Fuzz, page 15
Eventually they shipped some off to the nation’s wildlife research labs, one in Colorado and one in Maryland, to try it out on rats.
Warfare and pest control long strolled hand in hand. Both, after all, seek to destroy grouped adversaries as efficiently as possible. Up until the nuclear era, any newfangled deadliness trained upon human enemies also tended to be tried out on enemies of the furred and feathered variety. A United Nations summary of control efforts used on the African quelea (or “locust bird”), for example, reads like a timeline of military weaponry: “guns, explosives, flame throwers, jellied gasoline, and contact poisons.”
During World War II, the chemical warfare people and the agripest control people were united by a common foe: the brown rat. Aka the Norway rat, aka the sewer rat, aka—quoting a Denver Wildlife Research Laboratory press release—“Hitler’s ace agent in this country.” Supply routes for the raw materials for existing rat poisons had been cut off during the war, and rats were living high: “… sabotaging factories, destroying food needed for our allies, and spreading disease among our armed forces.” This was not the first time rodents had been portrayed as enemy sympathizers. Posters for a California ground squirrel eradication campaign during World War I featured squirrels in tiny spiked German helmets. “Mrs. Squirrel” has been decorated with the Iron Cross, one of the highest military honors of the German Empire, which she wears as a necklace.
In June 1942, an unusual wartime alliance was forged. Division 9 (chemical weapons) of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development joined forces with the Denver Wildlife Research Laboratory (now the NWRC) in a quest for new rat poisons. The former suggested promising toxins from the arsenal, and the latter tried them out on traitorous vertebrates. Ricin, under the code name “compound W,”¶ was a candidate, as was sarin. The standout rodenticide, first tested in June 1944, was a phytotoxin the Division 9 people referred to as 1080. It was cheap and quickly lethal to rats.
Long before the ministries of war and agriculture got wind of it, 1080 had been used in rural Africa, in its natural plant form. Then, too, both rodents and humans were potential targets. Because the toxin imparts almost no detectable taste, the aggressor would simply crush the plant and drop it down the enemy’s well. While I might question the efficacy of the raw plant material, the lethality of the toxin eventually isolated—a fluoroacetate given the code name TWS—is well documented.
TWS was accidently discovered by a team of Polish chemists who later shared it with Allied intelligence. According to a declassified Division 9 memo dated April 20, 1945, a related fluoroacetate was under consideration as a “contaminant for water supplies” but never used. Personnel quoted in the memo had been shown footage of poisoned dogs and deemed it “an extremely revolting spectacle.” (1080 is 17 to 35 times more deadly to dogs than it is to rats.) Both felt strongly that an agent causing death in this “horrible” manner “could not possibly be used by any civilized nation against an enemy even of the most highly depraved type.”
So off it went to the Denver Wildlife Research Laboratory to test on rats. One of the laboratory’s press releases describes a 1080 trial run at an infested New Orleans grain elevator company. The chemical was dissolved in water and left in half-ounce, rodent tea party–sized cups along known rat runs. Within twenty-four hours, the release stated, 3,690 rats# were dead. Less prodigious but still impressive body counts are given in the 1945 “Summary of Field Reports on 1080,” compiled by the NDRC’s Rodent Control Subcommittee. One thousand and thirty-two pounds of 1080 was cooked up by chemists at Monsanto and shipped off to rat-besieged army and navy installations and public health departments for field trials.
Along with the kill tallies, the summary details the edibles each location used as bait. These ranged from standard rat bait fare—barley, oats, sweet potatoes, coconut, chocolate, peanut butter—to more culinarily creative concoctions. Naval Base Guam mixed their 1080 with dried eggs, Mazola, and fresh bacon grease, while the Ninth Service Command fashioned a 1080 meatloaf using horse meat and bread crumbs. First Service Command blended 1080 into Meat Hash C-rations. The secret ingredients of the Texas State Board of Health? Popcorn and chicken feed. The summary’s authors shared a few of their own favorite bait recipes, complete with cooking directions. (“Blend the 1080 and the flour. Dust the flour-poison mixture over the cubed vegetable, with continuous stirring.”)
