traditionally hunted bird. Now that we’ve almost succeeded in pushing a Sandhill Crane hunt through in Kentucky, the sky’s the limit.

Now that I’ve got your attention, here’s the final action alert for the Kentucky Sandhill Crane hunt proposal.  I’ve already summarized some reasons NOT to hunt Sandhill Cranes in this post:

Last Gasp for Sandhill Cranes

ACTION ALERT:  The USFWS has published its intention to approve Kentucky’s Sandhill Crane hunting proposal. The final deadline for comments is FRIDAY, AUGUST 5. The USFWS isn’t accepting emails, but you CAN comment online. Here’s how to do it.

Go to regulations.gov

Click on Submit a Comment

Type or paste  FWS-R9-MB-2011-0014-0204  into the keyword box & click Search

This will bring up the regulation page. You want "Frameworks for Early Season Migratory Bird Regulations." Buried in the text at that link is the proposal to hunt Kentucky Sandhill Cranes, along with a bunch of duck hunting stuff. It's interesting to look at it, especially the USFWS' refutation of various organizations' concerns about hunting cranes, under Section 9: Sandhill Cranes. If you want to cut to the chase and get your comment in,  click on Submit a Comment at the far right of this regulation. The idea being, despite the done-deal tone they take in the "proposal," to let the USFWS know you're out there, too.

Write your comment in the box provided (2000 characters or less)

Do it by Friday, August 5, 2011.

Snail mailed letters make an impression, especially when there are piles of them. Send your polite, well-reasoned letter to:

 Attn: FWS-R9-MB-2011-0014

Division of Policy Directives Management

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services

4401 N. Fairfax Drive

MS 2042-PPM

Arlington, VA 22203

I sent mine today.

As always, thank you for caring and thank you for acting.  The petition to the USFWS to re-evaluate its proposal to hunt eastern sandhills now has 2,733 signatures. Go to the link above, make your comment; sign the petition if you haven't. Make your voice heard.

Kentucky's Crane Hunt

For those of you who've been following the drama unfolding in Kentucky regarding a sandhill crane hunt, there's bad news. An eight-member commission unanimously approved the hunt proposal in early June.  Which wasn't a surprise, since everyone on the commission is a hunter. Thousands of letters and emails of protest apparently fell on deaf ears. Not surprising, but certainly disappointing. Shooting could start as early as mid-December 2011.

However.

Kentucky's wildlife offices have been flooded with protests, whether written, telephoned or emailed. It's probably of little use to further bombard Commissioner Jon Gassett with your good letters. Go ahead and check out his company, Southern Wildlife Resources LLC .  Now, I don't know much about conflict of interest or what taxpayer-paid state employees should or shouldn't be doing on their own time, but it looks to me as if he's offering the same services his Department of Fish and Wildlife does, only for personal profit. Brokering land to hunters, hooking them up with guide services...all for a fee. It isn't hard even for a simple bird painter to divine that Commissioner Gassett stands to gain financially from a crane hunt in Kentucky. No wonder his state office answering machine has a message on it expounding on the delicious meat of the sandhill crane. No, let's not write any more letters to Dr. Gassett. That dog don't hunt. Or rather, he does.

How about writing the Governor? And how about taking a few minutes to do it now? Here's an easy, quick link to a comment form on Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear's web site. He'll be deciding on the proposal TODAY, June 15. Let's give him a respectful little burst of opposition, huh?

                                    http://www.governor.ky.gov/contact/contact.htm

Photo by Cyndi Routledge

 These birds belong to all of us, not just a few hundred gunmen. Why should they get to unilaterally decide that the sandhill crane will be a game bird in Kentucky? 

We must make our voices heard.

As always, thank you for caring. And especially for acting.

The Crane Battle Moves to Kentucky

I cropped off the heads, with their big grins. Hunters tell me it's not hard to get your daily limit with such a huge, slow-flying target. 

