PROVIDENCE — Earlier this year, the head of Brown University’s bird-watching club called Sheida Soleimani.

The student had found a barred owl, usually a nocturnal creature, in the middle of the day, sitting on the pavement near the Faculty Club on Bannister Street. Next to the owl, said Soleimani, was a rodenticide box, filled with anticoagulant poison designed to kill rats and mice.

Soleimani is one of the state’s few wildlife rehabilitators, and the only one that focuses mainly on Rhode Island’s bird population. For the state’s bird-lovers, when they find a sick or dying bird, Soleimani is the 911 call.

When she picked up the barred owl, it was limp and trembling. Its eyes were half open, its entire body bruised, and blood was dripping from its beak. The owl died within hours, another casualty of an accidental poison in its food supply.

“These poisons stop the blood from clotting,” Soleimani told the members of the House Municipal Government and Housing Committee at a hearing Thursday night. “Once they’re in the body, they begin bleeding internally. It’s slow and invisible at first, but then something small, a branch, a hard landing, becomes catastrophic.”

Soleimani told these stories, and others, speaking in support of H7222, a bill that would create restrictions for first-generation anticoagulant rodenticides, poisons that have inadvertently found their way into the greater wildlife population.

Under the proposed law, municipalities would also be authorized to create pest management programs to replace the use of rodenticides and to tackle growing pest problems.

Last year, Soleimani’s clinic, Congress of the Birds, admitted 134 raptor patients, a class of birds of prey that include hawks, owls, eagles, and falcons. Every single one of them was treated for second-generation anticoagulant rodenticide exposure.

This year the number of raptors admitted with rodenticide exposure is already at 27, higher than at the same time last year, according to Soleimani.

“These numbers are not slowing down. These poisons do not stay where they’re placed. They move. They accumulate and they travel quietly through the food chain,” she said. “The rats eat the bait. The owls eat the rat. The poison does what it was designed to do, only now it is inside something we never intended to kill.”

Rats are a common, everlasting problem in urban and built-up areas like Rhode Island. They follow whenever humans live and have food, and the exact extent of our rat and mice problem is hard to quantify. They breed quickly, in great numbers, and remain mostly out of sight to get a proper count compared to other urban wildlife. But there’s always going to be a need to control the rodent population, because if there are too many rats it presents a significant public health issue.

But the rodenticides designed to kill rats and mice are making their way into other mammals. Owls, hawks, and other birds of prey primarily get their food from Rhode Island’s rodent population.

But whatever eats the rodents also ingests whatever poison killed the rodents. Rodenticide traps like the one that killed the barred owl provide already-dead rats that are too tempting for raptors to ignore. And the effects of rodenticides build up over time — it’s not one poisoned rat that’s killing raptors, it’s repeated poisoned rats accumulating within birds’ systems over time.

Sarah Deckel, director of bird conservation for the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, told committee members that while we don’t have lots of data on raptor deaths in Rhode Island, there is alarming data elsewhere: 89% of red-tailed hawks in New York City that died between 2012 and 2018 tested positive for anticoagulant rodenticides (ARS).

“It is highly likely that this species accumulated a toxic level of ARS by foraging around the sides of highways, fields, and forest edges, all places that humans interact with in some capacity,” Deckel said.

But the problem goes beyond rodents and raptors, according to Deckel. Anticoagulant rodenticides have been documented in more than 80% of tested bald eagles, crows, owls, skunks, bobcats, raccoons, foxes, deer, chipmunks, squirrels, and even some fish species.

“The fact that even herbaceous species such as white-tailed deer have detectable levels of ARS in their systems suggests a broad and unrecognized pathway of exposure to non-target species,” Deckel said.

Pest control specialists said they are opposed to the legislation, although they agreed with what the supporters were saying. Nathan Jewett, an associate certified entomologist representing the New England Pest Management Association, told committee members his organization was generally opposed to removing tools from the toolbox, without making exceptions for licensed professionals.

“People can buy [rodenticides] online, they can buy them at Tractor Supply or at Home Depot, but they don’t have the licensing or training on how to apply them responsibly,” Jewett said. “I’ve seen them thrown out loose into yards, into rat burrows.”

The professional pest management industry accounts for little of the total rodenticide usage compared to homeowners and business owners, according to Jewett said. The legislation as proposed, he said, would also need exceptions for industries like restaurants and grocery stores, in order to curb the growth of rodent populations and disease risk.

Rodenticides are only one of the protocols used by pest control specialists. They also use snap traps and glue traps, install rodent-proof doors and walls, and perform sweeps.

Rodent birth control, a popular rodenticide alternative in other states that make the rats unable to breed, aren’t fully registered in Rhode Island. There are some registered for mice, but not for rats, and the downside, said Jewett, is that they aren’t a one-time use. Rodent birth control requires repeat applications over time, and should have a comprehensive citywide approach.

“We have to be very careful about throwing out a tool from the toolbox,” Jewett said. “There’s a reason why mice and rates are rated the second and third most successful mammals on Earth, after humans.”

H7222 was held for further study.