Quoth the raven

pesticide laced eggs#

Nevada's very own drone joystick jockeys#

Infrared spy cameras, assassination by poison, licenses to kill are ideas associated with the War on Terror. In Nevada, Wyoming, Utah and Idaho, there exist sinister terrorists known as corvus corax: the common raven. It may be time to take up arms against them to secure the homeland.

Ravens, crows and magpies are the members of the corvus family. The largest and smartest are ravens, often growing two feet long with a three-foot wingspan. They are extremely intelligent animals, capable of using tools like twigs to solve complex problems. They have advanced communication skills. Ravens often gather on the high transmission lines dotting the Western range to signal to each other where prey can be found, resulting in dozens swooping down at once on road kill or a desert tortoise for a communal meal.

The endangered sage grouse, while a beautiful bird with an amazing mating ritual, is after all just a wild chicken and not known for its intelligence. Ravens use their tactical skills to lure the sage grouse hen away from its nest and then sneak in to devour the eggs. This is a major reason for the sage grouse decline.

This might be just another Animal Planet story, but for man. Man’s laws contribute to both the rise of ravens and the decline of the sage grouse. The ravens flourish because of the 1918 Migratory Bird Act, which protects them from hunters. The sage grouse decline has the panicked Western states scrambling to find ways to protect the precious species from ravens and other threats. If they fail, the feds threaten to list them under under the Endangered Species Act.

The ESA is the pit bull of environmental laws. Once it has you in its grip, it locks its regulatory jaws around you forever. Very few endangered species are removed from the list, which for anything else but a government program would make you wonder how effective the ESA really is. If the sage grouse is listed, the ability of the states to manage their own lands would be subject to the whims of the feds, and the legions of eager environmental groups who have the ability under the law to sue, sue, and sue again for stricter rules and enforcement.

To fend off this threat, infrared cameras have been placed to catch the ravens in their egg stealing ways. The videos confirm they are indeed major terrorists. Various states have petitioned for legal raven hunts, but the birds are so smart, like Steven Seagal, they are hard to kill. Elko has implemented a pilot program to use pesticide-laced eggs that only affect the corvus family sprinkled around the sage grouse leks. (Leks are the desert dance floors on which sage grouse puff out their brilliantly colored air sacs and dance until they mate.) Idaho tried to target 4,000 ravens for a quick egg-sit but failed to get the feds to process the permits for the hit. Officials concede that if you kill a lot of ravens, more could simply take their place.

The Nevada legislature has two joint resolutions, AJR2 and SJR5, which petition the Congress and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for permission to limit the raven population.

I think the Legislature should show some real leadership. Why not simply ask the CIA for the use of a few of their predator drones? They could even be guided by Nevada’s very own drone joystick jockeys. The only things ravens understand is force. All options should be on the table. A few hellfire missiles should do the trick. We can limit the collateral damage. Just a teeny, tiny range war. What could possibly go wrong?