Protecting Raptors from Rodenticides

摘要

Rats and mice have been pests throughout recorded history. They eat and contaminate food, and help transmit human diseases, including plague. Pest management as a profession started with rats and mice, and they are common elements in literature and inour cultural history. Who can forget The Plague by Albert Camus, or the Pied Piper ofHamlein folktale? (Corrigan 1997). The best way to control rodents is by combining sanitation, exclusion, habitat management, and traps in an integrated control program. (See the second article in this issue.) This combination can work well for structures, but urban conditions can lead to rats breeding in sewers, vacant lots and other situations. Public health requires control, and often, resources to provide urban cleanup and integrated management are not available (Olkowski et al. 1991). As a last resort, poison baits have been used to reduce rat populations. Poison has also been used for voles, gophers, prairie dogs, ground squirrels and other such pests (Hygnstrom et al. 1994).