The research, led by Santiago Zuluaga of the Spanish National Research Council together with F. Hernán Vargas of The Peregrine Fund and Juan M. Grande of Argentina’s Colaboratorio de Biodiversidad, Ecología y Conservación, tackles a long-standing blind spot in conservation science. Scientists have a well-developed framework for describing nature’s contributions to people, or NCP, the umbrella term covering everything from pollination and waste removal to spiritual inspiration. For large mammals such as wolves, bears, and ungulates, researchers have extensively mapped both the benefits these animals provide and the conflicts they generate. Raptors, by contrast, have been studied almost exclusively through an ecological lens, with far less attention paid to the social and cultural dimensions of how people live alongside them.

To close that gap, the team designed an online survey targeting raptor conservation professionals across the globe. The questionnaire was built around eleven categories of beneficial contributions and eight categories of detrimental contributions and conflicts, drawing on established frameworks from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and on earlier work with terrestrial carnivores. The survey was distributed in September 2019 through the World Working Group on Birds of Prey and Owls, the Raptor Research Foundation, The Peregrine Fund, regional raptor networks, and specialized social media groups, and remained open until January 2020, when the researchers closed it to avoid the uncontrollable influence of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic on responses.

Seventy-six experts from 31 countries ultimately participated, ranging from naturalists and ecologists to veterinarians and social scientists. Half held doctoral degrees, and the respondents’ ages spanned 23 to 77 years. The geographic spread leaned heavily toward Europe, North and Central America, and South America, with Africa, Asia, and Oceania underrepresented—a limitation the authors acknowledge. Participants answered separate questionnaires for four raptor groups: hawks and eagles, vultures, owls, and falcons. The researchers then analyzed how many of the assessed contribution items each expert recognized for each group, treating the data with a binomial mixed model that accounted for repeated responses from the same individuals.

The headline finding is that all four raptor groups were perceived to deliver substantially more benefits than harms. Owls emerged as the most beneficial group, with experts agreeing on 72 percent of their assessed beneficial contributions, followed by vultures at 54 percent, while falcons and the hawks-and-eagles group each reached 45 percent. On the detrimental side, hawks and eagles and falcons were the most implicated, each with expert agreement on a quarter of the assessed conflict items, compared with just one item in eight for vultures and owls. Hawks and eagles thus earned the label of the most controversial raptors: they were recognized as providing a high proportion of both benefits and conflicts, a duality that mirrors their real-world position as apex predators living alongside farmers and hunters.

Some individual contributions stood out with remarkable clarity. A striking 96 percent of experts identified disease-risk reduction as a benefit provided by vultures, reflecting the well-documented role of these obligate scavengers in removing carcasses that would otherwise harbor pathogens. Nearly as many, 92 percent, credited vultures with removing organic waste, an ecosystem service whose economic value has been estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars following catastrophic vulture declines in South Asia. Owls earned strong recognition for reducing species that cause human injury and death and for boosting agricultural output by preying on rodent pests. By contrast, some contributions flew under the radar: fewer than a fifth of experts recognized raptors as seed dispersers, and only about a third acknowledged their role in providing materials for crafts and traditional cultural practices.

The conflict patterns proved more group-specific than the benefits. Experts overwhelmingly associated hawks and eagles with predation on domestic livestock, at 63 percent agreement, and with competition with hunters for wild prey, at 53 percent. Falcons were similarly linked to livestock predation and to mistrust between decision-makers and local communities. Vultures were chiefly associated with misunderstanding among stakeholders over their management, while owls were most strongly tied to fear, with 63 percent of experts recognizing this detrimental contribution—a nod to deeply rooted beliefs in some societies that owls portend death and disaster, and to their persecution as vermin even where legal protection exists.

Beyond the bird-by-bird accounting, the study uncovered two factors that shape how experts themselves perceive raptors. First, experts who believed that an interdisciplinary approach—combining biological and social sciences—is more effective for raptor conservation recognized significantly higher proportions of both beneficial and detrimental contributions than those favoring a purely disciplinary, biology-only approach. This held true even though only 2 percent of respondents identified as social scientists, suggesting that the field’s practitioners increasingly appreciate that saving raptors requires understanding human behavior, livelihoods, and governance, not just ecology. Second, and perhaps more provocatively, women experts recognized significantly more of both the benefits and the conflicts than their male counterparts. Women made up fewer than a third of respondents, consistent with documented gender imbalances across conservation science, including the finding that women hold only about 29 percent of editorial board seats in biodiversity conservation journals.

The gender result carries practical weight. Prior research stretching back to the 1980s has shown that men and women wildlife professionals hold systematically different views on wildlife values and management, and that gender-diverse teams tend to produce more creative solutions and better decisions. The new findings extend that logic to raptor conservation: if women perceive a broader spectrum of raptor contributions and conflicts, then gender-balanced teams are more likely to capture the full picture needed for effective management. The authors argue that removing barriers to women’s participation in raptor conservation would be a win-win, improving both equity and the quality of conservation outcomes.

