Stop Wildlife Poisoning

Category: Pesticides, carbofuran | Date: Jun 19 2008 | By: Martin Odino

Hi, I am Martin Odino. I just joined Wildlife Direct to coordinate and work with WD’s Furadan Task Force. I have been collecting information on furadan use, distribution and legislation of the chemical in certain parts of Kenya and the local regulatory agency respectively. I am still collecting information on furadan use, cases of its abuse (dominated by deliberate poisoning) for puposes of documenting the current scenario as concerns the chemical’s significance to biodiversity conservation efforts. Kindly share with me such information on the email address: martinchael@gmail.com. This will be greatly appreciated and will go a long way towards contributing to the advocacy for our animals faced with the risk of furadan poisoning.

The following is a real tale of the mastery that furadan has assumed through empowerment by man to enslave and kill biodiversity from my last survey in May 2008.

The Bunyala irrigation scheme is a source of livelihood to natives of Bunyala in Busia district,Kenya. The rice growing irrigation scheme is also particularly attractive to birds which come to feed on the cereal and other lifeforms that come with the flood waters. At least 98 species of birds are recorded in and around the irrigation field. Other wild biodiversity seen during my four day survey includes wild cats, monitor lizards and snakes.

Though a focal point for the struggle for life sustenance by two obvious forms of biodiversity -man and birds, another latent scenario becomes apparent when you walk through the irrigation field and pick up carcases of the latter.Bait in form of rice grains laced by furadan are behind these deaths.

Just a few hundred meters from the irrigation field, in some homesteds of people generally regarded as bird hunters, captive Open-billed Storks are tethered to reeds, pegs or even on some poles in the houses. These subjects were baited using snails with furadan. They were then quickly given water which spared them from death but condemned them to captivity. These captive storks are used to raise alarm calls to conspecific individuals who then fly down to them. Meanwhile the hunters have scattered about the calling storks molluscs(snails) which have furadan skillfully put in the snails’ shell cavities while still leaving the snails in the shells. The in flying storks get distracted by the snails about their captive coleague and settle on the easy,ready meal oblivious of the killer furadan in the baiting snails’ shells. In a few minutes, the graceful birds lose their gait, becoming disoriented in movement and their flight ability is totally impaired. The eager hunters then come upon them with sizeable sticks to maim the individuals that are still strong before collecting their catch for sell to the waiting l0cal market.

But the poisoning work of furadan does not end here. Some very lucky birds manage to escape into the bushes or even fly (for smaller-sized species) to low trees. There is evidence of undisposed, dicomposing, escapee birds on low trees, in bushes and on the grass plains. But just how many of these runaways and carcases are not eaten by other predators and scavengers?I hope none, though I know there are at least some that are eaten and with the furadan still potent in their crops, the predators and scavengers also end up being poisoned.