Badgers and skunk that were supposed to shoo away pelicans from Idaho island take off

Badgers, skunk bail off pelican island in Idaho

BOISE, Idaho — The badgers bailed. The skunk skedaddled. The pelicans persevere.

In April, the state Department of Fish and Game put five predators — three badgers, two skunks — on an island in the Blackfoot Reservoir in southeastern Idaho in a bid to keep American white pelicans from nesting there.

The agency blames the big birds for eating too many fish, including sensitive Yellowstone cutthroat trout, as well as stocked hatchery-raised trout coveted by anglers.

But two badgers outfitted with radio collars now appear to have swum to the mainland. There’s no sign of the third badger, which had no collar. And only one skunk with a radio collar remains on Gull Island. The other has disappeared.

Mark Gamblin, Fish and Game’s regional supervisor for southeastern Idaho, concedes enlisting skunks and badgers to control pelicans has been a bit of a disappointment, at least so far.

“This is exactly what adaptive management is: You try something, you learn something from it and decide what the best approach to take is,” Gamblin said.

Pelicans in two colonies in southeastern Idaho, one on the Blackfoot Reservoir and the other on the Snake River’s Lake Walcott, have tripled to about 7,000 birds since 2002. Idaho wants to reduce the flock to 700 birds at the Blackfoot Reservoir and 2,100 at Lake Walcott by 2013.

In 2009, Fish and Game proposed shooting pelicans and oiling their eggs to keep them from hatching.

That angered some who like the big birds. And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the federal agency that manages migratory birds under a 1918 law, appeared likely to shoot down Idaho’s proposed lethal measures after calling them an “eradication program.”

As a result, Gamblin’s agency decided to unleash the badgers and skunks.

That the predators bolted isn’t exactly a surprise.

A badger’s home range is tens or even hundreds of times the size of 6-acre Gull Island. A skunk’s range may be 1,200 acres, too.

Both are swimmers.

A radio collar from one of the badgers is currently sending a “mortality signal” from an area that scientists believe is located on the mainland. That means the collar isn’t moving. Until it’s collected, Gamblin won’t know if the animal is dead or has just shed its collar.

“It’s a valuable collar, we need to retrieve it,” he said.

Biologists who fly the reservoir regularly haven’t picked up the signal of two additional collars, meaning the badger and skunk that wore them have likely wandered beyond the one-to-two-mile signal range.

Gamblin said spring snow flurries delayed pelican nesting this year, so the birds are still arriving to lay their eggs.

On Willow Island, a second island in the Blackfoot Reservoir, the state agency has also fenced off about half the pelican nesting habitat. But even that’s no guarantee of reducing pelican numbers, because the adult birds might just crowd into nesting habitat that remains.

“It’s been effective at preventing nesting activity within the fence,” Gamblin said. “We may learn — we don’t know yet — that the birds just pack into a tighter area.”