This fungus disease, widespread in Europe since the 1920's, entered the United States 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 its poisonous secretions as well as by mechanical clogging causes 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 contaminated with spores of the invading fungus, and the spores adhere to the insect body and are carried wherever the beetle flies. Efforts to control the fungus disease of the elms have largely been directed toward control of the carrier insect. In community after community, especially throughout the strongholds of the American elm, the middle west and New England, intensive spraying has become a routine procedure.

What this spraying could mean to bird life, and especially to the robin, was a matter first made clear by the work of ornithologists at Michigan State University, Professor George Wallace and one of his graduate students, John Mehner. When Mr. Mehner began work for the doctorate in 1954, he chase a research project that had to do with robin populations. This was quite 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 in 1954. The following year the city of East Lansing (where the University is located) joined in, spraying on the campus was expanded, and with local programs for gypsy moth and mosquito control also under way, the rain of chemicals increased to a downpour.

During the year of the first spraying all seemed well. The following spring the migrating robins began to return to the campus as usual. Like the bluebells in Tomlinson's haunting essay, The Lost Wood, they were expecting no evil" as they reoccupied their familiar territories. But soon it became evident that something was wrong. Dead and dying

robins began to appear on the campus. Few birds were seen in their normal foraging activities or assembling in their usual roosts. Few nests were built; few young appeared. The pattern was repeated in 1956, 1957, and succeeding springs. The sprayed area was a lethal trap in which the first wave of migrating robins would be eliminated in about a week. Then new arrivals would come in, only to add to the numbers of doomed 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," said Dr. Wallace. 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 exhibited the well known symptoms of loss of balance, followed by tremors, convulsions, and death".

Several facts suggested that the robins were being poisoned, not so much by direct contact with

Several facts suggested that the robins were being poisoned, not so much by direct contact with the insects, as indirectly, by eating earthworms. Campus earthworms had been fed inadvertently to crayfish in a research project and all the crayfish had promptly 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 soon to be supplied by Dr. Roy Barker at the Illinois Natural History Survey at Urbana. 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. His work also makes clear why the lethal effect is delayed for a season: remember that the campus robins in Michigan showed no unusual mortality in 1954, the year spraying began -- the first die-off game in 1955.

Like most of nature's cycles, the relationship becomes beautifully clear once it has been worked out. The trees are sprayed in the spring (usually at the rate of 2 to 5 lb. of DDT per 50 foot tree, which may be the equivalent of as much as 17 lbs. per acre where elms are numerous) and often again in July, at about half this concentration. Powerful sprayers direct a stream of poison to all parts of the tallest trees, killing directly not only the target organism, the bark beetle, but any other insects it strikes, including pollinating insects and predatory spiders and beetles. The poison forms a tenacious film over the leaves and bark. Reins do not wash it away. In the autumn the leaves fall to

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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 earthworms, who feed in the leaf litter, for elm leaves are among their favorite foods. In feeding on the leaves the worms also feed on the insecticide, accumulating and concentrating it in their bodies. Dr. Barker found deposits of DDT throughout the digestive tracts of the worms, their blood vessels, nerves, and body wall. Undoubtedly some of the earthworms themselves succumb, but others survive to become "biological magnifiers" of the poison. In the spring the robins return to provide another link in the cycle. 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 day's rations to a bird that eats 10 to 12 earthworms in as many minutes.

In one robin analyzed by Barker, 14 organs and tissues contained DDT. The heaviest concentration was in the digestive tract and, significantly, the testes. The poison had invaded the brain of 87% of the robins analyzed, preparing the way for the paralysis and convulsions typical of DDT poisoning. Dr. Wallace says he has never known a robin to recover once tremoring has set in. His report is confirmed by Dr. Walter Nickell, a naturalist at the Cranbrook Institute of Science at Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, who has received countless specimens of dead and dying birds from the Detroit area. Dr. Nickell reported several years ago that he had nearly 200 afflicted birds "die on his hands" without being able to save one.

Not all robins receive a lethal dose, but there is another consequence may lead to that forebodes the extinction of their kind as surely as fatal poisoning.

The shadow of sterility lies over all the bird studies and indeed lengthens to include all living things within its potential range.

The studies of Drs. Wallace and Mehner, now extended through the 1960 season, show conclusively the wiping out of the robin population.

There are now fewer-than-a-dozen robins to be found each spring on the entire 185-acre campus, compared with a conservatively estimated 370 adults in this area before spraying.

