How can we lower the rodent population in a humane way, but keep the owl community thriving?

At first it was the bold, haunting image that caught me.
I merely glanced at the advertisement: the somewhat magnified photo of a raptor’s
large amber orb of eyes and the dark, lifeless varmint in its beak declaring,
“You call them rodents. We call them dinner.”

In that moment I took the ad to suggest we should not kill
rats and other pests in order for the owl community in Malibu to survive. This
intuitively suggests an imbalance of nature might take place as we annihilate
the 27 mile stretch of rodents, thus potentially starving out the owl
population. I love owls, I appreciate them, I like the way they hunt, and I
want them to be active rat catchers. I also believe in owl houses to make their
job as hunters more efficient. I honor their magical qualities as well
as their mystic presence much in the way the Indians do.

But who likes rats? I know someone who has a pet rat.
My friend said her pet is much like a dog, responds to its’ name and likes to
have its tummy rubbed. But the pet rat gets sick alot and my friend gives it medicine.

When I think of rats I imagine a scourge of these little
beasts known to spread diseases such as salmonellosis, fowl cholera, and
bubonic plague scampering up our craggy cliffs, across our orchards, up into
our eaves, and scratching between our walls. BTW: plagues still exist and have
been accounted for in Asia, New Zealand and Australia where one afternoon a
farmer had to kill 70,000 rats. I read in a recent New York Times article that
ten owl families living in a barn in Florida “cleared the surrounding sugarcane
field of 25,000 rats a year.” Hello! Rats can thrive. 

Obviously rodent control is not just a local issue.

According to
an animal behavior research group out of England, “…it has been estimated that
between a fifth and a third of the world’s food supply never reaches the table
because of losses to rodents.”  You like
cute little house mice? Good, because there are plenty of them. It is said they
are the largest mammal population on earth. And they will gnaw away at your foodstuffs
faster than you can say, “pass me a Dorito.”

Amidst these cheeky ruminations I return to the
advertisement and on closer inspection realize the thrust of this paid for
message is an appeal to humanely treat rodents by encouraging the reader to
refrain from using poison products to kill them. The owl in the ad states, “I
prefer my meals poison free.  Please stop
using poison products.”

Fair enough, and very clear, and even perhaps
charming. I apologize if I have appeared coarse, but because their numbers
suggest rodents know how to exponentially multiply, I prefer extermination
thru innovative and creative control methods. I have weighed the "risks" versus the "benefits" and I think dogs, snap traps and raptors are the best way to go. But, if that doesn't work ( better to hire a professional here), you might want to consider  a bait ( compressed grain wafers) and a bait box. The wafer should contain 1/2 oz to 1 ounce of "rodenticide"  called "contac." It only takes that much to kill an average size rat.  According to the professionals who make a study of "rodent control" it takes up to 15% of an animals body weight to get a lethal dose. 

Oh yeah, did I mention "sticky boards" which does away
with roughly 20 million rodents per year in England?  Look it up.

Back to the ad which  asks us to play nice, and to consider animal
welfare and the unintentional death to creatures who coexist as part of the Malibu food chain.  Unfortunately using poison as a pest control method proves to be a risk to
“non target” creatures, which in this case  is the owl. 

Having lived most of my life in the city until I moved
to Malibu, I never had the thrill, or the experience to listen to and track the
screech owl’s sharp cry, nor the barn owl’s murmuring “who who.” Like so many
Malibu residents I too have imagined the owl’s mystical presence. The owl
enchants.

The American Indian glorifies the owl as a shamanistic
creature, and I appreciate and find comfort in this mythology. In that magical
place the owl has other worldly affiliations, symbolically noted with one eye
closed and one eye open—thus referring to a presence in both the afterlife and
the life we live now.

Multiple generations of owls have returned to the
eucalyptus, sycamores and ravine outside what is now my window for hundreds of
years, maybe even in the “before” alongside the Chumash Indians who thrived
here.

However, I am still left with the notion that I am punishing
the raptor by sweeping away the kill that is the component of its food supply. This pains me, but in
truth, I have little concern the local raptor population does not have enough
to eat. I trust that varmints of multiple varieties thrive in our local
ravines, brush, canyons and holes. 

There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t see hawks
flying over PCH, the hiking trails, or the fields. As the hawk lives, so does
the falcon, the osprey, the owl. If these raptors experience a dearth of
carrion here, why wouldn’t they migrate somewhere that would provide a veritable
cornucopia for their brood?  You might
say I believe in this basic tenant of migratory pattern and evolution. For now
they are happy in Malibu.