The Bundys and the Birders

The Bundy family and their white male right-wing cronies, armed with pistols, rifles, and assault weapons, have now occupied Malheur Wildlife Refuge, one of the great bird sanctuaries of the western USA, for nineteen days. They are cattle ranchers, and they dress like cowboys. Many are Mormons. They have taken over a few administrative buildings and a bunkhouse from which they come and go at leisure, so it’s hard to say how many are involved. Their supporters bring them more guns and ammunition and gifts of food, and more armed right-wing nut-jobs have appeared, uninvited, in bullet-proof war costumes, to help defend them. Defend them from what? From the birds? 

They point their guns at anyone who threatens them; they break into government computers; they steal government vehicles; they cut fences; they promote the downfall of the government. Some are anti-Semites; most are anti-immigrationists; they don’t want “refugees” admitted to the USA. They despise President Obama and hurl racist insults at him and his supporters. If you have access to the New York Times, there’s a lengthy report on them here, and you can read about them in hundreds of other places.

If they were young black men, they’d all be dead, murdered en masse as the Black Panthers were. The Paiute Indians, whose land it rightfully is, say they are working with the government to preserve the land, and they don’t want the Bundy crowd using their land for private cattle-grazing from which only white ranchers profit. 

Former occupiers compare the Bundy “occupation” to ours. We were unarmed, and we were met with armed riot cops, water cannon, tazers, pepper spray, tanks, and helicopters. This is of course not the same thing. We were in cities all over the world. We annoyed business owners and talked about capitalism. The Bundy crowd is out in a wilderness now covered in ice and snow. 

The people who are most incensed about the Bundy occupation are...wait for it...birders. The Audubon Society sponsored a rally and a march to the Federal Building to demand the government reclaim the bird refuge. About five hundred people showed up in the pouring rain to listen to Bob Sallinger, the Audubon Society Conservation Director, read a statement created by birders, the Paiute people, and people from the small towns around Malheur.


I don’t personally believe in meeting violence with violence. I honestly don’t know what anybody should do about these armed white men in cowboy gear, and I’m glad it’s not my responsibility to do something. But I admire the passion and the intensity of the people at the rally, and I love Ursula Le Guin’s letter to the editor of our local paper: “Ammon Bundy and his bullyboys aren’t trying to free federal lands, but to hold them hostage. I can’t go to the Malheur refuge now, though as a citizen of the United States, I own it and have the freedom of it. That’s what public land is: land that belongs to the public — me, you, every law-abiding American. The people it doesn’t belong to and who don’t belong there are those who grabbed it by force of arms, flaunting their contempt for the local citizens.” Yes.