Bird flu spreads to Southern California, infecting chickens, wild birds and other animals

After proliferating globally, a historic wave of avian flu has entered Southern California, the place it’s worrying farmers and fowl -overs and will add to issues with provide chains and meals costs.

Already, poultry operations have needed to euthanize home flocks of chickens and turkeys, whereas hundreds of untamed birds have additionally died. Wildlife consultants say they’re seeing a wave of dying birds shifting south — already as far as Irvine — as the autumn migration units in.

Authorities describe the surge as “unprecedented” in scope, breadth and lethality.

In North America alone, an estimated 50 million birds have succumbed, which consultants say might be an unlimited undercount. And although authorities officers are primarily involved about poultry farms, the epidemic has struck wild birds, too — from waterfowl to raptors and vultures.

In late August, one New Jersey park needed to shut its trails to hikers. There have been too many useless vultures on the bottom.

Elsewhere, different animals are getting contaminated and dying. In Maine, an elevated variety of grey and harbor seal deaths have been attributed to the illness, whereas in Florida, officers imagine a bottle-nosed dolphin succumbed to the virus. It’s additionally been detected in skunks and foxes.

People are usually not considered in danger for an infection, however the reality the flu has unfold to some mammals issues some consultants, provided that people are mammals.

For now, domesticated and wild birds are the main focus of consideration.

“Sadly, we’re actually simply originally” of this extremely pathogenic avian influenza outbreak, stated Maurice Pitesky, a UC Davis Cooperative Extension affiliate professor within the Poultry Well being and Meals Security Epidemiology Division within the College of Veterinary Medication. He famous that thousands and thousands of birds are simply starting their southward migration from summer time feeding grounds within the Arctic — a spot the place they’ve been mingling and communing all summer time with species from throughout the globe.

“Some illness fashions present that we’re going to get hammered this fall,” he stated, including it may add some actual stresses to the meals provide, which is already being clobbered by excessive corn and soy costs — the meals required to maintain the thousands and thousands of chickens and turkeys in poultry farms alive.

“There’s plenty of virus within the surroundings,” he stated. “Within the Central Valley, we’ve got 600,000 resident waterfowl. In a couple of months, that quantity will probably be 6 million.”

The outbreak — which researchers name by its initialism, HPAI — is comparatively novel to this a part of this world.

All through most of historical past, HPAI would seem solely sporadically and domestically, based on Bryan Richards, rising illness coordinator with the USA Geological Survey’s Nationwide Wildlife Well being Heart. When it did seem, it will fizzle out quick.

“It was a type of one-and-done phenomenon,” he stated. “It’d kill plenty of birds after which be gone.”

However in 1996, “the story modified,” Richards stated. In China’s Guangdong province, the virus mutated “and it by no means went away.”

Then, in 2005, the illness spilled again to waterfowl — primarily bar-headed geese — from home poultry, inflicting substantial mortality amongst each wild and home birds.

“This was a extremely massive deal,” Richards stated.

And it continued within the surroundings — though largely relegated to Asia.

However in 2014 and 2015, the illness appeared for the primary time in North America. By the point it subsided, 40 million birds had died, inflicting an estimated $3 billion in harm.

Then in early 2021, it confirmed up in Europe, the place each wild and home birds died en masse. That fall, it appeared in North America. 1000’s of sea birds — gannets, puffins and murres — died alongside the Avalon Peninsula in Canada’s Newfoundland province.

Quickly it unfold down the East Coast of the USA after which started marching west throughout the continent.

In late August, it appeared in California. First in a poultry farm in Fresno, the place all of the birds had been euthanized. Then in turkey flocks in Tuolomne and Sacramento counties. Since then, it has exploded throughout a lot of the state — the virus has been detected in home birds in seven counties. For wild birds, the depend is at 19.

Rebecca Duerr, California-based veterinarian for Worldwide Chicken Rescue, stated wildlife refuge facilities at the moment are within the untenable place of getting to show away sick birds, lest they infect the opposite birds they’re caring for.

She stated testing is extraordinarily costly; there are not any speedy antigen avian flu checks like there are for COVID-19.

She’s bracing for what the autumn migration could convey and what the illness may do to endangered birds, such because the California condor.

“There are already so few of them,” she stated. “A illness like this could possibly be catastrophic.”

Colony birds are one other concern, she stated. Simply as tens of hundreds of murres and gannets had been worn out in Canada, wildlife officers worry such outbreaks alongside the Pacific.

Consultants imagine the illness is being unfold by wild birds. And although industrial poultry farms have been following biosecurity measures for months now — spraying down vans and staff earlier than they enter and after they go away these amenities — they’re calling on yard birders to additionally take warning.

Deanna Lin, who owns 4 chickens in Menlo Park, was unaware of the outbreak as her 4 hens clucked and scratched throughout her yard final week.

She additionally feeds a homicide of resident crows, who saved one in all her hens from a hawk assault a couple of years in the past.

Now she’s waiting for indicators of an infection — each in her personal flock and among the many wild birds that go to her yard.

Indicators of the illness embrace sudden dying; respiratory misery; clear discharge from the eyes, nostril or mouth; lethargy; disinterest in meals or water; swelling of the eyes, head, wattles or combs; a discolored or bruised comb, wattle or legs; and stumbling or falling.

State officers are asking poultry house owners with doubtlessly uncovered flocks — through which animals present indicators of sickness or sudden dying — to name CDFA Sick Chicken Hotline at (866) 922-BIRD (2473).

As Lin hand-fed her two new pullet chickens — Ygritte, a Cream Legbar, and Gretel, an Ameraucana — she shook her head, imagining what it may take to guard them from a illness that’s handed from fowl to fowl by droppings and fomites (virus that will get carried on surfaces).

“That’s not going to be simple,” she stated.