“This is a huge victory for birds and it comes at a critical time — science tells us that we’ve lost 3 billion birds in less than a human lifetime and that two-thirds of North American birds are at risk of extinction due to climate change,” she said in a statement.
Huffington Post: Judge Reverses Trump Administration’s Removal Of Migratory Bird Protections
The New York judge, quoting Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” in her ruling Tuesday, excoriated the previous administration’s interpretation of the 1918 federal wildlife law, stating that it “runs counter to the purpose of the MBTA to protect migratory bird populations.”
“It is not only a sin to kill a mockingbird, it is also a crime,” Justice Valerie Caproni, quoting the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, stated in her ruling. “That has been the letter of the law for the past century. But if the Department of the Interior has its way, many mockingbirds and other migratory birds that delight people and support ecosystems throughout the country will be killed without legal consequence.”
Under the Trump administration’s change of the law, the deaths of migratory birds by such things as oil spills, uncovered oil pits and liquid waste tanks, and uninsulated power lines had been excused from legal repercussions. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers and enforces the MBTA, estimates that these human-caused threats result in tens of millions of bird deaths each year. The BP Deepwater Horizon oil well disaster in 2010, on its own, is estimated as having killed 1 million birds.
Daniel Jorjani, a former Koch brothers adviser who wrote the Interior Department’s legal opinion as principal deputy solicitor in December 2017, argued that the MBTA as it until then read unfairly punished “a host of otherwise lawful and productive actions.” His opinion followed the Obama administration, 11 months earlier, amending the law so that it applied to the incidental wounding, killing or trapping of birds.
The Trump administration’s change to the rule prompted a number of lawsuits by environmental groups ― including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Audubon Society ― as well as several states.
Caproni, in her ruling Tuesday, argued that the Trump administration’s amendment to the law went beyond excusing lawful accidents and was “contrary to the plain meaning of the MBTA.”
“Killing a bird by firing a gun, setting a trap, dumping oil waste, or pressure washing nests from a bridge all fit within Interior’s active sense of ‘kill,’ and yet the Jorjani Opinion concludes that the first two are prohibited by the MBTA while the latter two are not,” she wrote.
Sarah Greenberger, interim chief conservation officer for the National Audubon Society, was among those hailing the judge’s decision.
“This is a huge victory for birds and it comes at a critical time — science tells us that we’ve lost 3 billion birds in less than a human lifetime and that two-thirds of North American birds are at risk of extinction due to climate change,” she said in a statement.