The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  All this has come about because of the prodigious growth of an industry for the production of synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery did not come by chance; insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man. In being man-made—by the ingenious laboratory manipulation of molecules, involving the substitution of atoms or the alteration of their arrangement—the new insecticides differ sharply from the simpler ones of prewar days. These were derived from naturally occurring minerals and plant products: compounds of arsenic, copper, lead, manganese, zinc, and other minerals; pyrethrum, from the dried flowers of chrysanthemums; nicotine sulphate, from some of the relatives of tobacco; and rotenone, from leguminous plants of the East Indies. What sets the new synthetic insecticides apart is their enormous biological potency. They can enter into the most vital processes of the body and change them in sinister and often deadly ways. Yet new chemicals are added to the list each year, and new uses are devised for them. Production of synthetic pesticides in the United States soared from 124,259,000 pounds in 1947 to 637,666,000 pounds in 1960—more than a fivefold increase. In 1960, the wholesale value of these products was well over a quarter of a billion dollars. But in the plans and hopes of the industry this enormous production is only a beginning….

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  Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings, once filled with the beauty of bird song, are strangely silent. This sudden silencing of the song of the birds, this obliteration of the color and beauty and interest they lend to our world, has come about swiftly and insidiously, and has gone unnoticed by those whose communities are as yet unaffected. From the town of Hinsdale, in northeastern Illinois, in 1958, a housewife wrote in despair to one of the world’s leading ornithologists, Robert Cushman Murphy, Lamont Curator Emeritus of Birds at the American Museum of Natural History: “Here in our village the elm trees have been sprayed for several years. When we moved here six years ago, there was a wealth of bird life; I put up a feeder and had a steady stream of cardinals, chickadees, downies, and nuthatches all winter, and the cardinals and chickadees brought their young ones in the summer. After several years of DDT spray, the town is almost devoid of robins and starlings; chickadees have not been on my shelf for two years, and this year the cardinals are gone, too; the nesting population in the neighborhood seems to consist of one dove pair and perhaps one catbird family. It is hard to explain to the children that the birds have been killed off, when they have learned in school that a federal law protects the birds from killing or capture. ‘Will they ever come back?’ they ask, and I do not have the answer.”

  One story might serve as a tragic symbol of the fate of the birds—a fate that has already overtaken some species and threatens all. It is the story of the robin, the bird known to everyone. To millions of Americans, the season’s first robin means that the grip of winter is broken. Its coming is an event reported in newspapers and described eagerly at the breakfast table. And as the number of arrivals grows and the first mists of green appear in the woodlands, thousands of people listen for the dawn chorus of the robins, throbbing in the early-morning light. But now all is changed, and not even the return of the birds may be taken for granted.

  The fate of the robin, and indeed of many other species as well, seems linked with that of the American elm, a tree that is part of the history of thousands of towns within its native range, from the Atlantic to the Rockies, gracing their streets, their village squares, and their college campuses with majestic archways of green. Today, the elms are subject to a disease that afflicts them throughout their range—a disease so serious that many experts believe all efforts to save the elms will in the end be futile. The so-called Dutch elm disease entered the United States from Europe in 1930, in elm-burl logs imported for the veneer industry. It is a fungus disease; the organism invades the water-conducting vessels of the tree, spreads by spores carried in the flow of sap, and, by mechanical clogging and also by poisons it secretes, causes the branches to wilt and the tree to die. The disease is spread from diseased trees to healthy ones by elm-bark beetles. The insects tunnel out galleries under the bark, and these become a favorable habitat for the invading fungus. As the insects move through the galleries, they pick up the spores, and later carry them wherever they fly. Efforts to control the disease have concentrated on achieving control of the carrier insect, and in community after community, especially throughout the strongholds of the American elm, the Middle West and New England, intensive spraying with DDT has become a routine procedure.

