By Miriam L. Austin

I breathe in sharply. The bird in the trough is large this time. The feathers are scarcely wet – the head lying face down in gentle repose – yet somehow as if at any moment it might spring awake and gracefully lift into the sky on those powerful wings tucked so neatly against the sides of the body.

No! I cry out. But there is no response. No head lifts, no eyes plead for assistance. I realize suddenly that life and hope have only been recently abandoned by this still form, and my imagination begins to race. If only – if only I had made it here just an hour before, perhaps even just minutes ago, before that last fateful breath was taken. If only I could have plucked this beautiful falcon from the alluring but deadly water and sent it winging back across the night sky, back to Echo Crater where the prairie falcons nest and scream from the rocky walls.

But this bird will never fly again. Nor will the hundreds and likely thousands of other birds that have drowned this summer alone in water developments on public and private rangelands in Idaho. The prairie falcon was only one of three found drowned this summer in Laidlaw Park, Idaho. The three falcons, along with approximately two dozen other birds, died recently in troughs and tanks in the Craters of the Moon National Monument Expansion, where a warning was issued upon establishment by Presidential Proclamation “not to appropriate, injure, destroy, or remove any feature of this monument.”

This experience follows on the heels of the Pleasantview, Idaho tragedy, where an estimated 500 to 1,000 birds, bats and small mammals drowned needlessly this summer. We have counted and photographed enough death on the BLM’s Pleasantview Allotment for the images to linger forever with my assistants and me.

We will relive again and again the horror of approaching one stinking trough filled with the corpses of more than 69 deceased migratory songbirds, the hot sun glinting from iridescent lazuli buntings, the contrasting reds and browns of Cassin’s finches,

the bright yellow markings of warblers and siskins. We will relive the horror of lifting valve box covers at the ends of troughs and discovering the decaying piles of birds and mammals that thought the narrow openings represented some sort of escape from their watery doom.

We will relive the horror of finding the temporary wood and escape debris we have placed in the troughs (to serve as interim devices until the BLM could intervene) thrown out by thoughtless permittees, followed by the horror of finding dozens of new bodies floating in the same waters on our next visit.

We will relive the horror of finding drowned female kestrels and other hawks, knowing that somewhere nearby their nestlings have also been condemned to death. The horror of finding, on consecutive weeks, drowned mated pairs of downy and hairy woodpeckers, of pairs of dozens of other species large and small, knowing again that not only have the parents died by drowning but also that whole families were now condemned to die of starvation.

And how to find the young or even offer any rescue assistance? How to find dozens of innocent young birds hidden away from prying eyes in their many kinds of nests and cavities, desperately waiting for a parent to return with life-giving sustenance?

We will try to relive our short-lived joy finding one lone young brewer’s sparrow – a BLM sensitive species – still holding its head above water in a tank the size of a modest living room in Pleasantview. And we will relive again and again the agony of losing the short desperate battle to try to warm and rescue that one lone tiny bird from fear, exhaustion and hypothermia.

How long do these birds and mammals swim in endless, hopeless desperation? The will to live is strong in even the tiniest of wild hearts. We found this little bird at noon, exhausted and paralyzed. Had it been swimming since first light, when it came for a drink at dawn? All night? How long can the long-legged bats, the golden-mantled ground squirrels, and the prairie falcons swim, searching for a way up and out of steep-walled prisons flooded with water we have captured for the convenience of livestock? Hours? A full day? Clinging to tiny bits of wood and floating algae on a warm day or night, perhaps even longer?

Does hypothermia win out? Or, in silent exhaustion, do these precious bits of life finally just lay their heads down on the watery pillow? And how long did each of the birds and mammals wait before taking that last chance to reach the lifegiving waters in the steep-sided troughs? And how could any human being repeatedly throw out the hundreds of spent bodies, like so many pieces of used tissue, without even making an attempt to relieve their plight?