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled inspection of armadillo carcasses with this important action alert for wildlife enthusiasts everywhere.  MARCH 15, 2011 is the deadline for public comment on a proposal to hunt sandhill cranes in Kentucky. That's TOMORROW. If you wrote to Tennessee in the campaign this winter, you can cut and paste and change "Tennessee" to "Kentucky." If not, please read my letter, crib bits of it in your own words if you wish, avoiding overly sentimental or confrontational wording,  and politely email Mr. Gassett at this address:    jon.gassett@ky.gov


Copy your letter to FW_Suggestions@ky.gov


Do it now, please, for the cranes. We fought them back in Tennessee; there's a two-year stay on their proposal. We can fight them back in Kentucky, too. The Kentucky Ornithological Society and the Beckham Bird Club have both come out strongly against the hunting season.  Kentucky Dept. of Fish and Wildlife Commissioner Jon Gassett has indicated that if enough people write in protest, the proposed hunting season--due to start this December-- will be reconsidered. Nobody owns these cranes--they're free for all to enjoy. If you think it's wrong to shoot them, please take the time to email Mr. Gassett. THANK YOU!

March 14, 2011

Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife 

Jon Gassett, Commissioner

 One Sportsman's Lane

 Frankfort, Kentucky 40601

Dear Mr. Gassett,

I am a writer, naturalist and artist with a special interest in human/bird interactions.

 For my new book, due out in 2012 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, I’ve been researching sandhill crane hunting. The sandhill crane has the lowest recruitment rate (average number of young birds joining a population each season) of any bird now hunted in North America. Historic recruitment rates of all migratory sandhill crane populations range from 7.5% to a high of 11%.

 Since 1975, hunting in the Central Flyway has taken around 20,000 cranes annually (E.M. Martin, U.S. FWS report). This represents 6% of the estimated mid-continental spring population of 322,700 birds for the same two decades. Given the projected recruitment rate, harvesting 6% of the population each year in the US alone seems to me to be cutting it too close to the edge. Kills in Canada, Alaska and Mexico are not included in the count. What about all the other birds that die from inexperience, disease, natural predation and accidents? Further, the crane take in Mexico is a free-for-all: neither regulated nor recorded.

 Hunting sandhill cranes in Kentucky is a bad idea from a public relations standpoint, considering the growing cadre of birders and nature enthusiasts for whom cranes are a touchstone species. How can Kentucky possibly garner enough revenue from crane hunting to offset the outrage when birdwatchers find out that the cranes they love and travel to see are being shot? Hunting is on a steady downturn, and nonconsumptive wildlife pursuits are on a tremendous upswing. Nationwide, wildlife watchers now outspend hunters 6 to 1. The explosion in digital photography allows people to stalk wildlife without harming it. Initiating a hunting season on a large, charismatic species like a crane is no way to resuscitate hunting. It is, however, an excellent way to alienate nonconsumptive wildlife enthusiasts, and further polarize the camps.

 Texas and North Dakota together account for 88% of the total yearly kill of sandhill cranes. There is evidence that a unique Canadian prairie population of lesser sandhill cranes is being selectively wiped out, since they migrate over the most heavily hunted areas of Texas. It should go without saying that the incidental kill of endangered whooping cranes is an unacceptable cost of adding another state to the shooting gallery all along both species’ migration route. Of the Central Flyway states, Nebraska alone holds out in protecting the cranes, having proven by its longstanding Festival of the Cranes in Kearney that a crane is worth infinitely more alive and purring in the sky with its family than thudding, broken and bleeding, into a cornfield.  Just ask Bill Taddicken, director of the Lillian Annette Rowe Sanctuary on the Platte River in Kearney. Crane tourism brings that little town around $10 million each year in revenue, without a single shot being fired. 

Proposing a hunting season on a bird with that kind of ecotourism potential simply doesn't make sense. Giving a few hundred hunters something else to shoot, in my opinion, cannot be worth the blowback from tens of thousands of people who are willing to travel and spend just to watch the birds fly over.  Please reconsider this proposal, and consider taking a lesson from what happened in Tennessee. Letters and emails by the thousand poured into the commissioners' offices, protesting its crane hunting proposal. Even more telling, the support the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Commission was expecting from its hunting community simply never materialized. I've received letters and emails from a number of avid hunters who find the concept of shooting cranes repugnant. TWRC's response to the outcry was a two-year stay on the proposed season. I feel certain that, given Tennessee's 18-year track record of celebrating cranes in a tremendously successful festival, the opposition will only be stronger in 2013. I would encourage the the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife to take Tennessee's example as an indication that offering sandhill cranes for hunting will create far more public relations trouble than it's worth. 