  What this spraying could mean to bird life, and especially to the robin, was first made clear by the work of two ornithologists at Michigan State University, Professor George Wallace and one of his graduate students, John Mehner. In 1954, when Mr. Mehner began work toward his doctorate, he chose a research project that had to do with robin populations. This came about entirely by chance, for at that time no one suspected that the robins were in danger. But even as he undertook the work, events occurred that were to change its character—and, indeed, to deprive him of his material. Spraying for Dutch elm disease began in a small way on the university campus that very year. In 1955, the city of East Lansing, where the university is situated, joined in; spraying on the campus was expanded; and, with local programs for control of the gypsy moth and the mosquito also under way, the chemical rain increased to a downpour. In 1954, the year of the first, light spraying, all seemed to be well. The following spring, the migrating robins returned to the campus as usual. Like the bluebells in H. M. Tomlinson’s haunting essay “The Lost Wood,” they were “expecting no evil” as they reoccupied their familiar territory. But soon it became evident that something was wrong. Dead and dying robins began to appear on the campus. Few birds were seen engaging in their normal foraging activities or assembling in their customary roosts. Few nests were built; few young appeared. The pattern was repeated with monotonous regularity in succeeding springs. In the sprayed area, each wave of migrating robins would be eliminated in about a week. Then new arrivals would come in, only to add to the numbers of birds seen on the campus in the agonized tremors that precede death. “The campus is serving as a graveyard for most of the robins that attempt to take up residence in the spring,” Dr. Wallace noted. But why? At first, he suspected some disease of the nervous system, but soon it became evident that “in spite of the assurances of the insecticide people that their sprays were ‘harmless to birds,’ the robins were really dying of insecticidal poisoning; they invariably exhibited the well-known symptoms of loss of balance, followed by tremors, convulsions, and death.” Several circumstances suggested that the robins were being poisoned not so much by direct contact with the insecticides as indirectly, by eating poisoned earthworms. Campus earthworms had been fed to crayfish in a research project, and all the crayfish had quickly died. A snake kept in a laboratory cage had gone into violent tremors after being fed such worms. And earthworms are the principal food of robins in the spring.

  A key piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the doomed robins was presently supplied by Dr. Roy Barker, of the Illinois Natural History Survey. Dr. Barker’s work, published in 1958, traced the intricate cycle of events by which the robins’ fate is linked to the elm trees by way of the earthworms. The trees are sprayed in the spring or early summer and often again a few months later. Powerful sprayers direct a stream of poison toward all parts of the tallest trees, killing directly not only the target organism—the bark beetle—but other insects, including pollinating species and predatory spiders and beetles. The poison forms a tenacious film on the leaves and bark. Rains do not wash it away. In the autumn, the leaves fall to the ground, accumulate in sodden layers, and begin the slow process of becoming one with the soil. In this they are aided by the toil of the earth
worms, which feed in the leaf litter, for elm leaves are among their favorite foods. In feeding on the leaves, the worms, of course, also swallow the insecticide. Dr. Barker found deposits of DDT throughout the digestive tracts of the worms, and in their blood vessels, nerves, and body wall. Undoubtedly some of the earthworms themselves succumb, but those that survive become “biological magnifiers” of the poison—that is, the concentration of insecticide builds up in their bodies. Then, in the spring, the robins return. As few as eleven large earthworms can transfer a lethal dose of DDT to a robin. And eleven worms form a small part of a robin’s daily ration; in fact, a robin may easily eat eleven earthworms in as many minutes.

  Not all robins receive a lethal dose, but another consequence of poisoning may lead as surely to the extinction of their kind. The shadow of sterility lies over all the bird studies—and, indeed, lengthens to include all living things. There are now only two or three dozen robins to be found each spring on the entire hundred-and-eighty-five-acre campus of Michigan State University, compared with a conservatively estimated three hundred and seventy adults before spraying. In 1954, every robin nest under observation by Mehner produced young. In 1957, Mehner could find only one young robin. Part of this failure to produce young is due, of course, to the death of one or both of a pair of robins before the nesting cycle is completed. But Dr. Wallace has significant records that point toward something more sinister—the actual destruction of the birds’ ability to reproduce. He has, for example, “records of robins and other birds building nests but laying no eggs, and others laying eggs and incubating them but not hatching them.” In 1960, he told a congressional committee that was holding hearings on a bill for better coordination of spraying programs, “We have one record of a robin that sat on its eggs faithfully for twenty-one days and they did not hatch. The normal incubation period is thirteen days….Our analyses are showing high concentrations of DDT in the testes and ovaries of breeding birds.”

