Owls, Rats, Refuge for All
I met Hoo-dini, a great-horned owl and love-child of Muppets Bert and Statler, at the Woodford Cedar Run Wildlife Refuge in Medford, New Jersey the other day. Perched behind his woody shelter, he bored his lazily blinking eyes into mine. As one of Hoo-dini’s eyelids retracted a bit slower than the other, he was constantly winking at me, the feathery old flirt.
For most of his life Hoo-dini has been in the care of the wildlife refuge. In 2010, he fell from a tree as a fledgling, suffering a wing fracture he never recovered from. Still, the great Hoo-dini’s innate owl stealthiness prevailed—earning his namesake after “escaping” from his equipment during training. Sneaky magician.
Official portrait of Hoo-dini, 📸 Cecil Taylor Photo
My blurry shot of Hoo-dini, boring into my soul at the Woodford Cedar Run Wildlife Refuge, 📸 March 2025
I was a big fan of Hoodi. And the Woodford Cedar Run Wildlife Refuge. It was a lovely way to spend an afternoon in the Pinelands, with so many wonderful rescued animals like Luna, a barred owl, Ember the red fox, Bradley the Cooper’s Hawk (yes, they did), Hekyll & Jekyll—two 35-year-old turkey vultures—and sweet little Henry, an albino northern cardinal.
Due to physical impairments (e.g. hit by a car, fell out of a tree) and human imprinting (i.e. people kept them as pets), none of the animals at the wildlife refuge were capable of surviving in the wild on their own. I was gutted learning about Utley, a spritely canada goose, raised by humans who improperly fed her, causing a wing deformity known as “angel wing”. Now Utley’s feathers permanently stick out at an unnatural angle, making her flightless.
Luna, the dainty-yet-spooky barred owl at the Woodford Cedar Run Wildlife Refuge, 📸 March 2025
The shit nature endures and dies for at the expense of humans is fucking senseless. Seeing so many impaired birds at the wildlife refuge reminded me of Flaco, the darling Central Park Zoo eagle-owl who boldly escaped in February of 2023 only to die three weeks later from noxious New York City rats. Flaco’s necropsy confirmed harmful levels of rodenticide in his system.
But rats, filthy and flighty as they may be, weren’t to blame for Flaco’s death. No, that honor went to the humans stuffing the rats with poison, thereby totally fucking up the food chain. Rodenticide has been a known danger to wildlife for decades. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Wildlife Unit detected rat poisons flowing through 84% of dead birds of prey found across New York City.
Flaco the eagle-owl, 📸 Central Park Zoo
Despite the increased use of rodenticides—75,749 pounds of it dispersed in 2022 alone, New York City saw three million rats in 2023, up from 2 million in 2010. So we know rat poison isn’t effective. Yet we continue to use it. Wildlife continues to suffer and die. Rats, too, which feels extra gratuitous given their sacrifice has been in vain, doing nothing to curtail the population problem. Senseless.
Like many of their human counterparts, New York City rats are smart, resilient, and intimidating as fuck. They can leap up to four feet sideways, drop down from five stories, and tread water for days. They also have the potential to produce 15,000 descendants in a single year. It’s no wonder rodenticide doesn’t do shit.
Times Square rat, 📸 AP Photo/Richard Drew, File
Fortunately, there is good news for the city and its feathery and furry inhabitants. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Department of Sanitation have teamed up with the biotechnology company SenesTech to implement a rat contraception pilot program. Birth control for rats that sterilizes both males and females and comes in the form of salty, fatty pellets (yum?!). The best part is it’s safe for both rats and surrounding wildlife. A real win-win.
The pilot launched earlier this year and is expected to run at least 12 months in two of the city's four "rat mitigation zones"—Bronx Grand Concourse, Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant/Bushwick, and East Village/Chinatown.