Join us at the City of Redding Clear Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant on Metz Road off of Hwy 273 for a sunrise stroll around the ponds and Sacramento River. We will be looking for wintering waterfowl/waders as well as riparian and oak woodland passerines. Dress for chilly and windy weather on a 2-hour flat terrain hike, bring water and snacks. Rain cancels the trip.
In 1896 egrets and other birds were being killed wholesale to use their feathers in women’s hats. To protest and end the slaughter, Harriet Hemenway and Minna B. Hall formed a group, the original Massachusetts Audubon Society. Within two years their movement had been replicated in fifteen other states and the District of Columbia. Another five years, and the state organizations united into the National Audubon Society.
It was an era when modern industry was young and booming, and citizens were moving from family farms to jobs in the cities. But like us, people valued the land and they recognized that its beauties and riches were not inexhaustible. So they acted to protect those natural riches. Women quickly abandoned feathered hats. In 1903 our nation created the first National WIldlife Refuge, then the National Park Service in 1916, and in 1918, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, or MBTA.
The MBTA put into US law what the country had already agreed to with Canada, and subsequently with Mexico, Japan, and the Soviet Union. It prohibited the harming or “taking” of birds. As clarified and amended over the last century, its provisions have promoted safety and efficiency. After the Exxon Valdez killed 250,000 birds with a spill of enough oil to cover 34 acres a foot deep, the act supported fines and reparations of over $100 million, and Congress passed a requirement that oil tankers be double-hulled. When BP’s Deep Horizon spilled two to fifteen times more oil, killing over a million birds, the company paid, to date, nearly $70 billion in cleanup, fines, and lawsuit settlements that have offset the losses to habitat, residents, and businesses.
Pelican in Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
In the last two decades the act has been enforced with punitive damages only fourteen times, and for amounts that large businesses might shrug off. Even BP’s Deep Horizon payouts of $70 billion were less than .2% penalties under the MBTA. But that liability may have given teeth to the much larger public and commercial lawsuits for recovery from losses.
The act provides for waivers for various purposes including education, research, and safety. It protects only native species, and provides for game bird hunting seasons. It is hailed as our nation’s best legislation to protect birds.
But two years ago the Trump Administration gutted it. It reinterpreted the law to allow incidental take, with no waivers required and no penalties levied. “Incidental” takes are killings that happen as a by-product of actions. The new interpretation eliminates fines for misapplying pesticides that kill hundreds or thousands of birds on a single mega-farm, or for poor maintenance on an oil rig that kills a million birds or more. Every incentive to consider the well-being of birds is removed by this interpretation. Routine practices that save millions every year–covering oil waste pits, spacing power lines to avoid electrocution, replacing tower lights with blinking ones–are rendered valueless. This ruling replaces the public wealth of nature’s beauty and richness with a narrower, purely monetary value.
It has become common knowledge that birds are already in a precipitous decline. Some species like the desert-adapted ash-throated flycatcher are doing well, but overall there is a 30% loss of North American birds over the last fifty years.
Now the Administration is trying to make the interpretation that removes bird protections into permanent law. Our representative in Congress has repeatedly stated his commitment to outdoor access, but the outdoors that we can access are being impoverished. He calls efforts to protect wildlife and clean habitats “government overreach,” but given the decline of our birds it appears to be under-reach.
Now there is a bill in Congress to protect the MBTA from being demolished. Representative LaMalfa can sign on as a cosponsor to the Migratory Bird Protection Act, H.R. 5552. He can work publicly and vigorously with the Administration, his party, to get the bill enacted into law. If you, like Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall of yore, want to weigh in, Rep. LaMalfa can be reached through his form at https://lamalfa.house.gov/contact or the Redding office (530) 223-5898.
The egrets won’t thank you. But they might survive.
American White Pelican
What California bird weighs five pounds more than our ten-pound eagles, has a wingspan two feet longer than the eagles’ seven feet, and a beak twice as long as a great blue heron’s? What bird is rumored to eat its own young, and also to feed its young with its own blood? What bird is noted in a 1910 poem by Dixon Lanier Merritt as wonderful because “His bill will hold more than his belican”?
Yes, the bird is the American White Pelican. (And yes, the poem is by Dixon Merritt, not Ogden Nash.)
These old birds, with fossil relatives going back half way to the dinosaurs, are shy of people, and remain an infrequent sight in Shasta County. But they are here. They nest along the shallow lakes of north-eastern California, and they winter even closer, throughout the Sacramento River Delta. Occasionally we spot them.
On a quiet summer day they might float high overhead. They typically proceed in a silent group of fifteen or so, with not a single one of them deigning to speak or flap a wing. Their long bills spear forward like a pteradactyl’s; their motionless, extended wings show black flight feathers on otherwise snowy plumage. They hang in the summer-blue sky, still as pallbearers, seeming beyond the rule of something as mundane as gravity.
But of course they are fellow Earthlings, and sometimes will tilt Earthward and glide severally into a water-ski landing on a shallow lake. They prefer shallow lakes because of their feeding style.
Brown Pelican Dive
Their coastal cousins, the brown pelicans, plunge into the water and scoop a beak-full of ocean and, they hope, stunned fish. White pelicans, on the other hand, paddle along the surface to find their food. Frequently they group together to swim-herd fish into shallow coves, where they can more easily scoop a mouthful of prey, either from their normal floating position or by tipping tail-up like a mallard. White pelicans will swallow salamanders and crawdads, but they mostly dine on warm-water fish like carp and minnows.
Each spring, the adults’ beaks brighten from yellow to orange, and they develop a rounded ornamental fin on their upper bills—an accessory that perhaps one must be a pelican to admire. The mated pair scrapes out a hollow in sand or gravel where the female lays 2-3 eggs. Only one of the young will usually fledge. Their in-nest competition is fierce.
While incubating or otherwise resting, pelicans often tuck their bills down their front sides. It may be this habit and the red-orange bill of the breeding season that fostered the mistaken myth that adult pelicans feed the young their blood. They do not.
As for the grisly tale that parent pelicans eat their offspring: adult pelicans do not carry food to their young in their pouched beaks. They swallow the food and then regurgitate it for the nestling. On its part, the baby stimulates regurgitation by sticking its own beak down its parent’s throat. The scene looks very much like the parent is eating its baby, head first. The feeding practice and the tale it inspired are primitive and perhaps galling; but the unpretentious dining style seems to have worked for 30 million years.
White pelicans declined for the first half of last century, perhaps in part due to the loss of a major nesting rookery when the progenitors of the Westlands Water District drained Tulare Lake, which at the time was the largest lake surface west of the Mississippi. But now the pelicans are recuperating—into new trouble, expanding into the southeast where catfish farms create rich feeding grounds.
We will gather at the Arcata Marsh Interpretive Center parking lot to meet trip leader Bill Oliver. Many participants on this trip spend the night in Arcata to meet there in the morning. The 307 acre Arcata Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary integrates the City of Arcata’s wastewater treatment plant with 5 miles of walking paths through freshwater marshes, salt marsh, tidal sloughs, grassy uplands, and mudflats. Many shorebirds and migrants along the Pacific Flyway are seen here. Call Bill @ 941-7741 for more information.
