As this pot boiled, Secretary Babbitt in the mid 1990's transferred practically all the FWS research to the US GEOLOGICAL SURVEY??? The damage control transfer 10 years earlier had included a damage control research lab in Denver but this transfer to USGS was mostly employees and dollars that were largely justified for migratory bird responsibilities. The transferred researchers were immediately assigned to "environmental" window dressing and effectively cut off from FWS managers and APHIS workers. The USGS employees have slowly disappeared into a geological tar pit and they are seen less and less often at management meetings or State fish and wildlife conferences.

Enter the mute swan. Mute Swans have been on this continent since colonial times. They have been and continue to thrive in both domestic and "wild" circumstances. They were migrating over a century ago in California and were considered on of our wild swans by bird folks and hunters in the 19th century. They are reported to thin Eurasian milfoil stands in mid Atlantic streams thereby enabling canoe passage. Their numbers have increased in recent years during fall and winter on the Chesapeake Bay. Several thousand from as far away as Connecticut winter on the Bay. They eat (actually tear up) submergent plants being reestablished by the State of Maryland to renew Bay resources like blue crabs and waterfowl. Other waterfowl such as Canada geese also tear up these plants. FWS one day just proclaimed that mute swans were not "covered by the Treaty" so they could be killed on sight whenever possible. (Take note all of you threatened by or harmed by Endangered Species or Marine Mammals or Animal Welfare Act provisions - just ask the government to say it isn't so!)

Swan lovers, actually a lady in Connecticut, took Uncle Sam (FWS) to court and the judge found out that FWS has no documentation of swan damage and has made no effort to manage mute swans. The judge told FWS that mute swans (and all members of the family Anatidae) ARE PROTECTED BY THE TREATIES. The judge further ordered FWS to develop scientific information to justify any management of mute swans. (Now, once again, all of you who have been harmed by or threatened by the Endangered Species or Marine Mammal or Animal Welfare Acts or by some judge or bureaucrat using the same as a club -what does FWS do when ordered by a court to do something it doesn't want? Comply? No. Appeal? No. They grab the INVASIVE SPECIES club meant to bludgeon the public and use it to do what they want.

As a result of this mute swan order, FWS proposed and Congressmen Gilchrest of Maryland and Saxton of New Jersey sponsored a bill to exclude ALL NON-NATIVE AND INVASIVE SPECIES from protection under the Treaties. All the Federal bureaucrats jumped on this bandwagon. All the professors shouted "Huzzah" and all the new wave biologists and NGO's like The Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited joined in support. All of them see the potential of Federal INVASIVE SPECIES authority as the beginning of a new source of Federal funds and power. The politicians see it as an opportunity to show that they "care" and are "doing something." This fits in well with all the other attempts to sell the American public and the Congress that government has a responsibility to conduct a never-ending jihad against all the thousands of plants and animals that have arrived here since 1492. In the case of this bill, any bird arriving "before 1918" or brought here by other than natural means will be slated for having existing Federal protection terminated. The precedent for expansion of this scientifically, ethically, socially, and morally baseless concept will be breathtaking as it is used to break Treaties that citizens have been prosecuted under for nearly 100 years. FWS will show the court and al the rest of you smarty-pants that if they don't want to do something, no one can make them do it. What was it Leona Helmsley said about "little people?"