The study also sounds a cautionary note about what happens when conflicts are ignored. Poorly managed human–raptor conflicts can escalate into human–human conflicts over wildlife management, as documented in disputes over raptors and grouse moors in Scotland and in persecution of harpy eagles and Andean condors in the Neotropics. For vultures, the experts marginally disagreed on whether these scavengers prey on livestock, with 46 percent agreement—yet overlooking that local-scale predation, the authors contend, may inadvertently fuel the very stakeholder misunderstandings that make vulture conservation so contested. Conversely, some contributions are so culturally embedded that they cut both ways: vultures are poached for belief-based uses in West Africa and South America, while in Mumbai the same birds are actively valued for their role in Zoroastrian funerary practice. Because many such contributions and conflicts are deeply context-dependent, and because basic data are lacking for many of the world’s 561 raptor species, the authors argue that structured expert-knowledge assessments like this one will be indispensable for mapping raptor contributions at regional and national scales—and that the gender and disciplinary perspectives of the experts consulted should be deliberately considered when doing so.

Subject of Research: Expert assessment of raptors' beneficial and detrimental contributions to people and associated human–raptor conflicts worldwide

Article Title: Raptors’ contributions to people and human–raptor conflicts worldwide: an expert assessment

Article References: Zuluaga, S., Vargas, F. H., & Grande, J. M. (2026). Raptors’ contributions to people and human–raptor conflicts worldwide: an expert assessment. Frontiers in Bird Science, 5, Article 1819176. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbirs.2026.1819176

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fbirs.2026.1819176

Keywords: raptors, birds of prey, nature's contributions to people, human–wildlife conflict, vultures, owls, eagles, falcons, ecosystem services, conservation science, interdisciplinarity, gender bias

The birds in the study were not killed for research. All 24 cadavers arrived opportunistically between June 2022 and November 2023, a window that coincided with regional mouse infestations. Some were donated by the university’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital after being euthanised for medical reasons, while others were roadkill collected during unrelated fieldwork. Ten raptor species and one nightjar were represented, with Eastern Barn Owls dominating the sample at ten individuals, followed by three Australian Boobook Owls. Two Wedge-tailed Eagles, two Black-shouldered Kites, a Peregrine Falcon, a Powerful Owl, a Grey Goshawk, a Brown Goshawk, a Nankeen Kestrel, a Black Kite and a Tawny Frogmouth rounded out the list. Thirteen birds were male, ten female and one of undetermined sex; fourteen were adults and ten immature.

The analytical centrepiece of the study was liquid chromatography mass spectrometry, or LC-MS, performed at the CSIRO Ecosciences Precinct in Brisbane. Because decay alters the water content of tissue, the researchers homogenised and freeze-dried liver samples before extraction, then used a multi-step process involving formic acid, cold acetonitrile and lipid-removal cartridges to isolate the rodenticide residues. The instrument, an Agilent 6546 liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer, ran in a data-independent mode called quadrupole-resolved all-ions analysis, screening for eight rodenticides including warfarin, brodifacoum, difethialone, flocoumafen, bromadiolone, difenacoum, coumatetralyl and pindone. Calibration curves spanning 0.01 to 1,000 parts per billion achieved correlation coefficients between 0.9683 and 0.9971, and quality-control samples spiked with known concentrations of the compounds verified the method’s accuracy across low, mid and high ranges.

The results were striking. Thirteen of the 24 birds, just over half, tested positive for rodenticides registered for use in Australia. The most frequently detected compound was warfarin, a first-generation anticoagulant, found in eleven birds. Second-generation anticoagulants, which are far more toxic and persistent, also appeared: brodifacoum in three samples, difethialone in one and flocoumafen in one. Three birds carried warfarin alongside a second-generation compound, meaning they had been exposed to multiple poisons. Perhaps most telling, only six of the thirteen rodenticide-positive birds had rodent remains in their digestive tracts at the time of death. The researchers interpret this as evidence that the poisons can bioaccumulate in liver tissue over time, lingering from past meals of poisoned prey rather than reflecting a single recent exposure.

None of the detected concentrations reached the lethal dose thresholds established for other bird species. Brodifacoum levels in the Barn Owls and a Wedge-tailed Eagle fell below the reported oral LD50 range for owls of 0.15 to 9.68 milligrams per kilogram, and the difethialone concentration in the Tawny Frogmouth, 0.1 milligrams per kilogram, sat below the LD50 values of 0.26 to 23.4 milligrams per kilogram documented for Bobwhite, Japanese Quail and Mallard. Warfarin concentrations were similarly far below the 525 to 2,150 milligrams per kilogram lethal range reported for those same test species. But sublethal does not mean harmless. Second-generation anticoagulants are highly lipid-soluble and resist metabolic breakdown, and brodifacoum has been shown to cause persistent coagulopathy in birds for up to eleven days even at doses below the lethal threshold.