All was not copacetic, however. Dogs were taking the bait. Or eating the bodies of the dead and dying rodents. And dogs, recall, are exquisitely sensitive to 1080. One test reported fifty had died. The government agencies put their heads together. They made poison lemonade out of lemons. 1080 was registered as a predacide for ranchers to use on coyotes.
The ranchers had a new problem now: how to keep the predacide from also being a man’s-best-friend-icide. Especially since afflicted coyotes tended to run off and, in the words of Rodent Control Subcommittee chairman Justus Ward, “regurgitate a sizable quantity of undigested poisoned food … over a considerable area.” Which ranchers’ dogs would find and eat.
Ward turned to Colonel C. P. Rhoads, chemical weapons whiz at the Defense Department’s Edgewood Arsenal. For the predacide version of 1080, Ward politely asked, “Perhaps you could suggest a drug which could be included with the 1080 to reduce the tendency of a coyote to vomit.” And for the 1080 rat-killing formulation, might there be something that would do the opposite? An emetic—a vomit-inducer—“so that poison baits which were eaten by dogs would be thrown up much more rapidly than is done when emesis is caused by the 1080 itself.” But would that not also make the rats throw up the poison—and thereby survive? It would not, because, to quote a then-secret memo from Birdsey Renshaw, of the National Defense Research Committee of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, “rats cannot vomit.”
World War II ended, but the toxin screening program continued. Over a span of forty-five years, some fifteen thousand potential poisons and repellents were tested by the Denver Wildlife Research Laboratory. Under pressure from environmental and animal welfare advocates, the chemists grew choosier. They looked for poisons that were not just cheap and deadly but also more specific to the animals they sought to control. The poison DRC-1339 seemed to fit the bill, literally and colloquially. The big-flock crop-eaters—blackbirds, starlings, cowbirds, grackles—were all extremely sensitive to it. This was exciting news for the NSA: the National Sunflower Association.
For forty years, the NSA has supported the interests of sunflower farmers, most of whom are in North and South Dakota, smack in the migration path of tens of millions of blackbirds and lesser feasting flocks. You can appreciate the challenge. They are attempting to keep birds from eating birdseed. Surveys of blackbird damage to North Dakota sunflower fields between 2008 and 2010 showed average losses of around 2 percent of the crop.
The National Wildlife Research Center has a branch in Fargo, North Dakota, devoted to the sunflower problem. It has been an enduring challenge. They’ve developed repellents, but there are application problems. Because of the sunflower’s unique asana, its “downward-facing head position,” aerial crop sprayers end up dosing the undersides of the flowers and missing the seeds. They developed a hybrid with tightly packed seeds that the birds couldn’t pull free, but the fat content of the seeds was low. That is a grievous drawback for the sunflower farmer, because the real money in sunflowers comes from oil, not birdseed. (Sunflower seeds make up a modest percentage of most birdfeeder mixes, which is good, because it would be hard to put aside the irony of annihilating birds for a product used exclusively by bird lovers.)
All along the way, the NSA kept up the push for poison. Things came to a head in 2006, when Frito-Lay announced plans to begin frying its major potato chip brands in oil from NuSun, a sunflower variety whose seeds contain no trans fat. To meet the demand, sunflower growers needed hundreds of thousands of acres of new plantings. The NSA sought permission for an increase in the annual “allowable take” of blackbirds. The South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department pushed back; ring-necked pheasants, a popular game bird, also turned out to be sensitive to DRC-1339. The National Wildlife Research Center, in 2003, had published detailed data on the sensitivities of dozens of nontarget bird species to DRC-1339, data that the original screening program didn’t have or, in some cases, hadn’t published. Not just pheasants, but also cardinals, jays, robins, bobwhites, meadowlarks, mockingbirds, tree sparrows, and barn owls showed high sensitivity to DRC-1339. The information has quelled somewhat my enjoyment of the salty, bagged snack foods. Blood potato chips!
Killing one or two million of the seventy million blackbirds that descend on the northern plains each year is like trying to solve global warming with an ice machine. The poisoning campaigns seemed almost more like spite than pest control, a practice undertaken out of frustration and anger, rather than documented results. Population modeling undertaken by a team of NWRC researchers in 2002 concluded that if the annual allowable take of migrating blackbirds was increased to two million, the benefits to sunflowers farmers “would likely be negligible.” Yet the killing continues. In 2018, USDA Wildlife Services destroyed 516,000 red-wing blackbirds, 203,000 grackles, and 408,000 cowbirds.
