MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
For 100 years, the U.S. Postal Service has shipped live baby birds around the country. Customers and suppliers now say many of the birds are dying in transit because deliveries are so slow. Kavahn Mansouri with the Midwest Newsroom has been looking into it.
KAVAHN MANSOURI: Livestock shows are typically one of the big attractions at county fairs. At the St. Charles County Fair in Missouri this summer, children and teens start prepping their animals early in the morning. Eighteen-year-old Evie Gholson's pride and joy is a white broad-breasted turkey.
EVIE GHOLSON: She's not too big. She's, like, just the right age, so she's able to still, like, walk around well and everything, and I could still pick her up. So it's perfect.
MANSOURI: But getting that perfect bird was difficult this year. When the U.S. Postal Service delivered a shipment of 10 baby turkeys the Gholsons had ordered, it ended up in Cleveland first. It showed up on the Gholsons' porch three days late. Evie's mother, Amy Gholson, says she knew what to expect when she saw the box labeled live birds.
AMY GHOLSON: Unfortunately, when I got home, we knew what the situation was. A silent box is a dead box.
MANSOURI: This was the second time the Postal Service had delivered a shipment to the Gholsons where most or all of the birds inside were dead. The service does have rules in place to make sure shipped birds arrive alive. However, there have been several instances that show those rules aren't working. And this year, the Midwest Newsroom found that hatcheries, breeders and backyard farmers blame Postal Service delays and other mishaps as the reason why birds die in transit.
Kelly Warren owns Cocktown Funky Orpingtons in North Carolina. The Orpington chicken she breeds are popular show birds. Warren estimates she's lost a third of the birds she shipped this year, and sometimes she's had to issue refunds to customers.
KELLY WARREN: One box last week arrived three days late. The whole box was dead. All I could do was get my shipping costs back. The rest of it was out of pocket.
MANSOURI: The U.S. Postal Service declined an interview request. In a statement, it said it has procedures for the safe shipment of live animals, and when properly packaged and labeled, live parcels get special handling. The Postal Service also said it doesn't track the total numbers of animals that die while in transit, so it's hard to know how widespread the problem is.
Even so, Postal Service delays have become more persistent in the years following the pandemic. Those slowdowns are central to a 10-year plan announced by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in 2021. It was designed to end billions of dollars of losses for the USPS. An additional cost-saving plan announced in August seeks to overhaul how packages are handled. That's a move DeJoy said could increase slowdowns and mail deliveries even more, especially in rural areas, where deliveries could take an additional 12 to 24 hours.
SAM GRAVES: It's just a huge management problem.
MANSOURI: That's Congressman Sam Graves of Missouri. He says complaints about mail delays are a top concern for his constituents in rural areas.
GRAVES: Other members of Congress all over the country are getting the same sort of complaints. So it is something that the government should do and should do well, and right now, it's not being done well at all.
MANSOURI: Graves and two other lawmakers recently introduced the Pony Up Act. It would offer some consumer protections for mail delays. As for the practice of shipping baby birds, activist groups like United Poultry Concerns have called for the end of the long-standing tradition.
At the county fair's 4-H show in Missouri, the turkey the Gholsons got in a replacement shipment won a blue ribbon. But Amy Gholson says the family's days of ordering birds through the mail may be coming to an end.
A GHOLSON: This is my daughter's last year showing in 4-H.
MANSOURI: And while Gholson says she's grateful the replacement shipments made it in time for Evie this year, she's also thankful that her days of finding dead birds in the mail due to delays are almost over.
(SOUNDBITE OF DUCK QUACKING)
MANSOURI: For NPR News, I'm Kavahn Mansouri in St. Louis.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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