the bird known to eve ryone. To millions of Americans, the season’s first robin means that the
grip of winter is broken. I ts coming is an event reported in news pape rs and told eagerly at the
breakfas t table. And as the numbe r of migrants grows and the firs t mis ts of green appear in the
woodlands, thous ands of people lis ten for the firs t 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 grante d. The s urvival of the robin, and indeed of many other s pecies as well, seems fatefully
linked with the American elm, a tree that is part of the his tory of thous ands of towns from the
Atlantic to the Rockies, gracing their streets and their village s quares and college campus es with
majestic archways of green. Now the elms are stricken with a disease that afflicts them
throughout thei r range, a dis eas e s o s erious that many experts believe all efforts to s ave the
elms will in the end be futile. It would be tragic to lose the elms, but it would be doubly tragic if,
in vain efforts to s ave them, we plunge vas t s egments of our bird populations into the night of
extinction. Yet this is precisely what is threatened. T he s o-called Dutch elm dis eas e entered the
United States from Europe about 1930 in elm burl logs importe d for the veneer indus try. It is a
fungus dis eas e; the organis m invades the water-conducting ves s els of the tree, s preads by
s pores carried by the flow of sap, and by its poisonous secretions as well as by mechanical
clogging caus es the branches to wilt and the tree to die. The disease is spread from diseased to
healthy trees by elm bark beetles. The galleries which the insects have tunneled out under the
bark of dead trees become contaminate d with s pores of the invading fungus , and the s pores
adhere to the ins ect body and are carried whereve r the bee tle flies. Efforts to control the
fungus dis eas e of the elms have been directed largely toward control of the carrier ins ect. In
community after community, es pecially throughout the s tronghol ds of the American elm, the
Midwes t and New England, intens ive s praying has become a routine proce dure.
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 s tudents , John Mehne r. W hen Mr. Mehner began work for the doctorate in
1954, he chos e a res earch project that had to do with robin populations. This was quite by
chance, for at that time no one s us pected that the robins were in danger. But even as he
unde rtook the work, eve nts occurred tha t were to change its character and indeed to de prive
him of his material. Spraying for Dutch elm dis eas e began in a s mall way on the univers ity
campus in 1954. The following year the city of Eas t Lans ing (where the unive rs ity is located)
joined in, s praying on the campus was expanded, and, with local programs for gyps y moth and
mos quito control als o under way, the rain of chemicals increas ed to a downpour. During 1954,
the year of the firs t light spraying, all seemed well. The following spring the migrating robins
began to return to the campus as us ual. Like the bluebells in Tomlins on’s haunting ess ay ‘The
Lost Wood’, they were ‘expecting no evil’ as they reoccupied their familiar territories. But soon
it became evident that s omething was wrong. Dead and dying robins began to appear in the
campus. Few birds were seen in their normal foraging activities or assembling in their us ual
roos ts. Few nes ts were built; few young appeared. T he patte rn was repeated wi th monotonous
regularity in s ucceeding s prings. The s prayed area had become a lethal trap in which each wave
of migrating robins would be eliminated in about a week. Then new arrivals would come in,
only to add to the numbe rs of doome d birds s een on the campus in the agonized tremors that
precede death. ‘The campus is s erving as a graveyard for mos t of the robins that attempt to
take up res idence in the s pring,’ s aid Dr. Wallace. But why? At firs t he s us pected s ome dis eas e
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