JR and Stan - I learned a lot about Furadan (carbofuran) because I do lion conservation in Africa and it has been used to poison predators on a very large scale across the continent. If Furadan granules are used correctly as Stan describes, it is of little danger to birds, but when it is broadcast on the surface it kills them in large numbers. The number I cited from a Canadian study gave a wide range of estimates because no one is counting dead dickey birds in agricultural fields; 100 million was at the high end of estimates. However, even if mortality was only 50% of that, it was still dreadful. Canada finally followed the EU and the US in banning it for most uses.
The American manufacturer of Furadan claimed for years that it was perfectly safe in birds and mammal, calling all the evidence junk science (which means any research that threatens profits, as in cigarettes and cancer or fossil fuels and climate change). They continued to stonewall until 60 Minutes, with an audience of about 30 million, did a piece on lion poisoning in Kenya, after which they withdrew it from the Kenya market the following day. However, it is still universally available in Africa as generic carbofuran from China and India. It is also used to poison ducks and fish which are then sold for human consumption!
Off topic, but because of widespread predator poisoning with Furadan, vultures which were ubiquitous in Africa until 15 years ago are now nearly gone (sorry, Craig, but the Peregrine Fund is at the forefront of trying to turn this around - junk science, of course). So are the lions the poisoning is aimed at. Vultures were essentially eliminated from Asia, too, due to an entirely different cause: the NSAID diclofenac causes kidney failure in vultures and was very widely used in cattle. One result of the Asian vulture extinction has been a huge increase in feral dogs and a corresponding increase in human rabies. When the cause of the die-off was finally worked out, India and Nepal moved quickly to ban diclofenac use for cattle, but the African countries have done nothing about Furadan, even though other nematicides are available.