But their reports on the pitiful failure of the robins' attempts to raise young are even more meaningful.

In 1954 every nest under observation by Mehner produced young. Toward the end of June, 1957, when at least 370 young birds (the normal replacement of the adult population) would have been foraging over the campus in the years before spraying began, Mehner could find *only one young robin*.

A year later Dr. Wallace was to report: "At no time during the spring or summer (of 1958) did I see a fledgling robin anywhere on the main campus, and so far I have failed to find anyone else who has seen one there".

Part of this failure to produce young is due, of course, to the fact that one or more of a pair of robins dies before the nesting cycle is completed. But Wallace has significant records which point to something more sinister -- the actual destruction of the birds' capacity 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. We have one record of a robin that sat on its eggs faithfully for 21 days and they did not hatch. The normal incubation period is 13 days.....Our analyses are showing high concentrations of DDT

Soon studies in other areas began to develop findings
equally dismal. Professor Joseph Hickey and his students
at the Univ. of Wisc., after careful comparative studies of
sprayed and unsprayed areas, reported the robin mortality
to be at least 86-88%. The Cranbrook Institute of Science
at Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in an effort to assess the
extent of bird loss caused by the spraying of the elms asked
in 1956 that all birds thought to be victims of DDT poisoning
be turned into the Institute for examination. The request
had a response beyond all expectations. Within a few weeks
the deep-freeze facilities of the Institute were taxed to
capacity so that other specimens had to be refused. By
1959 a thousand poisoned birds from this single community
had been turned in or reported. Although the robin was the
chief victim (one woman calling the Institute reported 12
robins lying dead on her lawn as she spoke) 63 different
species were included among the specimens examined at the
Institute.

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in the testes and ovaries of breeding birds", he told a Congressional committee in 1960. "Ten males had amounts ranging from 30 to 109 parts per million in the testes, and two females had 151 and 211 parts per million respectively in the egg follicles in their ovaries".

The Pittsburgh areas also under observation by Dr. Mehner, and where no spraying was done, presented a complete contrast to the situation in East Lansing. There was no change in the number of adult robins from year to year, and no decline in the production of young. However, once the findings at East Lansing came to be known, reports poured in to Dr. Wallace from dozens of mid-Western communities, like the Michigan town caught up in a spray program for elm disease. According to these reports, some of the heavily sprayed suburbs of Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago were already virtually without robins. By the end of 1959 some 45 mid-Western communities had reported the loss of their robins. With several million elms subjected to annual spraying throughout the country, the cost in robins alone ran to millions of birds--by one estimate, 100 million.

The robins are only one part of the chain of devastation linked to the spraying of the elms, even as the elm program is only one of the multitudinous spray programs that cover our land with poisons. Although Barker's careful studies have not yet been duplicated for other species, it is only reasonable to suppose that all birds and mammals heavily dependent on earthworms or other soil organisms for food are threatened

Heavy mortality has occurred among more than 90 species of birds, including three most familiar subfamily and amateen naturalists. The populations of nesting birds in general have declined as much as 90 percent in some of the sprayed towns. As wezl, also, all the species of birds are affected - ground feeders, tree-top feeders, term feeders, and so on.

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by the robins' fate. Some 45 species of birds include earthworms in their diet. Among them is the woodcock, a that American population of this species winters in a single area in southern Louisiana -- an area recently heavily sprayed with heptachlor. A disturbing

Already there are records of many mortality among more than 20 other species of ground-feeding birds whose food -- worms, ants, grubs, or other soil organisms -- has been poisoned. These include 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 who flit through the shrubby understory of the woodlands and forage with rustling sounds amid the fallen leaves -- the song sparrow and the white-throat -- these, too, have been found among the victims of the elm sprays.

Mammals, too, may easily be involved in the cycle, directly or indirectly. Earthworms are fourth in importance among the various foods of the raccoon, and are eaten in the spring and fall by opossums. Such subterranean tunnelers as shrews and moles capture them in some numbers, and then perhaps pass on the poison to predators such as screech owls and barn owls. Dr. Wallace has found hawks and owls in convulsions -- great horned owls, screech owls, red-shouldered hawks, sparrow hawks, marsh hawks. He considers these to be cases of secondary poisoning, caused by eating birds or mice that have accumulated insecticides in their livers or other organs. Such poisoning through successive links of a complex food chain may take years to reach its ultimate victims.