The clinical consequences of such exposure can be subtle but deadly. Birds suffering sublethal anticoagulant toxicosis have been documented to show lethargy, reduced agility and wing droop, impairments that degrade hunting performance and spatial navigation. For a fast-flying owl hunting at night, a momentary lapse in coordination can be fatal in a different way: collision with a vehicle. Twelve of the fifteen birds in the study showing traumatic injuries were found on roadsides, and the authors suggest that some of these roadkill birds may have been compromised by sublethal poisoning before they ever met a car. Peak coagulopathy after a single lethal ingestion typically occurs one to four days later, and after sublethal ingestion the effects may take even longer to manifest, widening the window of vulnerability.

Disentangling poisoning from trauma is one of the study’s central methodological challenges. Internal bleeding looks much the same whether it stems from a blunt impact or a drug-induced failure of the clotting cascade, and decomposition or scavenging can destroy clots that would otherwise distinguish the two. Ten birds showed haemocoelom, a coelomic cavity filled with uncoagulated blood, and in six of those there were no grossly obvious external signs of trauma such as fractures or lacerations. Yet only four of the ten haemocoelom cases were rodenticide-positive, and the statistical association between anticoagulant presence and postmortem evidence of coagulopathy was not significant. Alternative causes of bleeding disorders complicate the picture further: three birds carried low-burden apicomplexan parasites consistent with avian malaria, two had chronic enteritis with coccidian oocysts possibly of the genus Goussia, and heavy metal toxicity and bacterial infections such as salmonellosis can produce similar pathology in wild raptors.

One statistically significant pattern did emerge, and it concerned age. Immature birds were significantly more likely to carry higher brodifacoum concentrations than adults, a correlation with an f-value of 5.15 and a p-value of 0.03. The authors offer several non-exclusive explanations: inexperienced young hunters may target weakened, poisoned prey more readily; older birds may metabolise or eliminate the compound more efficiently or simply have longer intervals between exposures; or heavily affected juveniles may never survive to adulthood at all. The researchers caution, however, that the small sample size and a confidence interval hovering near zero mean the finding should be treated as a hypothesis generator rather than a settled conclusion. Species-level dietary differences add another layer of complexity, since rodent specialists such as Barn Owls and Black-shouldered Kites face theoretically higher exposure risk than bird-eating specialists like goshawks.

The conservation stakes extend beyond the species examined, all of which are currently listed as Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The Powerful Owl, despite its global status, numbers only an estimated 2,200 to 2,800 mature individuals, and the Grey Goshawk is estimated at fewer than 10,000 birds with a declining trend and Endangered classification in several Australian states. Sublethal poisoning that reduces foraging success, body condition and reproductive output, effects documented in vulture studies in the Pacific Northwest, could push such populations toward localised declines long before outright poisoning deaths register. Australian raptor populations remain poorly studied overall, making it difficult to assess how much hidden damage rodenticides are doing.

The study’s most policy-relevant finding may be its challenge to current Australian guidelines, which favour first-generation rodenticides such as warfarin over second-generation products on the assumption that they break down faster in rodents and pose less secondary risk. Warfarin was, after all, the most common residue in these Queensland birds. The authors point instead to coumatetralyl, another first-generation anticoagulant regarded as safer for predatory birds: mammals are generally more sensitive to it than birds, allowing lower effective doses, and while warfarin resistance has been documented in Australian rodents, no coumatetralyl resistance has yet been recorded there. The team calls for physiological studies of exposed raptors, rodent toxicity testing to track resistance, and surveys of rodenticide users to map what, how much and how often is being deployed. Until then, the poisons meant for mice appear to be quietly accumulating in the livers of the owls, eagles and falcons that share those fields, a debt the ecosystem may only now be beginning to itemise.

Subject of Research: Sublethal anticoagulant rodenticide exposure in deceased predatory birds in south-east Queensland, Australia

Article Title: Evaluating sublethal anticoagulant rodenticide exposure in deceased predatory birds of South-East Queensland, Australia

Article References: Low, Z., Murray, P. J., Naseem, N., McGilp, D., Doneley, B., Beale, D. J., Biggs, L., & Gonzalez-Astudillo, V. (2024). Evaluating sublethal anticoagulant rodenticide exposure in deceased predatory birds of South-East Queensland, Australia. Discover Toxicology, 1(1), Article 13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44339-024-00016-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44339-024-00016-4

Keywords: anticoagulant rodenticides, raptors, owls, warfarin, brodifacoum, secondary poisoning, wildlife toxicology, LC-MS, Australia, Queensland, coagulopathy, conservation