Sluicing the Eagles

Around lambing time last spring, persistent reports drifted into Washington of huge piles of dead eagles in Wyoming. The stories were discounted at first. There are only about 2,000 or so bald eagles left in the U.S. outside of Alaska, and an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 golden eagles. As an endangered species, they are protected by strict federal laws from hunters, including ranchers, who hold to the largely disproved conviction that eagles are responsible for the mass slaughter of lambs.

Last week the reports of slaughtered eagles turned out to be all too true. Not only had 770 golden and bald eagles been killed in Wyoming, but they had been shot in the least sportsmanlike way of all--from helicopters. Testifying before a Senate subcommittee, James Vogan, a balding, heavy-set helicopter pilot from Murray, Utah, told how he had ferried sharpshooters and so-called "sportsmen" over ranches in Colorado and Wyoming to "sluice" the eagles. Sluicing is what Westerners call the unsporting act of shooting sitting ducks, or eagles. Vogan also said that he knew of $15,000 paid to the flying service that owned the helicopter by Herman Werner, a Wyomingite who is the state's largest sheep rancher.

Official Anger. Vogan's disclosures provoked a storm of official anger in the capital. Secretary of the Interior Rogers C.B. Morton proclaimed the shootings a "national outrage," and his department promised to prosecute the hunters. Agents dispatched to Wyoming by Senator Gale McGee, before whose committee Vogan testified, had also found evidence of "substantial, willful and deliberate slaughtering of eagles." Last week McGee's men found proof: a cache of about 60 eagles, badly decomposed and buried six feet deep under the remains of other animals.

Such killings could have far more than merely local effect. Wyoming is on a major north-south flyway for eagles, and any slaughtering there affects the numbers of the great birds in other states. Moreover, Wyoming, says State Representative John Turner, an expert on bald eagles, "is the last place where golden and bald eagles are found in significant numbers as resident birds. Colorado has already lost its resident bald eagles." Besides the aerial sluicing, at least a hundred eagles have died in Wyoming in recent years by electrocution on power lines. Another score was killed last May when Rancher Van Irvine baited antelope carcasses with thallium sulfate, ostensibly to kill coyotes, a violation of state fish and game regulations for which he paid $679 in fines last month.

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