DEATH SPIRAL
A half-century-old chemical has come back with a vengeance, for the express purpose of killing birds and other wildlife. The more officials investigate, the more crime scenes they uncover.
THE VICTIM LYING ON KEVIN HYNES’S STAINLESS-STEEL table on March 11, 2015, showed no obvious cause of death. There were no injuries indicating that she had been hit by a car or electrocuted—the usual killers. 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.
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. Her stomach contents showed that she had been fit enough to find a rabbit earlier that day. Scraps of sheep hair and skin at the back of her mouth provided a clue that a more recent meal had been cut short. Maybe she’d been poisoned, Hynes thought. He ordered a toxicology screening.
A couple of weeks later, the results revealed the culprit: carbofuran, a neurotoxic chemical that is one of history’s deadliest pesticides. A quarter teaspoon can kill a 400-pound bear in minutes. It’s especially lethal for birds. 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. “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. “When an animal is exposed, it goes into convulsions and respiratory failure. It’s an excruciating death.”
Carbofuran was pulled from the U.S. market in 2009, but it didn’t disappear. People here and elsewhere—including in many countries