The irony is that the sunflower growers have long known what works best. As early as the 1970s, contributors to NSA member magazine The Sunflower had been recommending effective nonlethal approaches: “primarily habitat and crop management.” Give the birds something equally delicious to eat: plant an inexpensive, strategically placed “lure crop.” Rather than plowing under the post-harvest plant stubble, leave it for the birds, to distract them from other growers’ fields. Apply drying agents so the seeds are ready to harvest sooner, before the flocks arrive. Don’t plant sunflowers near marshes with dense stands of cattails or other attractive blackbird habitats. In other words, take the advice of that endlessly quoted general whose name sounds like a new sunflower hybrid:** Know thy enemy.
Lately, habitat management has meant killing cattails. As it had with 1080 back in the day, Monsanto supplied the poison: the contentious herbicide glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup). Glyphosate, I just read in a 2012 paper by four NWRC researchers, has been one of the chemicals used to dry out sunflowers for early harvest. Long sigh and downward-facing head.
In war there is always one last option: surrender. “An obvious bird management strategy,” wrote George Linz and Page Klug, in their chapter of Ecology and Management of Blackbirds (Icteridae) in North America, “is to abandon a bird-susceptible crop and substitute other crops … that are not damaged by blackbirds.” Or quit farming altogether and go into politics, like North Dakota sunflower grower turned senator Terry Wanzek. “We’ve surrendered,” he told Associated Press reporter Blake Nicholson. “The birds won.”
* But oddly, no rosary-pea rosaries. And only one 1931 JEQUIRITY BEAN PURSE *POISON IF EATEN*—as the seller listed it.
† A technique favored by Mussolini’s squadristi thugs. Political foes were force-fed large quantities of castor oil—up to a quart, according to The Straight Dope. Who does that? Moreover, why? To kill by dehydration? To humiliate? I could find no satisfying answer, not even from the International Castor Oil Association, which, despite large quantities of emails, had no comment.
‡ A few sutari crafters branched out into murder for hire. An 1890 issue of India’s Police Gazette profiles the “great poisoner” Dooly Chamár, eventually caught and sentenced to “transportation for life.” As a punishment, a lifetime of riding public transportation in India made a certain amount of sense; however, that’s not what was meant. It meant he was exiled. Also initially confusing was the locale of exile—a white-sand idyll in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Before the dawn of tourism, the islands housed a penal settlement, where British colonials tested torture techniques far more heinous than anything dished out by Indian Railways.
§ The militaries of various Western nations have experimented with this from time to time, but they did not call them sutaris. They called them “flechettes”—tiny toxin-dipped arrows, as many as 35,000, packed into a bomb. Both Canada and Great Britain tested flechettes on animals. Despite impressive efficacy, neither nation, perhaps recognizing the rather dim threat of a projectile that sounds like a feminine hygiene product, added them to the arsenal.
¶ Did the makers of the wart-removal product Compound W realize this when they named their product? I don’t know, because Prestige Brands, which owns Compound W, doesn’t return calls, their online media query form is a dead-end, and they’re not on Twitter. But while we’re on the topic of inappropriate names, let’s consider “Prestige Brands.” Because here are some more of their prestige brands: Fleet enemas, Nix for lice, Beano for flatulence, URISTAT, Nōstrilla decongestant, Summer’s Eve douche, Boil-Ease, Efferdent denture cleaner, and Boudreaux’s Butt Paste.
# That is a serious fucking rat infestation. “Huge,” agreed a spokesperson for GEAPS, the Grain Elevator and Processing Society (“the knowledge resource for the world of grain handling and processing”). The GEAPS man said in an email that even in less developed nations with shoddy storage facilities, “that many rats seems extremely high and uncommon.”
** Sun Tzu.
9
OKAY, BOOMER
Futile Military Actions Against Birds
As far as I can tell from newspapers of the era, the practice known as crow-bombing reached its zenith near the tiny town of Asa, Texas, on February 6, 1953. Joe Browder, “who hates crows,” took 150 pounds of dynamite and parceled it out to make 300 bombs. Half-sticks of explosive were packed, along with metal shards from a local foundry, into cardboard tubes and strung together in the scrub oaks along the Brazos River where the birds returned each night to roost. By one giddy estimate, 50,000 crows lay dead in an instant.
