Hello Robert,
I wonder if I could impose on you to post something on your blog for me regarding bird information. Here, in NC, we have an incident of what we believe to be poisonings of song birds. Nice, folks, huh? I park in a parking lot in downtown Raleigh (capital city) and we have been finding little piles of saltine crackers with some blue substance either smeared or dribbled onto the crackers. We believe that this is an effort to poison birds that sit in these trees and, naturally, occasionally poop on the cars beneath them. I have called in our state Pesticide investigative personnel, but they've never seen anything like this and the lab does not have the capability of testing for just any substance, so if we have some sort of lead, something someone else has encountered or seen to point us in the direction of what kind of substance this is, would be very helpful. We have racked our brains and just can't come up with anything that would be of a benign nature that is this color that anyone could be putting out for the birds. There has been some heated discussion in years past among some of the patrons of this parking lot pertaining to the yearly and seasonal presence of cedar waxwings that come through about this time of year in flocks and feast on berries on the downtown landscape trees. I think it is extremely coincidental that these mysterious crackers would appear just at the time these birds come through this year. Any help you or your readers could offer would be just wonderful.
Kathy
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Kathy Imbriani
Laboratory Research Specialist
NCDA & CS
Plant Industry Division
216 W. Jones St.
Raleigh, NC 27603
Mailing Address:
1060 Mail Service Center
Raleigh, NC 27699
919-733-3930 x 225
kathy.imbriani@ncmail.net