Some knights are transients, and come and go hitherly, and great caldors quite rare here, 9
wonder if would-be better to say did the recento warblies, pears and orles (the-top
Rebels) have done their, or quicdy Christopher and aging. Past the rest of the, oh, what
warblers so on 3ENTUR. (We do not know if so, from Delant are and elsewhere, though to
and queled catchers doing symptoms, but -11- you can't measure the mortality since they disopfer
anyway - by migration.

Nor is it only the creatures that forage on the ground or
those who prey on them that are endangered by the elm spraying. Dr.
Wallace-reports that all of the tree-top feeders -- the birds that
glean their insect food from the leaves, have disappeared from his
to the highly abrayal areas,
campus, among them 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 multi-colored tide of life. In Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin at least a
thousand myrtle warblers could be seen in migration during former years;
in 1958, after the spraying of the elms, 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 oven bird whose call throbs in the Maytime woods;
the Blackburnian whose wings are touched with flame, the chestnut-sided,
the Canadian, and the black-throated green. These tree-top feeders are
affected either directly by eating poisoned insects or indirectly by
a shortage of food.

The loss of food has also struck hard at the swallows that cruise
the skies straining out the aerial insects as herring strain the plankton
of the sea. A Wisconsin naturalist 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". (It is chiefly around spraying that affects swallows, gnat,
pubescence, not ground drosows)

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Of other birds this same observer wrote: "Another striking loss is the Phoebe. Flycatchers are scarce everywhere but the early hardy 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. It is tragic and I can't bear it." . . . . .

The dormant sprays applied to the elms in the fall, sending the poison into every little crevice in the bark, are probably responsible for the severe reduction observed in the number of chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, woodpeckers, and brown creepers. During the winter of 1957-58 Dr. Wallace saw no chickadees or nuthatches at his home feeding station for the first time in many years. Three nuthatches he found later provided a sorry little step-by-step lesson in cause and effect: one was feeding on an elm, another was found dying of typical DDT symptoms, the third was dead.

The feeding habits of all these birds not only make them especially vulnerable to insect sprays but also make their loss a deplorable one for economic as well as less tangible reasons. 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 insects 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 Bent's monumental Life Histories of North American Birds: "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)."

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 later there is a resurgence of the insect population, as almost always happens, the birds are not there to keep their numbers in check. As the Curator of Birds at the Milwaukee Public Museum, Owen J. Gromme, wrote the Milwaukee Journal, "The greatest enemy of insect life is other predatory insects, birds, and some small mammals, but DDT kills indiscriminately, including nature's own safeguards or policemen.... In the name of progress are we to become victims of our own diabolical means of insect control to provide temporary comfort, only to lose out to destroying insects later on? By what means will we control new pests, which will attack remaining tree species after the elms are gone, when nature's safeguards (the birds) have been wiped out by poison?"

Mr. Gromme reported that calls and letters about dead and dying birds had been increasing steadily during the years since spraying began in Wisconsin. Questioning always revealed that spraying or fogging had been done in the area where the birds were dying. "It can no longer be passed off as mere coincidence", said Mr. Gromme.

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Mr. Gromme's experience has been shared by ornithologists and conservationists at most of the research centers of the middle west, (such as the Cranbrook Institute in Michigan, the Illinois Natural History Survey and the University of Wisconsin,) as well as in other regions. A glance at the Letters from Readers column of a newspaper almost anywhere that spraying is being done makes clear the fact that citizens are not only becoming aroused and indignant but that often they show a keener understanding of the dangers and inconsistencies of spraying than do the officials who order it done.

"I am dreading the days to come soon now when many beautiful birds will be dying in our back yard", wrote a Milwaukee woman. "This is a pitiful, heartbreaking experience...It is, moreover, frustrating and exasperating, for it evidently does not serve the purpose this slaughter was intended to serve...Taking a long look, can you save trees without also saving birds? Do they not, in the economy of nature, save each other? Isn't it possible to help the balance of nature without destroying it?"

The idea that the elms, majestic shade trees though they are, are not "sacred cows" and do not justify an "open end" campaign of destruction against all other forms of life is expressed in other letters. "I have always loved our elm trees which seemed like trademarks on our landscape", wrote another Wisconsin woman. "But there are many kinds of trees...We must save our birds, too. Can anyone imagine anything so cheerless and dreary as a springtime without a robin's song?" Or as another disturbed observer wrote: "I have found warblers, song sparrows, etc. dead in the