upon to treat four of his patients within an hour after they had bee n expos ed while watching
the planes at work. All had similar symptoms: nausea, vomiting, chills, fever, extreme fatigue,
and coughing. The Detroit experience has been repeated in many other communities as
pres s ure has mounte d to combat the Japanes e beetle with chemicals. At Blue Island, Illinois ,
hundre ds of dead and dying birds were picked up. Data collected by birdba nde rs here s ugges t
that 80 per cent of the songbirds were sacrificed. In Joliet, Illinois, some 3000 acres were
treated with heptachlor in 1959. According to reports from a local s ports men’s club, the bird
population within the treated area was ‘virtually wiped out’. Dead rabbits, muskrats, opossums,
and fis h were als o found in numbers , and one of the local s chools made the collection of
insecticide-pois oned birds a s cience project....
Perhaps no community has s uffered more for the sake of a beetleles s world than Sheldon, in
eastern Illinois, and adjacent areas in Iroquois County. In 1954 the U nited States Departme nt of
Agriculture and the Illinois Agriculture Department began a program to eradicate the Japanese
beetle along the line of its advance into Illinois , holding out the hope, and indeed the
ass urance, that intens ive s praying would des troy the populations of the invadi ng ins ect. The
first ‘eradication’ took place that year, when dieldrin was applied to 1400 acres by air. Another
2600 acres were treated similarly in 1955, and the tas k was pres umably cons idered complete.
But more and more chemical treatments were called for, and by the end of 1961 some 131,000
acres had been covered. Even in the firs t years of the program it was apparent that heavy
losses were occurring among wildlife and domestic animals. The chemical treatments were
continue d, neve rtheles s , without cons ultation with eithe r the Unite d States Fis h and Wildlife
Service or the Illinois Game Management Division. (In the s pring of 1960, howeve r, officials of
the federal Department of Agriculture appea red before a congres s ional commi t tee i n
oppos ition to a bill that would require jus t s uch prior cons ultation. They declared blandly that
the bill was unnecess ary becaus e cooperation and cons ultation were ‘us ual’. Thes e officials
were quite unable to recall situations where cooperation had not take n place ‘at the
Was hington level’. In the s ame hearings they s tated clearly their unwillingness to cons ult with
s tate fis h and game departme nts .) Although funds for chemical control came in never-ending
streams, the biologists of the Illinois Natural History Survey who atte mpte d to meas ure the
damage to wildlife had to operate on a financial shoestring. A mere $1100 was available for the
employme nt of a field ass is tant in 1954 and no s pecial funds were provided in 1955. Des pite
thes e crippling difficulties, the biologists assembled facts that collectively paint a picture of
almost unparalleled wildlife destruction—des tructi on that became obvious as s oon as the
prog ram got un der way.
Conditions were made to order for pois oning ins ect-eating birds , both in the pois ons us ed and
in the events set in motion by their application. In the early programs at Sheldon, dieldrin was
applied at the rate of 3 pounds to the acre. To unders tand its effect on birds one need only
reme mbe r that in laboratory experi ments on quail dieldrin has proved to be about 50 times as
pois onous as DDT. The pois on s pread over the landscape at Sheldon was therefore roughly
equivalent to 150 pounds of DDT per acre! A nd this was a minimum, becaus e there s eems to
have been s ome overlapping of treatments along field borde rs and in corners. As the chemical
penetrated the s oil the pois oned bee tle grubs crawled out on the s urface of the ground, where
they remained for some ti me before they died, attractive to insect-eating birds. Dead and dying
insects of various species were cons picuous for about two weeks after the treatment. The
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