It’s been more than a decade since Lisa Owens Viani started to wonder what was killing the birds in Berkeley.
Raptors — birds of prey like owls and hawks — were turning up bleeding on the sidewalk and in kiddie pools. Necropsies of two Cooper’s hawks found blood-thinning rat poisons in their systems, a highly toxic substance that birds of prey can accidentally ingest by eating poisoned rats.
“I knew there was something wrong with that picture, which is why I had the bodies tested,” Owens Viani said. “An animal that could normally survive some kind of minor wound will often just bleed out from a little thing because the poisons cause so much hemorrhaging.”…