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Insecticides and pesticides images8/18/2023 “Everyone knows this stuff works very, very well for killing animals,” says Mourad Gabriel, a research associate at the University of California One Health Institute in Davis and co-director of the Integral Ecology Research Center. A similar unsolved case three years ago left 13 eagles dead. Last May wildlife investigators offered a $10,000 reward for information related to a spree of carbofuran poisonings on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that had wiped out six Bald Eagles and a Great Horned Owl. More than 230 Tundra Swan carcasses constituted a carbofuran crime scene at a lake in Inner Mongolia (authorities suspect poachers aimed to sell the birds to restaurants, some of which offer “swan feasts”).Įagles have been an especially common target in the United States. Nearly 190 vultures in Kenya died after dining on the remains of an animal laced with carbofuran a scientist studying the birds watched in horror as they dropped out of the sky within minutes of their meal. In Europe, gamekeepers defending pheasants at grouse-hunting estates poisoned hundreds of birds of prey, including Red Kites, Golden and White-tailed Eagles, and goshawks. People here and elsewhere-including in many countries where it’s still sold legally-use it to kill animals, rather than the insects it was invented to target. It’s an excruciating death.”Ĭarbofuran was pulled from the U.S. “When an animal is exposed, it goes into convulsions and respiratory failure. “It interferes with the enzymes that help nerves talk to each other,” says Ngaio Richards, a Montana-based wildlife biologist with an expertise in forensic science, who wrote a book documenting global animal poisonings from carbofuran. Whereas the pesticide DDT, banned in the 1970s after driving Bald Eagles, Peregrine Falcons, and Brown Pelicans to near extinction, works its way up the food chain gradually, like a progressive disease, carbofuran’s effect is instantaneous. A quarter teaspoon can kill a 400-pound bear in minutes. He ordered a toxicology screening.Ī couple of weeks later, the results revealed the culprit: carbofuran, a neurotoxic chemical that is one of history’s deadliest pesticides. Maybe she’d been poisoned, Hynes thought. Scraps of sheep hair and skin at the back of her mouth provided a clue that a more recent meal had been cut short. Her stomach contents showed that she had been fit enough to find a rabbit earlier that day. She was a female, seemingly in good health, and likely a mother incubating eggs, indicated by the bare skin-a brood patch-on her underbelly. Dressed in surgical scrubs and latex gloves, Hynes, a wildlife biologist with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation in Delmar, peered through the magnifying visor affixed to his headband and examined the Bald Eagle more closely. There were no injuries indicating that she had been hit by a car or electrocuted-the usual killers. The victim lying on Kevin Hynes’s stainless-steel table on March 11, 2015, showed no obvious cause of death.
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