We cannot forget or erase these scenes. We will relive the horror of discovering over and over, across the months of this desperately hot summer, the newly dead, the decaying corpses, the floating protein and lipid debris, as empty promises to address the carnage were broken again and again by an agency – the Bureau of Land Management – legally responsible for managing these lands and all their inherent values in a manner that merits the public trust.

It is only now, following years of protests and complaints by ourselves and so many of our friends and associates to area BLM offices, that the agency is taking official state action. Following public prodding by WWP and others, as well as threats of legal action by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Idaho BLM office under the direction of K. Lynn Bennett has finally issued mandates to all Idaho field offices to address immediately the issue of wildlife escape ladders.

But the scope of the problem is still far beyond the current efforts. Vertebrate wildlife have been dying needlessly for years in troughs in California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming and anywhere else where there are unprotected troughs. The presence of alternate sources of water is not sufficient. There remains something alluring to wildlife in the still, open and often deeper and relatively clean waters of livestock troughs.

Drowning deaths are also occurring in Idaho on U.S. Forest Service lands, Idaho Department of Lands state school sections, and private rangelands and pastures. And no one has even begun to take official action to stop the terrible toll of troughs on invertebrate wildlife.

As I wrote in a recent short note to the Idaho Cattleman’s Association’s Rangeland Resources Council and to U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo’s office in Pocatello, Idaho, it is time for all of our land users to do more than just “talk the talk” of land stewardship. Stewardship is an act of caring for something valuable. It’s time for everyone to “walk the walk.” And this applies to every one of us, including those who include themselves in the conservation community.

We have been very dismayed by a few of the more narrow-minded responses we have received regarding our reporting of the trough deaths and calls for action. One biologist who makes a contract income from bird-related resources claimed our calls for official action were “hysterical,” that we should be concentrating on designing a new and better trough instead. This ignores the fact that the BLM has had, since the 1980s, excellent research and publications available to the public on designing and installing escapes within water troughs. It is not a lack of technology; it’s a lack of care and effort on the part of most of our agency managers and resource users that has resulted in the current desperate situation.

An even more disturbing response came from hosts of a bird-oriented website in Idaho, where we have placed a number of alerts regarding the trough deaths and pleas for conservation-minded and bird-loving folks to contact their public land managers and request action. In a forwarded message that I recently received, I learned that the site’s hosts feel that issues such as birds drowning in water troughs “deteriorate” their website into a “pulpit to proclaim…pet or favorite agendas.” They claim that their purpose is “geared toward the reporting of sightings, wild bird behavior, habitat and announcements.”

What a terrible and callous attitude from a narrow-minded segment of the birding community itself! To ignore ongoing habitat threats that are inextricably tied to bird behavior, and to want to utilize birds as nothing more than cute bundles of feathers to check off on a year or life list is to utilize our public and wildlife resources in just as extractive and callous a manner as our irresponsible livestock users. Thankfully for the list-checkers, there are more than a few of us who care enough to actually do something besides watch our wildlife resources struggle in the downward spiral brought about by our own anthropogenic influences.

It is too late for the hundreds and thousands of wildlife that have already perished in livestock troughs this year. But as I have expressed to the BLM’s Idaho office, as well as to local offices and the media, let’s not let these deaths be in vain. Let’s learn from this terrible, costly lesson and finally act to secure the safety of wildlife West-wide. Regardless of our political and world views, wildlife is everyone’s business, and we have a moral obligation to see that our human activities have the least impact possible on the species with whom we share the earth – species that must rely upon our voices to serve as theirs.

Please contact your local land managers and request that they take all possible steps to address wildlife safety in your area, including the provision of escape ladders in any troughs. Please take the time to report any unprotected trough or tank to your state and local managers. And please report any deaths you observe in troughs or tanks immediately to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Miriam L. Austin is a field biologist and has served as WWP resources specialist who lives in Twin Falls County, Idaho

This article appeared in the Watersheds Messenger – Late Fall (Vol. X, No. 3)

Check out WWP’s archive of our semi-annual publication, the Watersheds Messenger