Trump policy which prevented companies being punished for wild bird deaths is revoked

Donald Trump’s policy which stopped companies being criminally prosecuted for preventable bird deaths has been reversed.

The Biden administration on Monday did a U-turn on the rule imposed by the former president, which had drastically weakened the government’s power to enforce a century-old law that protects most American bird species.

Mr Trump’s move halted enforcement under the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which was most notably used to achieve a $100 million settlement from BP after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster killed more than one million birds from 93 species.

The Trump administration had ploughed ahead with the migratory bird regulation even after a New York federal judge rejected the legal rationale behind it in August.

The rule change meant that the federal government would not fine or prosecute industries for practices that kill birds unintentionally such as oil spills, electrocutions on power lines, wind turbines that knock them from the air, and waste pits where landing birds perish in toxic water.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) acknowledged in findings last year that the rollback would have a “negative” impact on a number of species protected by the act, which range from hawks and eagles to seabirds, storks, songbirds and sparrows.

Besides the BP case, hundreds of enforcement cases — targeting utilities, oil companies and wind energy developers — resulted in criminal fines and civil penalties totalling $5.8 million between 2010 and 2018. USFWS officials have said relatively few of the cases end in criminal prosecutions because most companies are willing to take measures to address hazards that their operations may pose to birds.

A spokesperson for the Department of Interior said on Monday that the Trump policy “overturned decades of bipartisan and international consensus and allowed industry to kill birds with impunity”. The agency plans to come up with new standards “that can protect migratory birds and provide certainty to industry”.

Details on the new standards were not immediately made public.

Industry operations kill between an estimated 450 million-1.1 billion birds each year, out of roughly 7 billion birds in North America, according to USFWS. Researchers have said cats in the US kill the most birds — more than 2 billion a year.

America has lost more than one in four birds in the last 50 years, according to the Audobon Society, amounting to nearly 3 billion birds. The climate crisis is having increasing impacts on migratory bird populations.

AP contributed to this report