doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com If we have to stop shooting lead in shotguns to

save the raptors then New York Cityers have to stop using rat poison to kill rats. Three Red-Tailed Hawks died in Central Park and the autopsy revealed rat poison as the culprit. Now if the rest of the nation has to stop killing deer, dove, ducks, quail, and other game with lead projectiles I think it only fair that New York City can't use rat poison.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/nyregi...r=1&src=twr

In Mystery of Hawk Deaths, Rat Poison Emerges
By JAMES BARRON
Published: April 11, 2012

It had the makings of an avian mystery, albeit almost the opposite of that Hitchcockian one. Two red-tailed hawks were found dead, one in Central Park, one just outside. A third died 24 hours after being taken out of the park and sent to a wildlife rehabilitator because concerned park rangers could see that it was �not acting right.�


The red-tailed hawk Lima, photographed last November, was found dead on Feb. 26. She was once the mate of the much-followed raptor Pale Male.

A sign that warned of rat poison outside the Central Park police precinct.
Was it a whodunit? No, birders said on Wednesday, it was a whatdunit.

The results of necropsies on the three birds are in, and the culprit was not some predator in the park � not a cat stalking a snack, for example. Toxicology tests showed that all three hawks had died with rat poison in their systems.

That was just what some birdwatchers had suspected. One, Lincoln Karim, a wildlife photographer who was arrested after he kept one of the dead hawks in his apartment overnight, has maintained that the Central Park Conservancy applied rat poison in the park.

On Wednesday, a parks department spokesman acknowledged that until last June the conservancy had indeed used rat poison. But now the group uses snap traps in tamper-proof boxes that look like bait stations.

Still, the hawks� deaths were more recent than last summer, and there was one place in the park where there was poison in February, around the time the urban park rangers reported the hawk that was behaving erratically. That place was outside the Central Park police precinct, on the 86th Street transverse.

Mr. Karim noticed an exterminator�s sign as he was leaving the precinct on Feb. 27, after spending most of the night in a holding cell there after his arrest. He asked a friend to photograph the sign that morning.

�That�s the only spot in their hunting ground that has rat poison,� Mr. Karim said.

A police spokeswoman, Deputy Inspector Kim Royster, said that a contractor had placed rat poison outside the temporary station house in preparation for its demolition, as is often done when a building is to be torn down.

It had been vacated after renovations were completed and precinct operations moved to a newly remodeled building next door in January, she said.

So the plot thickens. Did the dead hawks feast on rats or mice that had crawled into the containers, swallowed some of the poison and managed to crawl out again? There is no way to know, birders say.

�Hawks cover a large area,� said Glenn Phillips, the executive director of New York City Audubon. �It�s big enough that they don�t feed, forage, in a single park.�

He added, �Every single park in New York is faced by tall buildings, which have their own garbage, which feeds rats, and their own rat-control programs. We believe the most likely source of rat poison is residences and other businesses surrounding the parks.�

The first hawk, a female, was found dead on Feb. 10. Another of the dead hawks was Lima, the mate of Pale Male, the celebrity red-tail with the Fifth Avenue address. She was found dead under a tree on Feb. 26. Mr. Karim said that the day before Lima died, she had coughed up the remains of a rat, as hawks will do after a meal.

A necropsy by the State Department of Environmental Conservation found that Lima had small amounts of three chemical components of rat poison in her liver. One was bromadiolone, a powerful poison that can kill rats or mice within 48 hours.

The hawk that had been turned over to the wildlife rehabilitator also had bromadiolone in its liver, along with two other types of poison, according to the necropsy.

The third hawk was found at Central Park South and Seventh Avenue on March 4. It too had bromadiolone and other poisons in its system. But the state pathologist who performed toxicology tests concluded that it died from shock related to a problem with her oviduct, a passageway from the ovaries.

As for Mr. Karim, he carried Lima�s body out of the park on Feb. 26 and kept it in his apartment overnight. On Feb. 27, he carried it back to the park. He was arrested that evening and charged with illegal possession of a raptor without a permit and with obstruction of government administration.

He said on Wednesday that the charges had been dismissed.

Sorry, Mike, your argument is too logical. Decisions of this type have to be based on highly charged emotional, erratic logic.

New York City......what else can you say? Three hawks are dead from eating poisned rats, but no figures on how many human beings were killed/mugged/assaulted/raped/robbed in Central Park in the last year. Mayor-for-life Bloomberg has got his priorities.....
I wouldn't visit New York if they were giving away Winchester 21's to middle age Texans.
On a happy note, the EPA recently announced they have no jurisdiction over banning lead in ammunition.

Maybe this post should be redirected to misfires.......

Gary, a Model 21? Are you sure about that? That would be the only reason I would go to New York City, not the state because the other parts of New York are in no way shape or form like the City.

Notice how frickin stupid they are, "A cat looking for a snack" yea, right a cat take on a Red-Tailed Hawk.
Big City Slickers should just keep to what they know, which ain't a whole lot.

How many New Yorkers died from rat born diseases in the same period? Leptaspirosis can be nasty.

Been to New York. Arrived by boat from Bermuda in order to fly out back to England. The immigration officer took some convincing that my only reason to come to New York was to leave shortly afterwards. I thought it a very dour and depressing city. Mind you, London is little better; I avoid going there as well. Sorry if this offends any New Yorkers on the site. Lagopus.....

+1.....NYC is an "arm pit" for sure......we also have some other arms with their associated pits in this country as well...

"Rat Poison"! That may very well be the legal answer to getting rid of the hawks that mess up my quail hunting. Of course the rat poison would be intended only for the cotton rat plague which has decimated the cotton crops...Geo

We have already had to stop using poison bait to kill Coyotes because the raptors were getting into it so ending poison for rats should already be covered by the same laws right? Have to admit rats are really quite a threat to humans though and need some pretty stringent methods of preventing them from getting food to control their populations.

But I think they should use nature's balance like the NYC Lefty's advocate for those of us living in the rest of the country. They need to have mountain lions, wolves, bears, bobcats, and coyotes to control the rat population. If someone's kid gets eaten that is a small price to pay for a healthy population of raptors.

Best,

Mike

Rattlesnakes do a pretty good job on rats here in Texas. Maybe we should export a couple million to New York City.
Well, maybe I would go for a 21....I'm pretty weak where those guns are concerned, but only if I could drop a couple of buckshot in the barrels until I got out of town. I was only referring to NYC...not the other parts of the state.