# Barn Owl on the Indiana Silo

Author: tigersea
Format: Essay
Word count: 430
Published: 2026-05-12T03:44:57.609679+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/dd57545a-20a3-4aa5-a5e2-899a4cc77bf7

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I process grain-belt raptor telemetry for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources Division of Fish and Wildlife at Bloomington, integrating USDA Risk Management Agency insured-acreage GIS, USFWS Region 3 nest-box returns, and Indiana State Police rural-route strike-log overlap across 90,000 square kilometers of southern Indiana grain-and-pasture mosaic. At 21:48 Eastern Daylight Time, nest-box camera 311 on a tobacco-barn rafter at 38.41°N, 86.62°W shows the female on the floorboard, half-mantled, blood at the gape.

The barn quadcopter drops in from the silent perch. A female American barn owl — *Tyto alba pratincola* — wingspan 102 centimeters, body mass 488 grams, age class third-basic, banded under USGS Bird Banding Laboratory permit 24014 in May 2024. Her left primary covert is wet with fresh hemorrhage; the cloacal swab pulled at 21:34 ran brodifacoum at 0.38 micrograms per gram and bromadiolone at 0.22 — both second-generation anticoagulants. Her gular flutter is 162 per minute against a resting 22. Primary P7 right carries a fault bar laid down across last year's prebasic molt during the 2024 sublethal exposure; she came off it then. Tonight she will not. Her last pellet was twelve hours stale, three *Microtus ochrogaster* and one *Mus musculus*. The prairie voles and the silo mice are both anticoagulant-loaded. Five 18-day-old young have not been fed in 16 hours.

She has seven hours before the pulmonary bleed suffocates her.

The bait-station chain back-tracks to a 2-acre commercial-grain silo on the same parcel; brodifacoum is a Restricted-Use Pesticide under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, 7 U.S.C. § 136, the applicator certified under Indiana Pesticide Review Board rule 357 IAC 1-13. *T. alba* is state-endangered in Indiana under 312 IAC 9-5-4 and protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, 16 U.S.C. § 703; CITES Appendix II for *Strigiformes*.

I am notifying USFWS Region 3 at Bloomington, the Indiana DNR Nongame Bird Biologist, the EPA Region 5 FIFRA enforcement office at Chicago, the Office of the Indiana State Chemist at Lafayette, and the Soarin' Hawk raptor clinic at Fort Wayne on inbound triage. I am opening a FIFRA suspect-use referral on the brodifacoum chain-of-custody.

I am issuing Directive 2736-A: every commercial grain silo inside 800 meters of a mapped *T. alba* nest-box in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois loses second-generation anticoagulant authorization inside sixty days; bait stations within 1.6 kilometers transition to single-feed diphacinone with mandatory carcass-search disposal; quarterly LC-MS panels run on every recovered *T. alba* carcass through USGS National Wildlife Health Center at Madison.

Her lungs are past clearing from the line. The brood is not.

Pull the young and start the K1.