Outlawed mining markers expected to keep killing Nevada wildlife

During a hike through a remote patch of Lincoln County late last month, Jim and Liz Boone stopped to knock down about 20 hollow plastic pipes they found arrayed across the landscape in scattered rectangles.

There’s no telling how many birds the Boones might have saved in the process, but they can easily pinpoint the number they could not. Jim Boone said they found about 30 dead birds, most of them ash-throated flycatchers, in the pipes. They also counted 10 dead rodents and five dead lizards — more victims of a little-known but common wildlife hazard in mining country, particularly in Nevada.

Public land in the Silver State is dotted with scores of hollow plastic pipes — as many as a million by some estimates — driven into the ground to mark mining claims. The yawning, 4-inch mouths of the uncapped markers entice cavity-nesting birds, which get into the pipes but can’t climb back out or spread their wings to fly. Trapped at the bottom, they slowly die of thirst or starvation.

“It’s a cruel and unusual death,” said Boone, a Las Vegas ecologist and outdoorsman who runs birdandhike.com.

The markers he and his wife took down May 21 were near Mount Irish, about 125 miles north of Las Vegas, in a 705,000-acre area proposed for a new national monument dedicated to Nevada’s iconic basin-and-range landscape.

Boone said there are fewer markers there than in other places in Nevada, but many are harder to reach. He said he and his wife had to hike about 6 miles in “a big erratic circle” to get to all they could see. They found several markers already knocked down.

Mine claim holders use PVC pipe because it’s cheap, lightweight and bright white, making it easy to lug around and easy to spot from a distance.

The use of uncapped pipes as mine markers was outlawed in Nevada in 1993, but the practice continued. In 2009, state wildlife officials and Audubon Society members lobbied for legislation that gave claim holders two years to remove their plastic pipes. On Nov. 1, 2011, it became legal for people to pull down such claim markers on public land and lay them on the ground where they find them.

Boone guessed he and Liz have knocked down about 50 mine claim markers in the swath of Lincoln and Nye counties that could one day become Basin and Range National Monument. The White House is said to be considering monument designation, a move that would ban oil and gas exploration, wind and solar farms and other development but apparently not affect current grazing and mining.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Nevada Department of Wildlife and a host of volunteer groups and individuals have made a concerted effort to remove hollow pipe markers throughout much of Southern Nevada, where “the easy ones to get have been gotten,” Boone said. “My understanding is there are almost none left in Clark County.”

As of last year, the Department of Wildlife’s marker-removal campaign, nicknamed the “Bluebird Project,” had taken down roughly 32,000 pipes and counted about 11,000 dead birds from 61 species. In one instance, a state biologist pulled 32 bird carcasses from a single tube.

The actual number of birds killed by hollow markers is thought to be much higher, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands. The single largest victim is the mountain bluebird — the Nevada state bird.

By some estimates, it could take years if not decades to make a real dent in the problem, especially in northern Nevada, where most mining claims — and mountain bluebirds — are found.

Boone said he plans to keep knocking down the pipes no matter where he sees them.

“A lot of migratory bird species are having a really hard time,” he said. “It seems like we should help them if we can.”

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Find him on Twitter: @RefriedBrean