Why didn’t someone call the authorities? The authorities were already there. The local game warden was part of the team stringing up the bombs after the crows had flown off for the day to feed. And there was the birds’ crime: feeding. A common concern expressed in the newspapers of the time was that crows—“black bandits of the air,” “feathered gangsters,” the “menacing sable flood”—were raiding the nests of waterfowl, devouring eggs and chicks to the extent that duck hunters would not have enough of them to shoot. Crow-bombing, in fact, was a government-sponsored conservation effort. Who oversaw the bombing deaths of 250,000 Illinois crows during the winter of 1935? The Illinois conservation commissioner. Who offed 3,000 crows at a roost near Coupland, Texas, flew to a wildlife conference in St. Louis, and returned the following Friday to bomb a roost in Creedmoor? The secretary of the Texas wildlife federation.
Such is the inside-out history of conservation in America. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the word came to mean what it means to us now. Wildlife and wilderness weren’t conserved for their intrinsic value. They were conserved for hunting and fishing. Mighty tracts of wilderness were protected from agricultural and other development to ensure there would always be places and things to hunt and fish. And the ducks were protected from the crows.
Farmers, too, raged against the eating habits of large flocks. In 1952, the agriculture arm of the government gave dynamite a try. The Denver Wildlife Research Laboratory ran a series of “experimental bombing tests” in the trees along a mile-long Arkansas marsh where redwing blackbirds, grackles, starlings, and cow-birds would come to roost after a long day of rice pilferage.* The study aimed to compare the cost-effectiveness of different bomb materials: dynamite versus Primacord, lead shot versus steel, paste-board mailing tube versus ice-cream carton versus can. Because of this work, we now know, for instance, that the “average kill per bomb” for dynamite and lead shot packed into a mailing tube is 1,820 birds, at a “cost per bird killed” of less than a cent.
What the experiment did not reveal was the extent to which killing what amounted to 1 or 2 percent of an enormous flock had a noticeable effect on farmers’ losses. That assessment in fact already existed, in the form of data collected over a decade of bombing crows in Oklahoma. From 1934 to 1945, 127 crow roosts were dynamited “to reduce predation on waterfowl eggs and damage to grain crops,” writes longtime USDA ornithologist Richard Dolbeer in his chapter of Ecology and Management of Blackbirds (Icteridae) in North America. An estimated 3.8 million crows were killed, yet, Dolbeer writes, “no evidence was obtained to indicate the explosions influenced total population levels, agricultural damage, or waterfowl production.”
Here’s the thing with killing as a wildlife damage control tool. It isn’t just mean. It doesn’t—barring wholesale eradication—work. On a visit to the National Wildlife Research Center, I spent a morning in the archives, reading oral history transcripts of some of the long-timers. One in particular stayed with me. Weldon Robinson began his career as a government bounty hunter, killing coyotes for $3 a head. He was soon hired by the Denver Wildlife Research Laboratory, where he rose through the ranks. By 1963, Robinson oversaw four units, including Bird Control, Predator Control, and Agricultural Rodents. He was the czar of nuisance wildlife offing. Somewhere along the way, Robinson’s oral history reveals, he had an epiphany regarding the animals whose numbers the agency had for so long fought to reduce: “Mother Nature adjusts.”
Robinson had landed on the phenomenon of compensatory reproduction. Destroy a chunk of a population, and now there’s more food for the ones who remain. Through a variety of physiological responses—shorter gestation periods, larger broods, delayed implantation—a well-fed individual produces more offspring than one that’s struggling or just getting by. With ample food, both the well-fed parents and their well-stuffed young are more likely to survive and reproduce. Coyotes, for instance, may have three pups when food is scarce, and eight when it’s plentiful. That figure comes from Resolving Human-Wildlife Conflicts, a technical press book by Michael Conover. Conover is a former director of the Jack H. Berryman Institute, which sponsors research into methods of human-wildlife conflict resolution (plenty of them lethal). Conover adds that killing coyotes opens up territories for males that would otherwise not breed. Bottom line: in order to end up with a net reduction in a coyote population, humans would have to destroy at least 60 percent of them annually.
