The National Audubon Society has launched a campaign to stop the U. S. Department of Agriculture from poisoning two million blackbirds a year to keep the blackbirds from eating the sunflower seed crop in the northern Great Plains (ironically, the same sunflower seeds that are later sold as birdseed).  The poisoned bait spread in sunflower fields poses a deadly danger to all other birds in the field, such as Horned Larks, Dickcissels, and sparrows, and when hawks and other predators eat the dead or dying birds, they too become poisoned.  The Audubon Society estimates that 68 bird species in all are threatened by the Department of Agriculture’s poison plan.  To get around the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Department pretends that this is an “experiment” to see whether lowering the population of blackbirds by killing them will reduce sunflower crop loss.  Despite the fact that this “experiment” has been conducted for five years, there apparently is still not enough “data”.  The Department is asking for another permit from 2001 through 2004.  Last year, the Audubon Society was successful in blocking the permit.  But to stop future permits, many letters of protest are needed.  This is where you can help.  At the end of this newsletter I have reproduced the text of the Audubon Society’s petition.  All you have to do is sign and return the letter to me. (Fore more information, see Audubon Magazine, July/Aug. 2000, p. 16).

Another action item is to write a letter to President Clinton asking him to designate the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge as a National Monument to keep the area safe from oil drilling. The area is completely undeveloped so far and it is the home of polar bears, caribou, muskoxen, grizzly bears, wolves, foxes, Golden Eagles, Snowy Owls and many other species of birds and animals.  This is a campaign of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).  Just send your letter to the White House, Washington, D.C.   If you want to copy the NRDC, their address is 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011.  For more information, check out their web site at www.nrdc.org.

At the time of writing this report in early September, the Corps of Engineers has still not issued a permit to Gateway International Raceway on their scaled-down application that will now impact just ½ acre of wetlands instead of their previous plan that would have taken or impacted over 30 acres of wetlands.  Stay tuned for the final chapter.

One of the two chip mills operating in Missouri has closed.  Although the doors are shut, the weeds are springing up in the parking lot, and its 26,000 acre tract of timber is for sale, Willamette nevertheless issued a press release saying that they are not closed!  This followed a prior report in the Post Dispatch that Willamette left because of the hostile environment toward chip mills in Missouri.  However, all is not well in the other chip mill-infested states such as Tennessee, where Willamette is tripling the size of a paper factory.  Obviously the chips that make that paper are coming from somewhere.  In Missouri, the battle will shift to the legislature to enact restrictions on destructive timber cutting practices like clearcutting.  Leo and Kay Drey’s 160,000 acre Pioneer Forest in southern Missouri, which uses selective harvesting as opposed to clearcutting, is a sustainable forestry method that allows the landowner to make money but preserve most of the forest at the same time, thus ensuring an ongoing source of income.  With clearcutting, when the forest is gone, there is nothing but a bare lunar landscape. 

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