On 18/10/02, Dlrymnd at aol.com wrote:
>Hi tweeters, just got home and am reading a notice from Children's Hospital
>that they will be spraying to kill the blackberries on their property.
....
>THEY ARE GOING TO LEAVE THE POISONOUS
>BERRIES THERE UNTIL NEXT YEAR. My concern is what about the birds that eat
>the blackberries over the winter. There are all sorts of yard birds here.

Take a deep breath and relax. Unless they put details in the notice
that you haven't passed on to us, there is no reason to be overly
worried. They'll be using an herbicide, and most of those are unlikely
to be seriously toxic to birds, even directly after spraying. Ask them
exactly what they're using if it wasn't in the notification, then look
it up at Extoxnet
<http://ace.orst.edu/info/extoxnet/pips/ghindex.html>. There's a
reasonable chance that they'll be using glyphosate, aka roundup (this
is the preferred time of year for using roundup on blackberries and
other stubborn shrubs because it gets carried to the roots). Glyphosate
has a very low risk for animals; it washes into the soil once it rains,
and it degrades quickly (how fast depends on the soil type and how
healthy the microbe community is, time ranges from days to a few
months). Many other herbicides are also not particularly dangerous to
animals, and don't leave much in the way of surface residue past a few
days or weeks. So find out the details.

>Does the UW spray Blackberries? what about the BurkeGillman

I don't know, but I wish they would. I wish they'd get aggressive
about ivy, too--it's even worse than blackberries. I'm delighted that
someone is taking steps to get rid of a large stand of blackberry,
which is an invasive alien that degrades habitat. A few bird species
do eat the berries (then spread the infection far and wide), but far
more bird species would be able to eat the myriad insects that depend
on native plants--and those insects are available year round.
Hopefully Children's won't replace the evil blackberry with lawn, that
would be no improvement at all--though it wouldn't really be worse,
either, because it will remove a seed source. Find out what they're
going to plant--if they're going to be putting in natives (a 15' wide
strip gives plenty of scope for a wonderful hedgerow, or else lower
shrubs/groundcovers), you'll likely see some improvement in the variety
of your local native bird populations once they mature.

> does the county just come out and spray in October and
>say "I'm not going to clean it up until NEXT FALL, when I'll
>replant the blackberries with other plants".

Leaving the remains for a year is often good practice. After using
herbicide, you can't replant right away. You need to wait for the
herbicide to break down, and you also need to wait through the spring
to make sure the stuff is really dead. Meanwhile, the blackberry
corpses are enough of a cover to reduce erosion until time for
replanting--if you removed them, especially on a hillside, there
wouldn't be any soil at all left by spring. The only really good time
to plant in Seattle is autumn, after the rains have come back. Any
other time of year and you waste tremendous quantities of water trying
to get new plants established. Wasting water in summer kills salmon,
and other birds depend on the salmon runs

For large quantities of blackberry, which this is, it's impractical to
kill it by hand. Believe me, 'hand pulling' is labor intensive and
nearly futile; I've been fighting one tiny patch that way in my yard
for nearly ten years now. Herbicide is sometimes the lesser evil
compared to leaving an invasive weed monoculture. Assuming that their
choice of herbicide is reasonable, it sounds like Children's is doing
the right thing.
--
Allyn Weaks allyn at tardigrade.net Seattle, WA Sunset zone 5
Pacific NW Native Wildlife Gardening: http://www.tardigrade.org/natives/
"The benefit of even limited monopolies is too doubtful, to be opposed
to that of their general suppression." Thomas Jefferson