Animal Vegetable Criminal by Mary Roach

Author:Mary Roach
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786078353
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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 cowbirds 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, pasteboard 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

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