Killing birds

I like to think of myself as an environmentalist.  We enrolled the farm in the Farmland Preservation program, I don’t use any pesticides on the garden or our lawn, and every year I work like a dog to cut back the brush on the stone waterway because I’m afraid that Roundup would end up in the stream and ultimately in Beltzville Lake.  I’m a member of at least three environmental organizations, and I taught an environmental studies class at San Jose State.  

Now I find out that I may have been poisoning birds.  When you have chickens, you have mice.  When you have a shed, you have mice.  Mice are destructive little creatures, chewing papers and crapping everywhere.  I’ve been using a product called d-Con to poison them, and it works.

The latest issue of Audubon Magazine contains a long article about what it calls “second generation anticoagulant rodenticides.”  These include d-Con, Hot Shot, Generation, Talon, and Havoc.  They kill by thinning the blood of mice and rats, in effect causing them to bleed to death internally.

When I found a poisoned dead mouse in the shed, I would chuck it out into the field.  That’s the problem.  Hawks and other birds eat the mice and, in turn, become poisoned.  So do foxes, raccoons, bears, skunks, dogs, and house cats.  There is a rodenticide that works on mice that does not affect other animals.  It is called wafarin, the ingredient in blood thinners used by humans.  The second-generation rodenticides act more quickly and are more popular, but they are the ones that harm any animals that consume them.

I’ve decided to go back to the old method.  I set three mouse traps with peanut butter as bait.  The mouse dies almost instantly, and no birds will be harmed.