• Millions of poultry in 20 facilities across Indiana have died from avian influenza
• Bird flu is killing sandhill cranes and other waterfowl across the state

Nearly 7 million chickens, turkeys and ducks at commercial farms across Indiana have contracted the highly contagious bird flu this year and concerns are rising with the disease now affecting wild birds, including waterfowl and at least one Bald Eagle.

Avian influenza, more commonly known as bird flu, has been identified in 20 commercial poultry facilities in Indiana since Jan. 1, according to state data, marking a significant increase in cases over recent years.

There currently is no cure for the disease, which has a high mortality rate among birds but remains low risk to people, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Denise Derrer Spears, the spokeswoman of the Indiana State Board of Animal Health, said the impact of bird flu varies from year to year.

“Cases have been trickling in since the first weeks of January,” she said, “but in the last week or so it has ramped up and that’s concerning.”

So far in 2025, officials have identified 6.9 million affected birds compared to about 13,100 in 2024 and less than two dozen in 2023. The bulk of cases this year are concentrated in Jay and Jackson counties, with totals of roughly 4 million and 2.5 million reported, respectively.

The jump in cases is not a major surprise due to the number of reports in neighboring states, Derrer Spears said. Ohio has been dealing with a high number of cases and many of those are concentrated at sites on or near the Indiana border.

Case numbers in Indiana are up due primarily to the disease hitting large-scale poultry farms that hold a million or more birds.

“Typically, there will be multiple houses or barns on a facility that has a large number of birds, and it is very difficult when in close proximity to keep virus out of one building,” Derrer Spears said.

Bird flu kills thousands of Indiana waterfowl

The disease has also been found in wild birds in the state. Waterfowl migrating to and through Indiana often flock in large groups, allowing them spread the disease where they congregate or stop.

Eli Fleace, an avian health biologist with Indiana’s Department of Natural Resources, said reports of dying sandhill cranes have been rolling in since January. Dead sandhills have been found this year in Union, Greene, Jasper, Newton, LaPorte and Stark counties, and DNR estimates roughly 1,500 have died across the state.

Snow geese, Canada geese, red-breasted mergansers, common goldeneyes and mallards have also died due to avian influenza, Fleace said. The bird flu has been found in at least one Bald Eagle and a handful of hawks and owls that can pick up the disease by scavenging on carcasses of infected birds.

“Avian influenza has been around since ducks have been around and we’ve had these outbreaks in the past,” Fleace said. “But it’s usually not this dramatic and often they go away after one season. This particular strain is behaving differently than every other strain has in the past.”

The current strain of bird flu (H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4), which was identified in 2021, is highly contagious and has persisted for multiple seasons, Fleace said. It is now widespread across the landscape, Fleace said, and bird populations will need to work through the disease and build up a stronger immunity.

Hoosiers who suspect a dead bird was affected with avian influenza should make a report online at on.in.gov/sickwildlife.

Does bird flu affect public health?

The CDC classifies bird flu as very low risk to humans and reports only 70 cases in the U.S. with one associated death from the disease. None of those cases were in Indiana.

Birds that die from avian influenza are not suitable to eat, Derrer Spears said, but eggs bought in the grocery store are safe and shoppers do not need to worry about eating them.

Eggs from backyard chicken coops exposed to bird flu should not be eaten or given to pets. Cats are especially susceptible to bird flu.

What’s being done about egg prices?

With hundreds of millions of affected poultry across the country, egg prices have soared as the supply dwindled.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a $1 billion strategy Tuesday to curb bird flu cases and lower egg prices, according to a news release.

The USDA is planning to expand its wildlife biosecurity measures by deploying 20 epidemiologists and expanding audits for affected farms. The department will also increase its aid to farmers to help restock their flocks and research vaccines and therapeutics for avian influenza.

The department will also consider importing more eggs while decreasing exports, which could be complicated by the Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs set to begin in March.

IndyStar’s environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.

Karl Schneider is an IndyStar environment reporter. You can reach him at karl.schneider@indystar.com. Follow him on BlueSky @karlstartswithk.bsky.social

What began as a simple welfare check turned into a nightmare when police officers arrived at an Indiana home to find a husband, wife and their three children dead. Upon their investigation, they discovered the killer was among the deceased but family members revealed the disturbing motive behind the killing.