Sincerely, 

Julie Zickefoose

Tennessee Tables Crane Hunt!

On Friday, January 21, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency voted to table the proposal to open season on sandhill cranes for two years. More than 100 people packed the Nashville hall to present hunting arguments both pro and con, but the con's carried the day, buoyed by the thousands of letters, emails, calls and comments received by TWRA since October. Remember my first post in October, when I told you TWRA Commissioner Michael Chase had received exactly one letter of dissent, from concerned Tennesseean Janet McKnight? You changed that.

photo by Vickie Henderson

The Tennesseean has an article about the meeting and the decision. The lack of good data about this eastern flyway crane population was central to the arguments against the hunt. In deciding against instituting a hunting season now, TWRA recognized that a hunt proposal perhaps partially based on one year's huge (and likely unrepeatable) apparent gain in crane numbers is premature. To recap, here are the crane counts for the past six years:

2006: 14,158
2007: 14,698
2008: 12,945
2009: 20,191
2010: 48,505

And this just in--the January 2011 count. Well, would you look at that: back down to an unprecendented low.

2011: 11,000

It's been cold and snowy in Tennessee this winter, and the low 2011 count likely means that many of the  cranes have pushed farther south. Midwinter counts can be misleading in both directions. A long-lived, slow-reproducing bird in which only 30% of nesting pairs manage to raise a single chick each year (or, to put it another, more sobering way, a species which raises an average of .33 chicks per pair per year) is not subject to sudden population explosions. It is, however, quite vulnerable to population crashes. We need to keep that in mind when we're putting it in the crosshairs.

photo by Vickie Henderson

Some biologists are now speculating that the freakishly high January 2010 count was the result of a weather event that froze all open water at Indiana's Jasper-Pulaski Fish and Wildlife Area, sending the cranes that normally winter there packing farther south to Tennessee. As many as 30,000 sandhill cranes may gather at the Indiana refuge in a big winter. And guess what?

As many as 30,000 people may come to see them at J-P in a single season--200 people per day. Sounds like a nice ratio: A crane for every human. But not... a crane in every pot. A flying, calling, purring crane, winging high overhead or stepping gracefully through the corn stubble.

Cranes will be flying, calling and purring, safe from gunshots, for at least two more years in Tennessee. They'll be drawing thousands of visitors to Hiwassee Refuge to enjoy them--and eat, bunk in hotels, and shop at local businesses while they're at it.

If crane enthusiasts, spearheaded by the Tennessee Ornithological Society's Melinda Welton and Vickie Henderson, have their way, they'll be safe for much longer than that. Vickie has drawn up a petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to take another look at its Management Plan for the Eastern Population of Sandhill Cranes. To take the provision for hunting seasons along the Eastern Flyway out of it, at least until more is known about this population's dynamics, movements, and reproductive viability.

Here's the petition site. Please, sign it.

 photo by Vickie Henderson

Tell the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that you don't want to see sandhill cranes gunned down in the Eastern Flyway.

photo by Vickie Henderson

Oh. And thank you for writing, calling, emailing, voting, signing. I think you know now that you've made a difference.

 Special thanks to Janet McKnight for first alerting this hermit to the proposal to hunt Tennessee's sandhill cranes.  Thanks to Gary Loucks , Melinda Welton, Vickie Henderson and Cyndi Lawrence Routledge for fighting the good fight on their own home turf. Never underestimate the power of uppity women (and men). We're going to need them--remember, this is just a reprieve in Tennessee. Kentucky's just proposed its own sandhill crane hunt and, not surprisingly, isn't accepting public comment. Well, that doesn't stop anyone from calling and writing their legislators, does it?  Here's one place to start.     

Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources

1 Sportsman's Lane

Frankfort, KY  40601 800-858-1549                

Remember, sign that petition.

Sandhill Crane Hunting

Like a big wingshot bird, the proposal by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Commission to open season on sandhill cranes in 2011 keeps flopping around in my head. People who object to hunting sandhill cranes do so for a number of reasons. However, we are generally characterized by advocates of hunting as being uninformed, leading with our hearts rather than our heads. Perhaps they’re right.

