A House Natural Resources subcommittee this week will discuss the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, a century-old law with a nagging legal ambiguity at its heart.
Written in 1918, the MBTA now shelters under its protective wing more than 1,100 migratory bird species. The crucial question of whether the law covers unintentional as well as deliberate harm to the birds, though, still remains up in the air after all these years.
Judges have reached different conclusions, and the dispute has yet to be resolved by the Supreme Court. Administrations keep changing their interpretation of the law, complicating life for energy companies and others whose operations may cause the various kinds of unintentional harm grouped under term “incidental take.”
The Wednesday afternoon hearing convened by the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries — chaired by Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) — comes as the Trump administration has adopted a limited view of the MBTA’s reach.
