Steve Milloy: DDT didn’t do-in whooping cranes either

By Steve Milloy

Unless hunters were blasting whooping cranes with DDT shotgun shells…

About the rebound in whooping crane population, John Crisp writes for Scripps-Howard:…

"Undermined by habitat loss, hunting and DDT, in the 1940s the entire whooping crane world population dropped to around 20 birds. Now the primary flock, which spends the winter at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas coast, numbers around 300. Including reintroduced flocks and birds in captivity, somewhere between 500 and 600 whooping cranes are alive today."

In addition to the fact that no study shows that environmental exposures to DDT affect bird reproduction, DDT wasn’t approved as an agricultural insecticide until 1945, and didn’t hit peak use until about 1960. The whooping crane population was done in, as Crisp correctly points out, by habitat loss, encroachment and hunting — but there is no evidence that DDT played any role.


Here is a comment from Alex Avery that I think is worth reading because we see this type of stuff constantly. RK


Alex Avery
February 21, 2012 at 10:28 am

As we all know from Fakegate and associated media coverage: actual facts and truth are totally disposible to the modern journalist. What matters more than reality is one’s “perspective” and imputed motives.

This is how the Audobon Society is allowed to disavow its own Christmas Bird Count data (the only reliable national data on which to judge DDT’s impact on birds) showing a steady and strong GROWTH in bald eagle numbers prior to and continuing throughtout the period of DDT use. At no point during the period when DDT is used is there evidence of a bird population decline of any kind. NONE. There is ZERO correlation between DDT use and bird populations. (check data on bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and brown pelicans — all near extinction prior to any use of DDT anywhere, and whose populations grew steadily throughout the DDT era)

It is so sad that something so easily verified is simply ignored completely in favor of a fabricated political narrative.

Alex Avery
Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues