Paul Bass Photo
Instead of scampering freely through the yards of West Rock Avenue, this squirrel ended up in a freezer. He wasn’t the first.
Something’s killing critters in lower Westville. The city’s health department isn’t sure quite what.
Two initial suspects: d-CON baits or antifreeze put in a neighbor’s lawn to ward off animals.
But those are just working theories.
Word of mysterious bloodless animal deaths started spreading through the neighborhood three weeks ago.
Mary Hadley came across three separate morning doves lying dead on sidewalks within a block of her Burton Street home.
Then a grackle turned up on a walkway on the side of her house.
“None of the feathers looked messed with,” Hadley recalled. “The bird looked perfectly fine. Except it was dead.”
Hadley considered putting the bird in her freezer and calling the city’s health department. Instead, she left it on the sidewalk—where other animals apparently dined on the carcass. She wishes she had gone with her first instinct.
Around the corner, on Central Avenue, Sarah Forman did call the city when intact dead squirrels started appearing on her property. She found six within a week.
The city’s health department took two of the dead critters and placed them in a freezer at the department’s 54 Meadow St. offices. Officials contacted the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, and the state’s agriculture department. None would do a test on the animals for free. And the city didn’t have money to pay for a test.
Senior city sanitarian Brian Wnek wrote back to Forman that he had discussed the issue with a DEP official.
“One thought was starvation,” he reported. “However, last fall saw a bumper crop of acorns, so there’s less chance that they starved to death.”
Then the DEP official asked Wnek to check the squirrels for any sign of blood “around the mouth or anal cavity,” Wnek wrote to Forman. “The presence of blood in these areas could indicate that the squirrels have been poisoned by rat bait (d-CON Baits or any other rodent baits) or by anti-freeze (both of these products have been used in the past (not legally) by neighbors who have had problems with animals in their back yards. The sad part is that it may not be a neighbor who lives close by. These animals, as you know, can travel long distances to find food sources).”
Wnek returned to the freezer—and saw some blood in the spots in question. He therefore told Forman that “one of my best guesses” is that “rat poison or other toxic ingestion” killed the squirrels. “My advice would be to speak with anyone in the neighborhood to see if they had any rodent issues and if they are using a bait product.”
Forman forwarded Wnek’s email message to neighbors, and asked if others had made finds similar to hers.
Arnold Gorlick and Thuy Pham-Lewis (pictured) did. They live on West Rock Avenue; their yard backs onto Forman’s. On Monday they found their third unmutilated, dead squirrel in their driveway. They double-wrapped the latest carcass (pictured at the top of the story) in plastic and stored it in the kitchen freezer.
They reported that a neighbor did spray a tree recently. Another neighbor noticed a “large black bird” hovering in a yard — raising fears that scavengers might pick up and transmit toxins from the squirrels.
Gorlick (who runs the Madison Arts Cinemas) spoke to people who care for his lawn, who assured him they use only “harmless” materials. He planned to follow up to learn the specific ingredients.
“They did say that this tends to happen this time of year due to annual tree-spraying. The point being that is where the squirrels live — in the trees,” Gorlick wrote in an email message to Wnek. “On the other hand, this is the first time in my 15 years here that I have noticed this pattern. What should I do with my dead squirrel? Is it of use to you and the Health Dept.?”
At this point, the health department isn’t sure what to do next, but it wants to keep an eye on the situation, according to Environmental Health Director Paul Kowalski. He couldn’t recall a squirrel “die-off” like this one. (He hadn’t known about the birds.)
“Once in a while we hear about baby squirrels falling out of a nest. But not full-grown squirrels at different times,” Kowalksi said.
“In the past we dealt with bird die-off. Certain trees in the city, for a week there’d be dead birds underneath it. That’s how we found out West Nile virus was in this town. When the natural balance of things is disturbed we like to know about it.”
Kowalski said that “seven squirrels in a two or three-house area” don’t concern him too much. His concern is more are dying around town. If so, he wants to know. He vowed to “put more pressure on the DEP to come down here and see what’s going on” if there’s more to see.
7 Dead Squirrels is a problem? Slow news day? We live in a country that aborts 1.2 million babies each year while a whole neighborhood gets in an uproar about a couple dead squirrels?