Lake Station police responded to a home on the 6700 block of 9th Avenue the afternoon of Feb. 21. Authorities say they received a request for a welfare check. Upon arrival, they obtained a search warrant for the home. Inside, officers discovered a disturbing sight.

Briana Payne, 27, along with her children, 7-year-old Aurorah, 6-year-old Ava and 4-year-old Alayna were found dead. A fifth person, 31-year-old Robert Payne was also found dead. The Lake County Coroner ruled their deaths as homicides by means of gunshots wounds. However, Mr. Payne’s death was the only one ruled as a suicide, per authorities.

The neighborhood was left shaken at the news that the seemingly perfect family was gone in an instant. However, neighbor Sandy Goodman tells WSAZ she knew something was off.

“They were arguing a lot for the last few days,” Goodman told reporters. “I knew there was something weird because the cars weren’t moved, and they go [out] every day.”

Briana’s family had their own theories as to what happened. Her mother, Lili Owens, tells ABC 7 Chicago there were concerns surrounding the state of her daughter’s marriage. For instance, one of Briana’s employers said she parted ways with the woman because of her husband’s red flags and claimed he wanted to isolate her, per the report. Owens also told reporters Briana told her husband she planned on filing for a divorce just weeks before the incident.

Based on this information, the family’s death was suspected to be a murder-suicide by the hands of Mr. Payne. Now, Briana’s family and the peers of her young daughters are left grieving the bright light they once were in their lives.

“Losing Briana and her daughters feels like losing a piece of our hearts. There’s an emptiness now in our community where their light and energy used to be. It’s hard to imagine moving forward without them. They deserved so much more time, so many more days to laugh and grow,” the family wrote via GoFundMe.

How do wildlife researchers know when an endangered population is sick? They can detect infectious microbes in animal waste, but the presence of a microbe doesn’t always equate to impactful symptomatic infections. In a new study, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers have used advanced molecular tools to survey the health status of endangered Indiana bats, identifying microbiome changes resulting from parasitic infections.

The findings are published in the journal Microbial Genomics.

“In conservation medicine, sick patients will rarely schedule a follow-up visit, so tracking the impact of a disease in real time is a challenge. We take a big picture view of microbial interactions at the population level to infer the burden of a disease over time from a snapshot,” said lead study author Andrew Bennett, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois.

Bennett and his colleagues temporarily captured Indiana bats at the entrance of a Missouri hibernation site, gently holding them long enough to collect a single fecal sample. They brought these samples back to a lab where they extracted DNA and identified the presence of gut microbes and parasites using a process called multiplex metabarcoding. They also documented changes in the makeup of the gut microbiome that corresponded with the amount of parasites present.

What they found was Eimeria, a protozoan parasite that hangs out in the gut and causes coccidiosis, a disease that leads to economic losses in many livestock animals. Bennett says Eimeria can be present at low levels in the gut without causing problems, but research in other animals has shown that stress can cause Eimeria to proliferate, invading and damaging gut tissue and leading to secondary bacterial infections.

“This is where our work adds value. Before, if we just detected Eimeria, we wouldn’t necessarily be able to say whether it was causing problems,” Bennett said. “But by analyzing changes in the microbiome that are associated with Eimeria load in these bats, we gain a non-invasive marker that can help us assess their gut health.”

The analysis revealed that bats with high loads of Eimeria had a corresponding proliferation of Clostridium bacteria, particularly those associated with severe tissue damage in other species.

Study co-author Joy O’Keefe, associate professor in NRES and wildlife Extension specialist, says they can still only guess at symptoms infected bats might be experiencing and whether Eimeria infection significantly affects survival or population size.

“We don’t know exactly what the stressors are that would drive bats to experience more ill effects from Eimeria, but this is the first step to allowing us to start making those investigations,” she said. “This also gives us a baseline that we can relate to other things, like management practices, the number of bats in a roost, and behaviors that bats are exhibiting.”

Study co-author Cory Suski, professor in NRES, points out that molecular tools add a level of sophistication to ecological research, as well as a great deal of insightful information.

“So much of conservation is just counting individuals. If there are a lot, we think they must be doing well,” he said. “So this is a way to ask some deeper questions and get information that goes beyond just counting without having to do crazy stuff or take animals into captivity.”

O’Keefe hopes the research community will use the same approach on other endangered bat species in North America to paint a comparative picture of their health.