Please take a few minutes to voice your opposition to the latest attack on the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed a rule to add to its regulations this administration’s rollback of longstanding migratory bird protections. The regulation would specify that incidental taking or killing of migratory birds would not be unlawful under the MBTA. To be unlawful, an action against any protected birds would have to be an action meant to injure or kill the birds.
Submitting a comment in opposition is easy. Go to the website for the proposed rule, click on the blue box that says “Comment Now, ” write your comment in the box that pops up and follow the prompts to submit your comment. The deadline for comments is March 19.
A simple comment opposing the proposal is enough, but if you want to write something more specific, you may want to raise some of the following issues:
Since 1970, North America has lost more than a quarter of its entire bird population, or around 3 billion birds, according to research published by the journal Science.
Birds provide essential services to agriculture and the economy by pollinating crops, dispersing seeds and eating harmful insects.
Incidental take standards have not resulted in the examples of egregious overreach the proposal outlines to justify the nullification, such as penalizing a boy for throwing stones and accidentally hitting a robin’s nest.
If the proposed rules had been in place during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there would have been no penalties at all for the more than 1 million birds that were killed during the first 95 days after the event. See the Audubon story here.
Industrial operations that have put into effect changes to avoid liability under the MBTA could return to past harmful practices under the rule:
Oil pits and open-top tanks that have been covered or flagged to avoid killing birds may go unprotected.
Wind farms sited to avoid sensitive migratory flyways may be sited where they may kill legions of migrating birds.
Protective measures adopted by electric utilities to avoid collisions and electrocutions may be bypassed in the future.
The proposed rule was published in the February 3, 2020 Federal Register at page 5915.