Sandhill cranes dropping into a Tennessee field. Watercolor by Julie Zickefoose

I will confess to having trouble getting my head around the reasoning behind the Tennessee crane hunting proposal. Plant 750 acres of feed crops for waterfowl. Watch sandhill cranes join the ducks and geese in exploiting the superabundant food. Start a festival for people who enjoy observing the stately birds. Celebrate a festival for 17 years as the wintering crane population swells to 48,000, and watch as a portion of the flock ceases to migrate, sticking around to feed on early spring plantings of winter wheat. Cancel the festival, then shuffle its dates around, back off the food crops to 450 acres, and propose a hunting season on cranes. All the while, grant crop depredation permits, giving farmers permission to shoot cranes that stay around late enough to eat their germinating winter wheat. I confess I’m left scratching my head. I have an incomplete understanding of the wildlife management principles illustrated here. From my uninformed perspective, it seems ill-advised to offer a migratory bird population so much artificial food that it ceases to migrate as it's been doing since the Pleistocene. Is shooting about 2% of the population really the best answer?

When shooting starts on private land around the Hiwassee refuge, Tennessee ornithologists predict that cranes, along with ducks and geese, will make for the refuge. Cranes may be too dumb to divine that the corn managers planted was intended only for ducks and geese, but they are smart enough to avoid places where they’re being fired on. I've seen it suggested that this will actually benefit birders, providing better viewing on the refuge than they'd have were the cranes dispersed on private land. Well, here's something to think about. Concentrating a large population of cranes in a smaller area can result in overcrowding and disease. Birders know that. They want what's best for the birds, not for themselves. I can't imagine any birdwatcher I know saying, "Oh good! They're shooting cranes right outside the refuge! More cranes for ME!!"

What is needed here, it seems, is not more crowding but a natural dispersal of the population, encouraging them to move on south. Now, being a birdwatcher, I admit to being ignorant of the fine points of wildlife management, but what if Tennessee were to taper off the feeding program? Maybe the cranes would keep heading south when the food ran out. Silly, I know, but it’s just crazy enough--it might work. The converse certainly worked.

Tennessee is the first state in the Eastern Flyway to propose a hunting season on sandhill cranes. Kentucky announced its crane hunting season on December 6, 2010. I heard it on the radio as I was writing this post, stopping in mid-tap to stare at the speakers. And oddly, Kentucky isn’t accepting public comment. Have they observed the outcry over Tennessee’s proposal? Memo to Kentucky: Announcing that you’re not accepting public comment doesn’t stop people from calling and writing their legislators.

Oh, and birdwatchers might like to know that Wisconsin’s planning a sandhill crane hunting season, too. Wisconsin: home of the privately funded International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, where the big white whooping crane was snatched back from extinction. Imagine how Wisconsin’s thousands of self-described “craniacs” are going to feel about that. But we mustn’t lead with our hearts. We must accept the wisdom, the necessity of shooting sandhill cranes.

A sandhill crane falls near Bosque del Apache NWR, NM.    Watercolor by Julie Zickefoose

The Eastern Flyway sandhill crane population has recovered from near extinction in the last 70 years—in our lifetime--and state game managers have taken notice. Their reasoning appears pretty simple: There are enough cranes around now to shoot some. My reasoning is simple too. Does that mean they must be shot? Is giving a small set of hunters one more bird species to aim at ultimately going to be worth the ill will and polarization of camps between the growing throngs of wildlife watchers and the shrinking ranks of hunters?  For the fact-checkers out there: The USFWS estimates that 33 states saw declines in hunting license sales over the last two decades. Massachusetts alone has seen a 50 percent falloff in hunting license sales in that period. Yes, hunting is declining. Maybe if we offer more species that can be shot...

So let's follow this line of reasoning. There are enough cranes out there now to shoot some without causing another population crash. All right then. There are surely enough red-tailed hawks sitting along the nation's highways to shoot some of them. Robins? Those things are everywhere, and tasty, too. And come to think of it, new great blue heron rookeries are popping up all over the place. A little fishy-tasting, but with the right marinade...

