Feds reach settlement with quail-hunting plantations over poisoned eggs

<p>The federal government has reached a settlement with the owners of several southwest Georgia quail-hunting plantations accused of using a powerful pesticide to kill wild animals that eat quail eggs.</p><p>Environmental Protection Agency spokesman Carl Terry said details of the settlement would be announced early this week. An official close to the investigation told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the total penalty would exceed $300,000.</p><p>Some of the individual plantations faced millions of dollars in potential fines for allegedly setting out chicken eggs laced with the pesticide Furadan to kill foxes, raccoons, possums, skunks and other animals that prey on quail eggs. After they died, those animals then became poisoned bait themselves, attracting and killing alligators, songbirds, snakes, bald eagles, hawks, vultures and other creatures.</p><p>The EPA declined to name the plantations involved in the settlement, although investigations in 1999 found evidence of illegal poisoning on at least 16 plantations.</p><p>Joe Tanner, director of Heritage and Conservation Wildlife, a group composed of quail plantation owners, said the owners involved are committed to responsible and sound conservation and wildlife management practice and pledged that there will be no more pesticide misuse on their land.</p><p>State and federal investigations into the poisoning began in 1998, when dogs belonging to raccoon hunters in southwest Georgia died after apparently ingesting Furadan. Investigators later tracked the poison to the chicken eggs.</p><p>Although investigators found evidence of wildlife poisoning on 16 plantations, only four of them _ Kolomoki near Blakely, Albemarle and Ecila near Albany, and Nochaway in Leary _ were required to pay several thousand dollars in fines to the Georgia Department of Agriculture, which had been given the authority to enforce the cases by the EPA under the guidelines of the pesticide law.</p><p>Last year, the EPA announced that it was reopening the cases against the plantations _ including the ones that were fined _ saying the violations warranted stiffer fines and that the penalties had been insufficient to deter further illegal wildlife poisoning.</p><p>Plantation owners have said reopening the cases amounted to government harassment.</p>

http://accesswdun.com/article/2003/10/185267