Sorry, but ducks don’t respect borders

The waterfowl season has been anything but just ducky for hunters, especially those from families who read the news.

“My wife won’t let me bring a duck into the house,” one hunter told me recently. “She’s been reading about the bird flu.”

President Bush didn’t help the situation in early November by asking Congress for $7.1 billion in emergency funds to help prepare the country for a possible outbreak of the deadly avian flu.

The President offered very few details about the threat or the planned course of action. This forced groups like Ducks Unlimited to contact experts who said that game should always be handled with care followed by proper handwashing, but that American waterfowl hunters faced no significant threats this season.

A few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture raised the anxiety level among hunting families even further by closing the border to the import of wild hunter-taken ducks and geese from Canada. The ban was a reaction to news that a domestic duck in British Columbia was found to have a form of avian flu, even though it was not a strain considered to be out of the ordinary.

Apparently no one in USDA headquarters realized that wild ducks and geese fly back and forth across the international border on daily basis during autumn.

Why would a federal agency go to all the expense and inconvenience of stopping hunters from bringing a few hundred birds through the customs gates when millions of waterfowl are flying across the border overhead?

Someone might have brought this to Washington’s attention if officials there had made the effort to contact state wildlife agencies, the media or hunting organizations before issuing the ban.

No one at the border was picking up ducks hunters were being prevented from bringing back into the U.S. Indeed, some hunters were quietly being told to dump the birds – an illegal act – into Dumpsters, the government’s apparent receptacle of choice for biohazards such as mallards that might potentially be carrying avian flu.

On Dec. 14, the USDA in Washington, D.C., issued a statement relaxing the ban to allow wild waterfowl to come across the border from everywhere in Canada except British Columbia. No problem. Most of Canada was frozen by that time and all of the waterfowl were already in the U.S.

Out here in the real world, neither public health officials nor fish and wildlife agency staffers have been overly concerned about the wild ducks coming from Canada. Even the veterinarian for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife didn’t see any serious danger at this time.

A Kellogg hunter, who found two sick mallards near Smelterville at the height of the alert about avian flu, said Idaho Fish and Game Department personnel in Coeur d’Alene weren’t even interested in looking at the birds.

BirdLife International issued a report last week pointing out that millions of wild birds have flown to their wintering sites across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas without the widely predicted outbreaks of H5N1 bird flu associated with their migration routes.

“The most obvious explanation is that migrating wild birds are not spreading the disease,” said Dr Michael Rands, the organization’s director.

“The hypothesis that wild birds are to blame is simply far from proven,” he said, noting that it’s more likely that wild birds are the victims, not the vectors of the feared H5N1 bird flu.

While hunters groups have been fairly mum on the issue, BirdLife scientists are urging governments and relevant agencies to give sportsmen a break and concentrate their efforts on the poultry and cage-bird trades.

Their recommendations include:

•Banning the movement of poultry and poultry products from infected areas.

•Banning the use of untreated poultry feces as fertilizer and feed in fish-farms and in agriculture.

•Restricting the international movement of captive birds in trade.

Recognizing that the virus can rapidly mutate, BirdLife agrees it’s important to monitor wild bird populations for evidence of new avian flu strains.

But the key to preventing the disease appears to be in better bio-security, not silly hysteria that blocks hunters from bringing dead waterfowl through customs gates while the birds fly freely across the borders.

Messenger killed: Sen. Larry Craig has succeeded in striking a blow against sound science in the battle to save endangered Pacific Northwest salmon stocks.

Angered by a court ruling that ordered more water to be spilled through four Columbia and Snake dams to aid salmon migrations, Craig inserted a provision into the energy spending bill to prevent funding for the Portland-based Fish Passage Center (FPC), which includes Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission scientists who analyze data on the effectiveness of the federal government’s multibillion-dollar effort to save wild salmon.

At a recent Northwest Power and Conservation Council hearing in Portland to address how the fisheries data will be analyzed without the FPC, Idaho fishing and river guide Jim Norton of Boise succinctly summed up where the scientists had gone wrong.

The FPC had been created to provide “honest, non-politicized information” to fish and wildlife managers and the public in general, he said, noting the scientists went beyond the tolerance conservatives have for good science by being so audacious as to suggest that “fish need water.”