EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

Persecution of the Predators

Black-chested Buzzard-eagle (Geranoaetus melanoleucus)
El Bolson, El Maiten, Patagonia, Argentina

Explanation:  This week's entry is a rather gruesome and sad scene ... one that used to dot the American West during earlier days of livestock ranching when predators of all kinds were "varmints" to be shot, hung on fences, and eliminated from entire ecosystems.  

This unfortunate victim is a Black-chested Buzzard-eagle -- one of the larger birds of prey in southern South America -- that some local rancher likely shot and impaled on a barbed-wire fence here in the Patagonian rangelands of Argentina.  Likewise, for decades in the American West, ranchers would shoot and hang predators of all kinds in a sort of morbid "warning" to other predators or just to display that they had eliminated yet another undesirable critter.  

The term "varmint" is essentially a variation on "vermin," which, in this context, is a wild animal thought to take livestock, crops, and even pets.  Varmints can include coyotes, mountain lions, prairie dogs, birds of prey -- such as this Buzzard-eagle -- and many other species.  

So-called "varmint hunting" is still alive and well in North and South America alike, and has a following with magazines and web sites and videos and organized forums and specialized exploding grenade bullets.  

This is not to disparage efforts to reduce or eliminate exotic species that can put natural ecosystems at risk.  A good example is the effort in Everglades National Park to stem the spread of Burmese pythons released there by people wanting to get rid of pets that had likely overgrown their cages.  

However, hunting naturally-occurring and protected species such as eagles which likely have minimal to no effect on livestock ranching is a notion whose time has long passed.