Here’s hoping this little bird found his owners! And if you are looking for a quick ornithological fix, I recommend A Field Guide to the Birds of Brazil by Ber van Perlo. He was a handsome little fella (the bird).* Then a student told us he was familiar with a good vet in town and offered to bring him in. Poor guy was not equipped to handle the freezing cold, so I held onto him and ventured into Columbia’s campus for help. We figured he must have escaped from an apartment window or something. I went to say hi to him and he flew up and landed on the shoulder of one of the people I was with (see photo). I was on the UWS on Saturday and noticed this bright orange/green/blue bird standing on the sidewalk chirping. Meanwhile, the feathered and furred body count grows.Ī red-tailed hawk found near the baseball field at Queensbridge Park with traces of four rodenticides in his body, which caused his death, likely feasted on a poisoned rat.The Oxford Comment guest star Jon (featured on Episodes 1 and 4.5) recently wrote in with this shocking, yet true story: “You need to focus attention on habitats and education and how we learn to live with these animals if we want to live with them,” he told THE CITY. On Sunday he hosted the “Raptorama” festival at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Broad Channel, Queens, where people could meet many of these birds up-close. New Yorkers “should use better methods, methods that are less impactful to the environment and to the birds,” he said. “We now know definitively that not just killing rats, it’s killing the most celebrated wildlife that we have in New York City,” said David Karopkin, a wildlife rehabilitator and an advisor to the advocacy group Voters for Animal Rights.ĭon Riepe, a wildlife expert and the Jamaica Bay program director for the American Littoral Society, said birds of prey like red-tailed hawks and great horned owls nest across the city, despite a concrete jungle of threats Animal groups have for years called for better methods to control the city’s least-favorite mammal. To help control the rat population, park officials say they use rodenticides listed as low to moderately low risk, along with dry ice to plug rat burrows in the park.īut raptors like owls and hawks - and the rats they eat - travel throughout the city, to places beyond parks where rat poison is used more, experts say. That includes brodifacoum and difethialone. The animals - ranging from hawks to ducks to a critter that represented several “dead squirrels popping up throughout the Prospect Park area” - were found across the five boroughs, and suffered varying fates.įor the animals, the biggest dangers are often found outside of the city’s parks, which don’t allow the use of any anticoagulant rodenticides categorized as high primary and secondary risks to birds. The Parks Department has submitted at least 17 animals to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation’s Wildlife Health Unit for post-mortem examinations since the beginning of 2020, records reviewed by THE CITY show. That includes Barry the Owl, who was found dead after being struck by a maintenance truck in Central Park in August - but only after having been poisoned, THE CITY later revealed. “Over the years we have documented many red-tailed hawks and great horned owls dying from secondary anticoagulant rodenticide poisoning, this is a common diagnosis in red-tailed hawks submitted for examination from the New York City area,” biologist Kevin Hynes wrote in the necropsy, which was obtained by THE CITY via a Freedom of Information Law request.Īlthough intended for unwanted vermin like rats, rodenticide threatens some of the city’s most beloved creatures. In other words: rat poison - a frequent killer of birds of prey across New York City, biologists say. The dead, male, red-tailed hawk was discovered without any signs of significant trauma by a park-goer inside Washington Square Park in the spring of 2020.Ī necropsy later confirmed the hawk was poisoned by pesticides, including lethal doses of difethialone and a trace of brodifacoum.
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