Maryland nutria are pitted against the USDA Wildlife Services, a formidable killer of invasive animals.
Using guns, traps and poisons, the agency killed 4.1 million animals, including nearly 3,000 nutria, in fiscal 2009. It’s not something that officials in a department of animal lovers like to talk about. But the toll is detailed on its Web site under “killed/euthanized.”
The agency poisoned roosts of marauding starlings that flew to dairy farms, pecked at cow feed in troughs and defecated in the food.
Iguanas were taken out when they crawled under houses in Florida. Vultures have been shot when they wintered in cities such as Staunton, Va.
Along with state natural resources agencies, the USDA has an exemption from the Migratory Bird Act to eliminate fowl.
Starlings caught the worst of it; 1.2 million were killed. Pigeons were next at 96,000 kills. Pikeminnows, fish that prey on salmon, were reduced by 57,000. Raccoons, squirrels, beavers and mice also got death sentences.
Swamp rats have long had it coming, officials say. The voracious plant eater was imported to the Chesapeake Bay region and other areas in the 1930s and 1940s by fur farmers who wanted to sell their pelts.
The business didn’t fare well, and the semiaquatic rodent, which has webbed feet, escaped from farms. Colonies became established along the Atlantic Coast from Maryland to Georgia, all along the Gulf Coast and on the West Coast in Oregon.
The Delmarva Peninsula was green with marsh before nutria arrived. Now, after years of being fed upon by the nutria, much of the marsh has disappeared, replaced with cloudy water that can’t support life.
In 2003, the Maryland congressional delegation, state officials and federal agencies started the Chesapeake Bay Nutria Eradication Project, which removed 13,000 of the animals from 150,000 acres of marshland.
But as the project wore down, people continued to spot isolated nutria, and vegetation kept disappearing. That’s why orders went out and Kendrot and two wildlife biologists sped from the wood docks at the Green Hill Yacht and Country Club in Salisbury on a cool and sunny Wednesday.
Eusi led them into shallow branches of the river called guts. Mixed with the native muskrat and raccoon tracks were dead-giveaway webbed swamp rat prints.
As the afternoon ended, Robert Colona, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist who tagged along, complimented Eusi on his find in the hidden canals of the Wicomico River.
“There’s a ton of tracks through here,” Colona said. “There’s a lot of nutria here.”
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