  The robins are only one element in the complex pattern of devastation arising from the spraying of the elms, even as the elm program is only one of the multitudinous spray programs that spread poison over our land. Heavy mortality has occurred among about ninety species of birds, including those most familiar to amateur naturalists, and in some of the sprayed towns the populations of nesting birds in general have declined as much as 90 percent. All the various types of birds are affected—ground feeders, treetop feeders, bark feeders, predators. Among them is the woodcock, which includes earthworms in its diet and which winters in southern areas that have recently been heavily sprayed with chemicals. Two significant discoveries have now been made about the woodcock. The numbers of young birds in New Brunswick, where many woodcocks breed, have definitely been reduced, and adult birds that have been analyzed contain heavy residues of both DDT and a chlorinated hydrocarbon called heptachlor. Already there are disturbing records of mortality among more than twenty other species of ground-feeding birds, including three of the thrushes whose songs are among the most exquisite of bird voices, the olive-backed, the wood, and the hermit. And the sparrows that flit through the shrubby understory of the woodlands and forage with rustling sounds amid the fallen leaves—the song sparrow and the whitethroat—have also been found among the victims of the sprays.

  All the treetop feeders—the birds that glean their insect food from the leaves—have disappeared from heavily sprayed areas, including those woodland sprites the kinglets, both ruby-crowned and golden-crowned; the tiny gnat-catchers; and many of the warblers, whose migrating hordes flow through the trees in spring in a multicolored tide of life. In Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, in the years before 1958, at least a thousand myrtle warblers could be seen in migration; after the spraying of the elms in that year, observers could find only two. So, with additions from other communities, the list grows, and the warblers killed by the spray include those that most charm and fascinate all who are aware of them: the black-and-white, the yellow, the magnolia, and the Cape May; the ovenbird, whose call throbs in the Maytime woods; the Blackburnian, whose wings are touched with flame; the chestnut-sided, the Canada, and the black-throated green. These treetop feeders are affected either directly, by the eating of poisoned insects, or indirectly, by a shortage of food.

  The loss of food has also struck hard at the swallows, which cruise the skies straining out the aerial insects as herring strain out the plankton of the sea. A Wisconsin naturalist has reported, “Swallows have been hard hit. Everyone complains of how few they have compared to four or five years ago. Our sky overhead was full of them only four years ago. Now we seldom see any….This could be both lack of insects because of spray, or poisoned insects.” Of other birds this observer wrote, “Another striking loss is the phoebe. Flycatchers are scarce everywhere, but the early common phoebe is no more. I’ve seen one this spring and only one last spring. Other birders in Wisconsin make the same complaint. I have had five or six pair of cardinals in the past, none now. Wrens, robins, catbirds, and screech owls have nested each year in our garden. There are none now. Summer mornings are without bird song. Only pest birds, pigeons, starlings, and English sparrows remain.”

  The sprays applied to the elms in the fall, sending the poison into every little crevice in the bark, are probably responsible for severe reductions observed in the numbers of bark feeders—chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, woodpeckers, and brown creepers. During the winter of 1957–58, Dr. Wallace for the first time in many years saw no chickadees or nuthatches at his home feeding station. Three nuthatches that he came upon later provided a sorry little step-by-step lesson in cause and effect: one was feeding on an elm, another was found dying, and the third was dead. The loss of all these birds is deplorable for economic reasons as well as for less tangible ones. The summer food of the white-breasted nuthatch and the brown creeper, for example, includes the eggs, larvae, and adults of a very large number of insect species injurious to trees. About three-quarters of the food of the chickadee is animal, including all stages of the life cycle of many insects. The chickadee’s method of feeding is described in Arthur Cleveland Bent’s Life Histories of North American Jays, Crows, and Titmice: “As the flock moves along, each bird examines minutely bark, twigs, and branches, searching for tiny bits of food (spiders’ eggs, cocoons, or other dormant insect life).” Various scientific studies have established the critical role of birds in insect control in a variety of situations. Thus, woodpeckers are the primary factor in the control of the Engelmann spruce beetle, reducing its populations by a minimum of 45 percent and a maximum of 98 percent, and are also important in the control of the codling moth in apple orchards. Chickadees and other winter-resident birds can protect orchards against the cankerworm. But what happens in nature is not allowed to happen in the modern, chemical-drenched world, where spraying destroys not only the insects but their principal enemy, the birds. When, as almost always happens, there is a resurgence of the insect population, the birds are not there to keep their numbers in check.

