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Thursday, September 21, 2006

Group Says Birds Aren't 'Bait'

By Matt Gomez
Mountain View Telegraph
    As the weather begins to cool, hawks, eagles and other birds of prey begin their migrations to the south.
    The chilly weather also signifies a time when HawkWatch International, a raptor monitoring and protection group, makes an effort to track the birds' movements and watch for trends in raptor populations.
    HawkWatch has been operating in the Manzano mountains for 20 years, but two recent letters to the editor in the Telegraph raised concerns regarding HawkWatch's use of "bait birds" at its monitoring site near the Capilla Peak fire lookout tower.
    Mike Neal, field studies coordinator for HawkWatch, said "lure birds" are used by HawkWatch, but he emphasized that these birds were not being released as edible bait for passing raptors.
    "I think a lot of people associate the term bait with fishing bait where whatever you're using as bait is going to be killed as part of the process," Neal said. "That's definitely not the case (with HawkWatch's lure birds). Most of these birds do in fact survive."
    Neal said lure birds— which include house sparrows, European starlings and captive species of pigeons and Asian doves— are used to trap raptors as part of HawkWatch's banding operations. The primary purpose of the trapping is conservation research, in which migrating raptors' health is monitored to get a sense of the general health of the population of raptors.
    Neal said HawkWatch traps migrating raptors from about 12 species.
    "The main reason we use lure birds— and this is a standard practice that happens at hundreds of sites across the county, we aren't the only ones doing this by any means— but the primary reason why we do use the lure birds is they are the most effective means of trapping raptors," he said.
    All four species of lure birds HawkWatch uses are non-native species that are either bred in captivity or, in the case of the sparrow and starling, are exotic, invasive species that are subject to population control measures in which hundreds of thousands of the birds are poisoned annually, Neal said.
    "We do recognize this as being somewhat morally ambiguous, but given all the needs for the conservation research and the facts that these are disposable populations of birds that would otherwise be euthanized or in many other cases they would be killed by any other means ... they're not protected by any laws, in fact, many states have laws in order to control their populations," Neal said.
    Lure birds are anchored within a general area by a line that is attached to the bird, Neal said. The birds also wear protective leather vests to shield them from harm that could be inflicted by the birds of prey, he said.
    Three types of nets are used to catch the incoming raptors— all of which would shield the lure bird from attack.
    In all, an average of three or four lure birds are killed each year, Neal said, among a group of 150 used at each monitoring site.
    The lure birds work two hours at a time, Neal said, and then are allowed to rest through the following day before they are used again.
    Neal said artificial lure birds have been tested by some of his colleagues, but they proved to only be about 30 to 40 percent as effective as live lure birds.
    "One of the things, when we're collecting the type of data we're trying to collect ... having a larger sample size over a long sweep of time is really important," Neal said. "We don't even come close to trapping every bird that migrates through by any means, and that's not our goal, but our goal is to get a fairly robust sampling every season so if there are things in the population those trends would come out."
    Neal said HawkWatch has been operating out of the Manzano mountains since 1985 and has been trapping raptors extensively there since 1990.
    "We have a lot of roots there in that area and we don't want people to get a wrong opinion about our research or our organization," Neal said. "Obviously we care a great deal about birds."