Koyukon elder ties Galena swallow decline to Air Force mosquito spraying in TCC bird booklet

Benedict Jones, a Koyukon elder, has watched the swallows around Galena thin out, and he connects it to the Air Force spraying for mosquitoes. The swallows ate a lot of mosquitoes, he said. The Air Force used a lot of pesticide to be rid of them, and "since then there have been fewer swallows." They nest on the hillsides and in the mud of the riverbanks.

His account appears in Kk'onaat'oghee, kk'onaadedaale, tsooye, a Koyukon bird knowledge booklet compiled for the Tanana Chiefs Conference Migratory Bird Regional Co-Management Council by Susan "Ketsoo" Paskvan and published Sept. 2.

The birds he is describing are disappearing well beyond Galena. Bank swallows, the booklet's subject, are down 89 percent in Alaska since 1970, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, which has a study underway in the Interior. In Canada they are down 98 percent and listed as threatened.

They belong to a group in broad trouble. Aerial insectivores — the swallows, swifts, flycatchers and nightjars, all of them catching their food in flight — have been declining steeply across North America and Europe, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes the cause as unexplained. Researchers point to falling insect numbers, pesticide use, the loss of nesting banks where rivers get stabilized or mined for gravel, and warming that puts insect emergence out of step with the nesting season. Which of those matters most, and where, is not settled.

Bank swallows also spend most of the year somewhere else entirely, migrating to South America and back.

Neither Fish and Game nor the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has tied the Galena decline to spraying. Canada's federal recovery strategy for the species lists pesticide use among the factors working against it.