Dead birds rain on Illinois town

BREESE, Ill. -- It looked like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie: hundreds of dead birds covering JoAnn Thole's lawn in this southwestern Illinois town.

"I've got 117 pounds of dead birds -- I weighed them," Thole said as she opened her garage, which she had made into a makeshift bird morgue.

The European starlings hadn't died of some mysterious disease, but of poison distributed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the request of local farmers, who said the birds had been eating their cattle feed and causing other problems.

It's not the first time the issue of poisoning birds has surfaced in the region.

Bird poisonings

Last year, Harvey Culli of Freeburg, Ill., had to devote 30 of his prime woodland acres to conservation for 25 years to settle a lawsuit after he admitted poisoning red-winged blackbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, common grackles and horned larks. The birds had been damaging his family's crops, he said.

The difference between the government's killing spree and Culli's is that the 81-year-old farmer was poisoning birds protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act with a pesticide that had not been approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said Kirk Gustad, director of the Agriculture Department's Wildlife Services unit in Springfield, Ill.

Gustad uses a poison that is EPA-approved for killing birds and is sprinkling it only where the starlings, which do not enjoy special legal protection, look for their food, he said. Still, some blackbirds are likely killed in the process.

The agency has received about two dozen requests from farmers around the state to kill off the starlings, which eat feed meant for cows and spread disease in their droppings, Gustad said.

This week, thousands of dead birds dotted the streets of Breese, a town of 4,000 where they've been seeking out trees to sleep in after spending their days eating feed -- and poisoned pellets-- at nearby farms.

There were so many dead birds last weekend, Breese Police Chief Jim Hummert told residents to put the carcasses in containers at the curb with their garbage.

"There are some subdivisions with so many dead birds and so much bird droppings that kids can't go out and play," Hummert said.