Wildlife officials mute a generation of swans

Baltimore Sun ^ | April 26, 2005 | Candus Thomson

[bookworm100]

Killing unhatched swans 'is preferable to shooting or rounding them up and gassing them'

WYE ISLAND - There is nothing silent about the mute swan standing guard on the sandy spit of land across from his nesting mate.

Hissing and puffing himself up, the huge white bird makes for biologist Larry Hindman's small boat at ramming speed. But the menacing swan is no match for the biologist armed with a squirt bottle filled with cooking oil. Within minutes, the embryos inside the nest's six eggs will be suffocating.

Hindman is part of a state and federal effort to reduce the population of the beautiful, yet destructive, bird before it can do any more harm to its Chesapeake Bay habitat. The two-part plan calls for smothering 1,500 eggs now and killing as many as 1,000 adult birds later this year...

Opponents, led by the Humane Society and the Fund for Animals, believe that despite the congressional action, the swans are protected under international migratory treaties...

[bookworm100]

Of course, no one tells the farmers to stop using weed killer because, after all, the run-off into the Chespeake Bay is negligible. NOT!!!

[Osage Orange]

Well....at least they didn't pull the swan's PEG tube.

[cripplecreek]

Exactly what damage to the swans do?

[italianquaker]

i dont know about swans but the "homeless" in key west are polluting the protected wetlands with feces,urine etc and what?

[Thrusher]

Opponents, led by the Humane Society and the Fund for Animals Human Life, believe that despite the congressional judicial action, the swans unborn fetuses are protected under international migratory treaties the U.S. Constitution.

[bookworm100]

Ever since the advent of no-till planting (using pesticides to kill weeds), the grasses in the bay are dying. No one wants to blame developers (replacing trees with houses) or farmers. So they throw out a red herring – swans.

The wildlife people believe the swans take their toll on the bay. They say each adult can eat up to 8 pounds of underwater grasses daily - destroying critical vegetation that filters bay water and controls erosion. The birds also squeeze out native waterfowl, such as least terns, black ducks and tundra swans, bay experts say.

"It's hard for people to believe that a fairy book creature could be a problem for the Chesapeake Bay," says Jonathan McKnight, the head of the state's invasive species program. "None of us hold the swans responsible for this. The swans are doing what swans do, and they are doing it well.

"It's just another case where man has done something dumb, something inadvertent, and it's gotten out of whack."

"The [Maryland] Department of Natural Resources has not been able to prove that the swans are causing a problem," says Michael Markarian, executive vice president of the Humane Society of the United States. "For whatever reason, the DNR is hell-bent on killing these swans."

DNR = Department of Natural Resources (Clinton appointees?)

[cripplecreek]

Ive just never known swans to be a damaging bird. There are several dozen that live on the small lake where I am and they do their best to avoid contact with humans. They nest in the marsh and they eat a lot of the invasive eurasian milifoil. They never come into the yards or anything.

[Renfield]

Herbicides were used in row-crop production long before the adoption of no-till farming. In no-till, most of the herbicides sorb to exchange sites in soil organic matter anyway. No-till farming is helpful to the bay, by reducing particulate runoff going into the watersheds. Herbicide use isn't what's causing the loss of S.A.V. Most of the problem is due to turbidity (which itself is a direct consequence of urbanization), but eutrophication, competition by noxious invasive aquatic weeds, and swans all play a part. It happens that swans are the easiest to control. Adressing turbidity and eutrophication will require billions of dollars and a lot of heavy-handed government action.

[bookworm100]

An estimated two billion tons of soil erodes from U.S. cropland each year.

To many people, no-tillage farming appears to be a tremendous step forward for agriculture. At a time when fertile topsoil is being worn away by wind and water at rates that are figured in tons per acre per year, a drastic new soil-conservation measure is certainly in order. No-till does preserve topsoil, but this advantage doesn't come without certain trade-offs. In no-till farming, at least as it's practiced today, herbicides take the place of the plow. As it's currently practiced in the U.S., no-till farming might more appropriately be called no-till/chemical agriculture.

National Center for Food and Agricultural Policy (NCFAP) study on herbicides (2003) estimates the use of herbicides throughout the country. American growers, it turns out, annually use about 400 million pounds of herbicides on 200 million acres. Further, NCFAP estimates that growers spend nearly $7 billion for herbicides, application of herbicides and technology fees. All those pounds of chemicals are used to kill around 550 trillion weeds annually.

Years ago, before the advent of no-till agriculture, the numbers were only tiny fractions of these figures.

Chemical companies have a tremendous vested interest in seeing today's approach remain in place, and powerful vested interests seem to determine our nation's agricultural policies.

[Strategerist]

The Mute swans are damaging; they're not our native species of swan.

[LasVegasMac]

Just a hunch, but I'm thinking you don't have many chemical company's in your stock portfolio.

Like I said, just a WAG.

LVM

[SkyDancer]

Well where is PETA and all those other animal rights people? Maybe it is not on their agenda. It has to be private people and their land before those groups take action.

[SkyDancer]

"Well where is PETA and all those other animal rights people? Maybe it is not on their agenda. It has to be private people and their land before those groups take action."


Case in point:
April 26, 2005 -- PETA is barking mad at Kelly Osbourne because she dyed her English bulldog, Piglet, hot pink using human hair dye. "Dogs are not fashion accessories," PETA's Michael McGraw growled to The Boston Herald. "It is very irresponsible to subject a 13-week-old puppy to chemicals that most people aren't willing to put on their heads."

[bookworm100]

Pesticides are damaging, too.

Paraquat is probably the most toxic weed killer in widespread use today. In laboratory tests, half of a population of rats will die if they're fed 150 milligrams of paraquat per kilogram of body weight. To put that in human terms, it takes about a teaspoon of paraquat to kill a person.

The herbicides paraquat, atrazine, and MSMA have been found to inhibit the growth and productivity of algae in streams, which can affect the overall bioproductivity of the water.

[ApplegateRanch]

The mute swan is native to Europe and Asia, but is an exotic species in the United States. In Maryland, a feral population of about 4,000 mute swans has become established from the original escape of five captive swans in 1962.

That is quite a population explosion, and if it follows the usual trend, and no intervention is taken, think what it will be like in just 5 more years.

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