Poisons killed beloved owls in Tampa Bay. Can their defenders save others?
The birds died one by one in a local park. Admirers blame rat poison. Now they’re trying to get chemicals off the street.

SAFETY HARBOR — Mark Schocken took thousands of pictures of the great horned owls in Philippe Park, but he didn’t often capture them eating.

Then one clear afternoon, binoculars slung over his shoulder and camera in hand, he watched the mother bird plop a rat in front of her baby. The light was perfect, the owls positioned just right.

Click.

It was March 2, 4:25 p.m. Only days before the first death.

Schocken and his wife, Linda, spent many winter hours in the park, a sliver of oaks dripping with Spanish moss at the edge of Tampa Bay. They were part of a collective of photographers who surrounded the “Owl Tree,” a knobby clutch of branches next to a parking lot where the birds nested.

Admirers knew the owls like celebrities, learning their patterns — how they were most active around dawn and dusk, how the mother clacked her beak at squirrels that scurried too close, how their deep calls pulsed through the park’s canopy. Some gave them names, Oliver and Emily, this year with three babies: Huey, Louie and Daisy (née Dewey, before they figured out the owl was female).

Schocken, semi-retired at 74, felt a mysticism in their presence. He liked when the father owl turned searchlight yellow eyes onto him.

On this afternoon, not long before spring, he lingered under a branch where Emily sat with two owlets. He watched Huey touch the rat’s limp back. The mother gazed at her fuzzy-headed baby.

Suddenly, Emily snatched the rat in her talons and flew away. Schocken can’t be sure whether she returned to finish the meal. But he knows what happened next.

All but one owl was dead within a month and a half. Each had poison in its body — highly toxic rodenticides that businesses, homeowners and local governments use to kill rats and mice.

Two experts who reviewed necropsy reports for the Tampa Bay Times said the poisons likely caused or contributed to the owls’ deaths, adding them to an ever-growing list of unintended victims harmed by the chemicals.

RELATED: Think you have a rodent problem, Tampa Bay? Here’s what to do.
Such poisons routinely sicken other animals, including pets and people, that eat contaminated rodents or come into contact with the baits directly. Yet the strongest substances remain popular and widely available because they quickly erase an expensive problem: uncontrolled rodent populations.

While the federal government and certain industries have maintained that poisons are essential tools, animal advocates question whether they create more problems than they solve. The chemicals interrupt a fragile food chain, killing predators that naturally feed on rodents like raptors, foxes and mountain lions.

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Source consulted / tampabay.com