  To the public, the choice may easily appear to be one of stark simplicity: Shall we have birds or shall we have elms? But it is not as simple as that, and, by one of the ironies that abound throughout the field of chemical control, we may very well end by having neither. Spraying is killing the birds but is not saving the elms. The theory that the survival of the elms lies in spraying is a dangerous illusion, leading one community after another into a morass of heavy expenditures without producing lasting results. Greenwich, Connecticut, sprayed regularly for ten years. Then a drought year brought conditions especially favorable to the beetle, and the mortality of elms went up a thousand percent. In Toledo, Ohio, a similar experience caused the city’s Superintendent of Forestry, Joseph A. Sweeney, to take a realistic look at the results of spraying. Spraying of elms was begun there in 1953 and continued through 1959. Meanwhile, however, Mr. Sweeney had noticed that a citywide infestation of the cottony maple scale was worse after the spraying recommended by “the books and the authorities” than it had b
een before. He decided to review for himself the results of spraying for Dutch elm disease. His findings shocked him. In the city of Toledo, he found, “the only areas under any control were the areas where we used some promptness in removing the diseased or brood trees. Where we depended on spraying, the disease was out of control. In the county, where nothing has been done, the disease has not spread as fast as it has in the city. This indicates that spraying destroys any natural enemies. We are abandoning spraying for the Dutch elm disease. This has brought me into conflict with the people who back any recommendations by the United States Department of Agriculture, but I have the facts and will stick with them.”

  In the spraying of the elms, the birds are the incidental victims of an attack directed at an insect, but in other situations they are now becoming a direct target of poisons. There is a growing trend toward aerial applications of deadly poisons, like parathion, a member of the family of organic-phosphate insecticides, for the purpose of “controlling” concentrations of birds distasteful to farmers. The Fish and Wildlife Service has expressed serious concern over this trend, pointing out that “parathion-treated areas constitute a potential hazard to humans, domestic animals, and wildlife.” In southern Indiana, for example, a group of farmers joined forces in the summer of 1959 to engage a spray plane to treat an area of river-bottom land with parathion. The area was a favored roosting site of thousands of blackbirds, which were feeding in nearby cornfields. The problem could have been solved easily by a slight change in agricultural practice—a shift to a variety of corn with deep-set ears, inaccessible to the birds—but the farmers had been persuaded of the merits of killing by poison, and so they sent in the plane. The results probably gratified them, for the casualty list included some sixty-five thousand red-winged blackbirds and starlings. The question of other wildlife deaths that may have occurred was not considered. Parathion is not a specific for blackbirds; it is a universal killer. But such rabbits or raccoons or opossums as roamed those bottom lands, and perhaps never visited the farmers’ cornfields, were doomed by a judge and jury who neither knew nor cared about their existence. And what of human beings? In orchards sprayed with this same parathion, workers handling foliage that had been treated a month earlier have collapsed and gone into shock, escaping severe injury only by a small margin, thanks to skilled medical attention. Does Indiana still raise boys who roam the woods and fields, and might even explore the margins of a river? If so, who guarded the poisoned area to keep out any boys who might wander in? Who kept watch to tell the innocent stroller that the fields he was about to enter were deadly, their vegetation coated with a lethal film? No one. Yet it was at so fearful a risk that the farmers waged their war on blackbirds.