Bald eagle dies after rat poisoning on Cape

By Jason Savio
Posted Nov 2, 2018

BARNSTABLE — Zak Mertz had seen it before.

The pain, the suffering. This time it was happening to an animal he described as “beautiful.”

“They’re such incredible birds and it’s so tragic that this happened,” Mertz, director of the Cape Wildlife Center, said about a bald eagle that had to be euthanized at the animal care facility on Route 6A.

On Sunday, the Barnstable department of natural resources found the sick bird in Centerville and brought it to the New England Wildlife Center’s veterinary team at Cape Wildlife Center for evaluation.

The bald eagle was severely hurt and clinging to life, with a puncture wound and a ruptured eye.

“But the most significant factor in his prognosis is what we believe to be rodenticide toxicity, meaning that at some point he had ingested a rat or a mouse that had in turn ingested rat poison,” said Mertz.

Rodenticide, or rat poison, is an easy way to deal with unwanted rodents, but it also can poison other animals it was not meant to harm. Besides the danger to household pets, wildlife can be affected when a predator eats prey infected with the poison.

There are different types of rodenticides, with the most common being an anticoagulant, according to veterinarian Dr. Priya Patel at the wildlife center. It is lethal to those who ingest it by having an adverse effect on the normal clotting within the body, hindering the activation of vitamin K which is needed to form clots. Without vitamin K, any type of bleeding won’t stop, no matter how big or small the wound.

“The animals essentially bleed to death,” said Dr. Patel. “This can happen from very, very minor wounds. It’s just their body does not have the normal clotting mechanism anymore so they’re basically helpless at this point.”

The first thing Patel noticed when the eagle arrived at the facility was that its entire left side was covered in blood. They found a puncture wound on its side.

“With that amount of bleeding without a massive amount of fractures, you always want to suspect rodenticide,” she said.

Patel and her team performed a test to see how long it would take for the bald eagle’s blood to clot, a telltale sign of whether or not it had rodenticide in its system. The blood should normally clot in two to four minutes. Eight minutes in and the bird’s blood had still not clotted, she said.

“Unfortunately, it had a ruptured eye to the same side as the injury and that ultimately led Massachusetts Fish and Wildlife to have us humanely euthanize it because they cannot survive with one eye,” Patel said about the eagle, which is a protected species.

Patel and Mertz suspect the debilitating side effects of the rat poison likely led to the bird becoming weak and vulnerable, leaving it prone to the fatal injuries that ultimately cost it its life.

“When we see it, it is usually coinciding with another injury, meaning that the animal can cope with the rat poison up until the experiences of trauma at which point it overwhelms the body,” said Mertz.

Although it is difficult to say for sure, it could have been the initial incident that led to the secondary injuries, Patel said.

The eagle’s death could have been easily prevented if people chose safer ways to deal with rodent problems, Mertz said.

Snap rat traps, scent-based deterrents and ultrasonic devices plugged into a wall that emit a frequency that rodents don’t like are other options, Mertz said.

“When you look at the broader impact on the wildlife population, it’s certainly more humane and responsible to try the other approaches first,” he said.

Preventive measures go a long way too, such as examining buildings and clogging up holes with steel wool.

Mertz estimates that between the Cape facility and the New England Wildlife Center in Weymouth, they have seen up to 100 different cases involving animals stricken with rat poison over the course of the past two years, including red tail hawks, owls, foxes and coyotes.

“Anybody using (rodenticide) are poisoning hawks and owls,” said Mark Faherty, science coordinator at Massachusetts Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. “Nobody should be using them.”

Rodents ingest the poison and die after they “stagger out into the environment where they can be picked up by predators,” Faherty said.

In addition, children have become sick from rat poison being left around, he said.

The large number of sickened animals may have to do with what Dan Gosselin, manager at the Bird Watcher’s General Store in Orleans, says is an uptick in the rat population as of late. Gosselin cited local coyote hunting as a factor, as the canines are predators of rats. There is another unlikely culprit: dog feces.

“Rats really like their feces and that’s a huge problem,” he said. “It’s one of the biggest contributing factors, people not picking up their feces and the rats coming along and eating it because it’s nutritious to them.”

The number of people walking dogs also rises with the influx of summer tourists and while some people say they pick up after their dogs, they are sometimes putting the leavings into their compost, which doesn’t help, said the store’s owner, Michael O’Connor.

An increase in rats or not, Mertz stresses that it is always crucial to be more mindful of other wildlife and said he hopes the death of the bald eagle will serve a teaching opportunity.

“It’s a shame to see,” he said. “Something as simple as switching your rat control methods can potentially save hundreds of animals.”

https://www.capecodtimes.com/news/20181102/bald-eagle-dies-after-rat-poisoning-on-cape?utm_content=GTDT_CCT