Ultimately, the proposal to hunt Tennessee’s sandhill cranes is about hubris. It’s about manipulating wild populations as we see fit, about tilting the balance of nature toward huntable species by feeding them artificial foods and encouraging them to hang around to provide us a little sport. Try as I might, I cannot cram the lanky four-foot length of a sandhill crane into the slot in my brain marked “Game Species.” They’re too tall, too graceful, too ancient and yes, much too magical. There goes my heart again. Head says: They reproduce too slowly, producing one colt per year if they’re lucky. Ducks and geese can lay a dozen eggs; a crane lays two, and only one colt usually survives. That youngster is still heavily dependent on its parents for guidance in its first winter of life, and yet we’re proposing to let hunters shoot right into those family units. For sport. For fun. For food, maybe, if they have enough strong marinade.  Pretty gamey, I’m told. I intend never to find out for myself.

Sandhill cranes with their colt.                                  Watercolor by Julie Zickefoose

We should not be marinating the meat of sandhill cranes. We should be looking up at them alive and flying, our heads thrown back in wonder, gratitude and awe. We should be searching their cloud-gray numbers for the big white cranes who travel with them, and are at risk of being shot, their  precious genes squandered in the mud of a cornfield.

In my view, the great irony in this whole proposal to hunt cranes is that the majority of people who are aware cranes exist feel exactly as I do, vastly outnumbering those who would like to take a shot at one. Note to Tennessee, Kentucky and Wisconsin: Those cranes you're proposing to shoot are everyone's cranes, not just yours. They may breed in Wisconsin and pass through the southern states, but they belong to everyone, and your proposal to let a small subset of hunters fire on them is not popular with the majority who want them left alone. You are shooting yourself in the foot.

People who believe strongly in their perceived right to hunt whatever they wish can be  persuasive in characterizing birders and wildlife watchers as soft-headed and silly for having an emotional connection to birds and animals, for being guided by heart and not head. I believe to my core that it is desirable to hold some species sacred. I feel that way about sandhill cranes because I have observed, from Nebraska to New Mexico, from Michigan to Ohio, that they are potent ambassadors for wild things and wild places to the many thousands of people who are moved by them. These are not necessarily birders, just ordinary people who are stirred by the sight and sound of cranes. Cranes, I submit, are worth infinitely more alive than dead. Just ask the director of the Lillian Annette Rowe Sanctuary on Nebraska's Platte River, where sandhill crane tourism brings 15,000 visitors from all 50 states and 46 foreign countries; brings more than $10 million into the local economy every year. All without firing a single shot. Wildlife watching is the fastest growing sector in tourism.

I'd love to do this experiment. Take 1,000 people who know what a sandhill crane is. What percentage of them do you think would want to bring one down with a gun? What percentage would simply want to watch one fly overhead? We haven't even begun to tap the tourism potential of live Eastern Flyway cranes, and states are already proposing to shoot them?

Tennessee’s Wildlife Resources Agency posted an online survey in mid-November 2010 with a simple question: “Should sandhill cranes be hunted in Tennessee?” Two buttons: Yes and No. The survey was up for perhaps three days, and abruptly taken down without explanation. No results have been posted. In response to questions on “Tennessee’s Watchable Wildlife” Facebook page, the following appeared:

Your best bet to have an impact on the TWRA decision is to contact the TWRA commissioners with letters, phone calls, etc. At some point we'll provide the results of the survey, but keep in mind that it was not a well designed, scientific survey, it was biased in many ways and is not likely a very reliable source of information.

Birders, photographers, wildlife watchers: we don’t need SurveyMonkey to tell Tennessee what we think about opening a season on sandhill cranes. Comments period ends mid-January. A public meeting will be held Jan. 20 and 21 in Nashville, with an opportunity for public comments. Information: Ask.TWRA@tn.gov or 1-800-624-7406.

If you can't attend, please...Write them NOW. For the New Year, do something for the cranes.

Email: twra.comment@tn.gov

Letters: Michael Chase, Tennessee Wildlife Resources Commission Chairperson/PO Box 50370/Knoxville, TN  37950 email: mike.chase@tn.gov

Governor Bill Haslam, 1701 West End Ave., Suite 300, Nashville, TN 37203 (615) 254-4799

online comments to the Governor: https://www.billhaslam.org/suggestions-for-government/