Board wants to ban rat poison in parks
Pest control employed by restaurants can be deadly to predator birds and pets
The Vancouver park board said Thursday it will ask its restaurant lease operators to stop using rodenticide in an effort to prevent secondary poisonings of other wildlife such as owls.
Howard Normann, director of park operations, said in an interview the park board is telling restaurants in city parks that the current bait boxes can stay, provided lethal snap-traps are inside.
The action follows a Postmedia News story in March revealing that parks are not refuges for wildlife, given the use of poison bait boxes around restaurants designed to keep a lid on rodent populations. The problem is, rodents eat the poison then leave, become sick and can be easily picked off by wild predators and domestic cats and dogs, who then get poisoned, too.
Normann said he wants to “start taking it in the direction of just moving toward traps and removing any poison at all ... removing any rodenticide from our sites. Go to the same boxes, but they’ll contain snap traps. I’d like that to go park-board wide.”
Currently park leases with restaurants require them to provide pest management, without stipulating how they do that. Normann said park staff are now asking those restaurants to specifically install snap traps in their poison bait boxes. As leases come up for renewal, the expectation is that the wording will be changed to reflect the new policy.
“Let’s start the process now and see how it works,” he said. “If any new restaurants come on line, we can build that in right away.”
He said he also understands that customers “don’t want to see a rat running around while you’re eating your dinner.”
If restaurants can show that the policy is resulting in undue extra costs, perhaps because pest-control companies must check the traps more frequently, then the park board will entertain the notion of taking those costs out of lease payments, which are based on a percentage of revenues, he said.
“We feel that would be a valid cost,” he said.
Rob Hope, raptor care manager at OWL rehab in South Delta, estimated that at least 100 owls brought to the facility last year showed signs of rodenticide poisoning. They were mostly barred owls but also some great horned owls. Almost all died. A few owls brought in early enough were saved with vitamin K injections.
Hope believes the impact of rodenticide on raptors is getting worse. “People are going for a quick, easy fix,” he said.
Metro Vancouver says it already does not use rodenticides in regional parks, reverting to snap traps or electrocution traps at concessions. Biologists with expertise on the effect of rodenticides on wildlife say that at a minimum, bait boxes — especially ones containing the second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides, including bromadialone — should be used strategically and not left out for weeks and months on end.
“Ideally, they wouldn’t be used in parks,” said Sofi Hindmarch, an independent biologist based in Langley who has extensively researched the issue.
“These are our green spaces. This is where a lot of our remaining wildlife is. It’s a contamination of the whole food chain.”
The hope is that if the park board shows leadership, then others, including businesses in the city and beyond, will follow suit.
Federal biologist John Elliott said first-generation anticoagulant rodenticides such as warfarin can be purchased by anyone, whereas second-generation products, which are more toxic to non-target birds and wildlife, are supposed to require trained applicators, although there are concerns that’s not always happening.
Mike Akres, CFO of Sequoia Company of Restaurants, which includes Seasons in the Park Restaurant at Queen Elizabeth Park and The Teahouse in Stanley Park, said he was unaware of the issue, but would discuss it with the company contracted for pest management.
“If it does come down from the park board, we’ll do whatever they require us to do,” he said.