Men who poisoned protected birds found guilty — 15 months after trial

Two men who killed dozens of protected birds in 2020 by spreading poisoned corn around a pond in Lawrence County have been found guilty in federal court.

The verdict Wednesday for Robert Yost, 52, of New Galilee, Beaver County, and Jacob Reese, 27, of Enon Valley, Lawrence County, came more than a year after their bench trial. They will be sentenced on May 29. —

Attorney Steve Townsend, who represented Reese, said he understood the judge’s verdict but questioned its timing.

“You have a right to a speedy trial, but apparently not a speedy verdict,” he said. “I just wish it wouldn’t have taken this long on a day-and-a-half trial.”

Government prosecutors said that the men, who farmed a soybean crop on the leased property, had grown progressively frustrated by the damage the birds had been causing.

After firing shotgun blasts to scare them away and installing leg traps, they moved on to carbofuran-laced corn, investigators said.

Carbofuran is a pesticide.

In June 2002, the owners of the property discovered 17 Canada geese, a mallard duck and 10 red-winged blackbirds dead in their field, on or next to a 100-yard-long trail of corn.

According to testimony at trial, in June 2020, one of the owners of the home saw a Yost Farms employee fire a gun toward the wetlands, trying to scare the birds away.

Within the week, they found eight leg-hold traps in the tall grass of the field along the edge closest to the pond, which they asked Yost to remove.

Then, on June 22, 2020, one of the owners saw Reese using a shovel to spread something from the back of a utility vehicle.

The next day, they found the dead birds.

When an officer with the Pennsylvania Game Commission confronted the men, the defendants said they had put seed corn down to try to get the birds to eat that instead of the soybean crop.

When the investigator asked Yost and Reese to show them the bag that corn had come from, they said they had already burned it.

An examination of three of the birds and samples of the corn showed that they had been poisoned with carbofuran, which was declared unsafe by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009.

Yost, who leased the farmland, and Reese, who worked for him, were charged with conspiracy, unlawful use of a restricted pesticide and unlawful killing of migratory birds, which are federally protected because they migrate through Canada, the United States and Mexico.

U.S. District Judge W. Scott Hardy held a bench trial in October 2022 but did not deliver his findings until this week. He found both men guilty on all three misdemeanor counts.

The maximum punishment for killing the birds is a fine of $15,000 and six months in prison, while the pesticide charges carry a fine of $1,000 and imprisonment for 30 days.