Elsa Banks was horrified. In January she was walking her dogs near her south-side Madison home when she spied something in a snow bank. She got closer and saw it was "a big, beautiful bird" — dead, with both legs and part of its lower body burned off.

"It was just heartbreaking," says Banks, a teacher at McFarland High School. "Obviously, he suffered. Can you imagine what it was like trying to fly with his legs on fire?" She wondered if the bird had been burned by electric wires.

Banks notified one of her neighbors, Laurie Fike, who works for the state Department of Natural Resources, but heavy snowfall prevented the bird's removal until the recent thaw. Fike recognized the bird as a red-tailed hawk and suspected what had caused its demise.

"I thought right away it was burned on methane pipes at landfills," says the 20-year DNR veteran. "I just couldn't imagine how else the bird could have suffered that kind of injury."

Fike, with the DNR's wildlife damage abatement and claims program, brought the bird into work. She showed it to avian ecologist Sumner Matteson, who agreed it was quite likely the victim of methane burnoff.

"That was my preliminary assessment," confirms Matteson. "It sure looked to me like that's what it was." Nancy Businga, a DNR wildlife health lab manager who also saw the hawk, doubts it traveled far after being burned: "I would think it would go into shock and have blood loss fairly quickly."

Indeed, the hawk was so badly burned its sex could not be determined. A necropsy planned for this week may answer that and other questions.

Gene Mitchell, the DNR's landfill overseer, says most municipal landfills divert methane, a byproduct of decomposing garbage, to engines or turbines to produce energy. Relatively few have open-stick flares that ignite intermittently, and it's unclear how often birds get burned: "We don't know if this is a big problem, but we can't say that it isn't, so we're letting landfill operators know about it."

An article in the February issue of Wisconsin Natural Resources, the DNR's magazine, says the percentage of burned raptors that are "noticed, recovered or rescued" is probably small, since landfills tend to be in remote areas. But several singed birds have been found near the city of Janesville's landfill, and article author Dianne Moller, a wildlife rehabilitator, got authorities there to put spikes on the burners to prevent birds from perching.

To Fike, the message is clear: "This can be prevented. People who need methane flames can take steps to prevent birds from being killed like this." But you can't make a fix until you find a culprit, and Fike's quest to do so has been met with a chorus of "It Ain't Me Babe."

Madison city engineer Larry Nelson says that no active or retired Madison landfills use methane burners. Jon Schellpfeffer of Madison's sewage treatment plant says its methane flare has been used "very seldom," and not at all since last June.

Topf Wells, Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk's chief of staff, confirms that three county landfills (Rodefeld, Badger Prairie and Truax) use intermittent flares to burn off methane. But "all three are manually operated, not automatic. Our operators have very clear instructions to look [for perched birds] before they turn the flame on."

Fike has been told that some manufacturers use methane flares. She hopes people will help identify the potential source of the injuries that killed the hawk Banks found.

"I'm not going to give up on this," she vows. "The community can help us. That bird didn't have to die that way."