.dropcap { color: #838078; float: left; font-size: 82px; line-height: 60px; padding: 5px 8px 0 0; } The victim lying on Kevin Hynes’s stainless-steel table on March 11, 2015, showed no obvious cause of death. There were no injuries indicating that she had been hit by a car or electrocuted—the usual killers. Dressed in surgical scrubs and latex gloves, Hynes, a wildlife biologist with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation in Delmar, peered through the magnifying visor affixed to his headband and examined the Bald Eagle more closely. She was a female, seemingly in good health, and likely a mother incubating eggs, indicated by the bare skin—a brood patch—on her underbelly. Her stomach contents showed that she had been fit enough to find a rabbit earlier that day. Scraps of sheep hair and skin at the back of her mouth provided a clue that a more recent meal had been cut short. Maybe she’d been poisoned, Hynes thought. He ordered a toxicology screening. A...