The New York City Council on Thursday introduced a bill to protect the city’s wildlife — inspired by the death of Flaco the owl and other birds of prey sickened by eating poisoned rats.
“Flaco’s Law” would include changes to how the city mitigates its rat population, encouraging a different kind of birth control for the rodents — instead of poison.
Councilmember Shaun Abreu (D-Manhattan), who introduced the rat contraceptive bill, argued the city shouldn’t just keep pumping pesticide at the problem.
“We can’t poison our way out of this, we cannot kill our way out of this,” he said, noting the unintended consequences of using rodenticide — like a Rottweiler puppy who died after eating poison while walking in Washington Heights. The poison also contributes to untold animal deaths each year, including Flaco’s, THE CITY previously reported.
Under his proposed bill, the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene would work with the Department Sanitation to launch a pilot program to send out pellet-like contraceptives in the city’s “rat mitigation zones.” There would be at least two pilot program areas covering at least 10 city blocks and last at least half a year, per the bill.
The pellet would work better than other previously-used contraceptive methods, according to Abreu, who chairs the Council’s Committee on Sanitation and Solid Waste Management.
He pointed to other rat contraceptive attempts, like in Bryant Park recently, that weren’t that successful — but said the pellets would work better.
“It’s salty, it’s sweet, and it has fatty materials within it that attract rats,” he said. “They’ll bring that back to their burrow for other rats to eat.”
A spokesperson for the health department did not immediately return a request for comment. The agency hosts “rat academies” to teach rodent mitigation — offering one course for regular New Yorkers and an advanced class for professionals, according to their website.
Mayor Eric Adams has made ridding the city of rats one of his top priorities, dubbing it a key portion of what he’s called the “trash revolution” that includes containerizing all of the city’s garbage. This week, the city revealed it has selected a single company that homeowners will have to buy new branded garbage bins from.
The mayor’s office said it will review the Flaco’s Law legislation.
But the longstanding use of rodenticide — even as the city’s Parks Department restricts its use of the poison to certain times of the year and never when there are breeding Red-tailed hawks nearby — has had unintended consequences, mainly for wild animals and particularly birds.
Necropsies of wild animals showed that most of the birds that died of unnatural causes last year had rodenticide in their system, THE CITY reported in March.
Lights Out
Meanwhile, Flaco’s death also highlighted a second major cause of injury to New York’s feathered denizens: Buildings.
The Eurasian eagle-owl who became famous after escaping the Central Park Zoo either fell from or flew into a building on the Upper West Side in February but his necropsy later revealed he’d also been exposed to four anticoagulant rodenticides used to control rats in the city. He also “had a severe pigeon herpes virus” after eating pigeons sickened with that virus.
The city’s towering facades long posed a danger to birds, both those who live here and those who fly through as part of a migratory pattern.
Jessica Wilson, the executive director of NYC Audubon, said an estimated 250,000 birds die every year crashing into windows in buildings.
“There are really easy solutions, including making the windows in your building bird friendly and turning artificial light off at night,” she told THE CITY.
To that end, she and other advocates on Thursday pushed for an expansion of a 2021 law that requires all city-owned and operated buildings to turn their lights off at night, since birds get disoriented and fly into them. Broadening the law could require nearly every building in the city to go dark — not just public ones.
Another proposed bill would require buildings with reflective glass to put bird-friendly things like window details so a bird can see the difference between what’s in front of them and what’s a reflection.
“It would be a significant reduction in artificial light at night which is good for birds, but it’s also good for people,” said Wilson. “Reducing light at night is better for human health, for mental well being, and saves energy, too — it’s good for the climate.”