A waterfowl hunter on Virginia’s Eastern Shore will spend a day in jail and pay thousands of dollars in fines after he admitted to killing more than 20 bald eagles and hawks on his property. The reason he was doing it? He wanted to stop them from hunting the waterfowl he intended to take for himself.
The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources (DWR) Conservation Police spent two years investigating the case after they received a tip that someone was trapping and poisoning hawks and eagles during the 2023-2024 waterfowl season. Conservation Police Master Officer Brian Batton worked together with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the investigation. Batton and an agent found traps and multiple hawk and eagle carcasses to confirm the tip.
On the suspect’s property, they discovered a pole trap the property owner used to attract birds of prey, which would snare them when they landed. When Bratton and the agent spotted a juvenile bald eagle’s carcass on the ground, they suspected the bird had been poisoned with a banned pesticide. “This particular poison acts so quickly that nine times out of ten when an eagle or hawk eats something, they die with whatever they’re eating still in their claws,” Bratton said. “They have just a certain look about them, the body posture. Once you’ve seen it once or twice, you can almost tell that’s what to suspect.”
The bald eagle carcass was tested at a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service lab and confirmed to have been poisoned with carbofuran (also known as Furadan). Before the granular form of carbofuran was banned in 1991, the pesticide killed more than a million birds in the United States. Sometimes, the birds of prey mistook the granular pesticide for grain seeds, other times, they ate animals who had already consumed the poisonous substance. A liquid version was banned in 2009.
The Chesapeake Bay region has still had issues with carbofuran in recent years, however. In 2019, we reported on cases of eagles and an owl being poisoned across Maryland’s Kent and Talbot counties. In those cases, Fish & Wildlife Service and Maryland Department of Natural Resources believed whomever was putting out the poison-laced bait was not targeting eagles, but instead “nuisance animals” like foxes or raccoons. The poison is so powerful that birds of prey can be poisoned secondarily.
In the case on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, the defendant admitted he intentionally killed more than 20 bald eagles and red-shouldered and red-tailed hawks.
“[The defendant had] built a small waterfowl impoundment on his property,” Bratton says. “He’s a big duck hunter, and he was in the process of trying to really get it going [and attract ducks]…We’re fairly familiar with the guy. We’d dealt with him before on some waterfowl violations.”
In interviews with investigators, the man turned over a can of carbofuran and explained that he was poisoning the hawks and eagles because they were killing all the ducks he was attracting to his impoundment. In the late winter, when hawks are migrating through, the food supply gets short, so the birds of prey were searching for food and became easy targets for his trap.
The federal Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act provides criminal penalties for people who “take, possess, sell, purchase, barter, offer to sell, purchase or barter, transport, export or import, at any time or any manner, any bald eagle … [or any golden eagle], alive or dead, or any part (including feathers), nest, or egg thereof.”
The hunter’s actions were in violation of that federal law. Bratton explains, “He was very aware it was illegal, but in his mind, the ends justified the means, because he’s getting rid of the predatory birds to protect the ducks.”
Dr. Bryan Watts, founder and director of The Center for Conservation Biology, has conducted numerous studies about threats to the Chesapeake’s birds of prey. He says a mindset like this hunter’s hearkens back to the misconceptions of the late 1800s and early 1900s. “This particular case is a throwback to a different time. There was a period of time when states were providing bounties for killing birds of prey,” he tells us. “We learned from those things and we don’t want to go back to that type of thinking—protecting the prey from predators. Hopefully our society has moved beyond that by now. It’s why we have laws to protect these species… that type of action is just wrong, and we’ve learned that over time.,” says Watts.
Targeting birds of prey could also wreak havoc on the environment. Watts says that apex predators like eagles and hawks play an important role in shaping the ecosystem. There are several trophic levels (levels of the food chain) below them whose populations need to be kept in check.
The investigation into the eagle and hawk deaths wrapped up at the end of March, with the U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case. The man, who DWR is not naming, was sentenced to one day in jail, two years of probation, and nearly $10,000 in fines.
Ultimately, Bratton is glad the poisonings were investigated and the case closed before even more harm could be done. “That many hawks and eagles is pretty significant, so I feel like it’s a win for protecting the resource from further loss,” he says.
