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Monthly Archives: April 2025
Three hunting hounds killed by train during Worcestershire trail hunt
New DEC Head Promises Changes After Investigation Into P-Nut the Squirrel Seizure
Mon, March 31, 2025 by Lucas Day
By Instagram, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78281854
Following the notable wildlife seizure by the state last October in Chemung County of Peanut the Squirrel whose controversial death alongside his raccoon friend Fred sparked outrage, led to an internal investigation by the DEC’s of its wildlife enforcement procedures.
According to Acting DEC Commissioner Amanda Lefton, at the direction of the Governor, she prioritized a review of our current wildlife protection and enforcement process to protect New Yorkers and this agency from similar incidents in the future. Lefton said the agency have carefully reviewed all the public feedback and understands the “distress caused to communities throughout the state.” She added the DEC knows it can do better moving forward.
“Our agency is committed to developing additional protocols to address illegally possessed wildlife and ensuring that our staff and environmental conservation officers have the necessary resources to carry them out,” said Lefton. “In addition, DEC will be welcoming a new Deputy Commissioner for Public Protection & Emergency Response.”
“We recognize that these improvements are necessary and in my new role I will ensure that DEC is focused on its mission to deliver clean air and water for every New Yorker while protecting the environment and our invaluable natural resources for future generations.”
The owners of Peanut the Squirrel have sued the state of New York and Chemung County. Mark Longo filed a notice of claim against state authorities after the animals were seized during a raid on his Pine City home and animal sanctuary by the DEC on October 30. Longo accuses officials of government overreach, privacy invasion, and trespassing.
The claim states that Peanut and Fred were killed for rabies testing, an action the owners deem “unfounded” and “unjustified.”
Testing results for rabies came back negative for both animals.
Trump administration cuts FDA staff handling bird flu outbreaks
Loch Ness Monster hunting camera from ’70s found by ‘Boaty McBoatface’
- By Talker News
- Apr 1, 2025 Updated 3 hrs ago
- https://www.ttownmedia.com/news/national/loch-ness-monster-hunting-camera-from-70s-found-by-boaty-mcboatface/article_f6d464e7-c406-5420-acc5-2a606ab93101.html
By Elizabeth Hunter
Ocean exploring vessel ‘Boaty McBoatface’ has accidentally discovered a camera from the 1970s – designed to snap a photo of the Loch Ness Monster.
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During a test mission, the underwater vehicle – famously named by a public poll – discovered the camera system by accident around 180m deep within Loch Ness.
The camera was likely placed in 1970 by Professor Roy Mackal of the Loch Ness Bureau and the University of Chicago and is thought to have been one of the first attempts to catch the Loch Ness Monster on film.
The National Oceanography Centre (NOC), who operated the vehicle, retrieved the camera, which was still in good condition – and they were even able to develop the film.
Sadly, Nessie does not appear to have been captured on camera.
Adrian Shine, who set up The Loch Ness Project in the mid-1970s to investigate Loch Ness and its world-famous inhabitant, helped to identify the camera and says it was one of six deployed by Professor Mackal, with three of them lost in a gale that same year.
“It was an ingenious camera trap consisting of a clockwork Instamatic camera with an inbuilt flash cube, enabling four pictures to be taken when a bait line was taken,” he said.
“It is remarkable that the housing has kept the camera dry for the past 55 years, lying around 180 m deep in Loch Ness.”
NOC’s Autosub underwater vehicle, known popularly as Boaty McBoatface, discovered the camera when part of the mooring that had held the camera system in place got caught on the vehicle’s propellor.
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Bird flu finds its way into Western wildlife
The deaths of two Washington cougars suggest the virus is more widespread than thought.
- https://www.hcn.org/issues/57-4/bird-flu-finds-its-way-into-western-wildlife/
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Last fall, a Clallam County, Washington, resident spotted a young male cougar walking slowly through a field on the northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula. It was the middle of the day — a clear sign that something was off — and he was also skinny and weak, dragging his matted tail in the mud.
The resident called a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) game warden and Mark Elbroch, puma director of Panthera, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting wild cats globally. (Cougars are also called mountain lions or pumas.) Elbroch and the warden approached the cougar, yelling and clapping to gauge the animal’s alertness. But even when they were less than 20 feet away, the cougar didn’t respond. “The cat was on its last legs,” Elbroch said. “He literally couldn’t even get out from this pasture.”
The cougar was euthanized, and his tissue samples, which were tested for a number of diseases, revealed the presence of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza, or bird flu. Less than two weeks later, another infected cougar was found dead in Clallam County.
Mild forms of bird flu are common in wild and domestic birds, but sometimes a strain circulating on a poultry or waterfowl farm mutates into a more dangerous form and spills over into wild birds. The H5N1 strain, which was initially identified in domestic geese in China in the 1990s, had infected wild birds by 2002 and reached North America in 2021.
Since then, the virus has caused the deaths of tens of millions of domestic chickens, geese, ducks and turkeys in the U.S., contributing to the rise in egg prices. As of early March, it had killed at least 50,000 wild birds, according to estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey, and been detected in nearly 400 individual wild mammals, including felines, raccoons, rodents, seals and skunks. Globally, H5N1 has killed thousands of mammals in mass mortality events, including sea lions in Peru and Chile and elephant seals in Argentina.
The virus has caused the deaths of tens of millions of domestic chickens, geese, ducks and turkeys in the U.S., contributing to the rise in egg prices.
Over the past three years, more cases of H5N1 in wild mammals have been reported in Washington than in any other Western state except Colorado and New Mexico. Before H5N1 was identified in the two Olympic Peninsula cougars, sick animals had typically lived near wild bird populations infected with the virus. The 15 harbor seals that died in 2023, for example, frequented the same beach as a flock of infected Caspian terns. “The assumption was they were scavenging carcasses or even catching and eating sick birds,” said Katherine Haman, a WDFW veterinarian.
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But the two cougars weren’t living near any known outbreaks in wild birds or other prey species, according to the agency. Their deaths illustrate how little we know about how the disease spreads in wildlife, and how far it may have already reached.
UNLIKE THE COUGAR in the cow pasture, Clallam County’s second victim showed no obvious signs of disease. He had been fitted with a GPS collar as part of Panthera’s Olympic Cougar Project, and Elbroch said that he looked to be “in perfect health.” Later analysis of movement data, though, revealed the cougar had started to behave differently, traveling shorter distances than previously.
Virus-carrying prey can also appear healthy. “We don’t really know which animals are carrying and which ones have been exposed and recovering,” Elbroch said.
While there were no documented H5N1 outbreaks in the area, the cougars may have eaten infected birds along the Pacific Flyway, a major north-south migration route that runs along the West Coast from Alaska to Mexico. Or they may have consumed a mammal — a raccoon, river otter, seal or sea lion — that had eaten an infected bird. Regardless of the cause, the two deaths in the same general area during the same short timespan suggest that bird flu is circulating undetected in the apex predators’ prey. “That just really highlights, to me, that this virus may be more widespread on our landscape than we know or think it is,” said Haman.
Although 70 H5N1 cases have been confirmed in humans — mostly poultry and dairy farmworkers — in the U.S., public health officials say the virus still poses a low health risk: It has not yet spread between people, and its symptoms are usually mild. But the further it spreads among other mammals, the more opportunities it will have to mutate into a form easily contracted by humans. If the virus acquires the ability to be more readily transmitted between mammals or between humans, Haman said, “we have a potential brewing pandemic.”
In December, the wildlife agency announced that the state was seeing an uptick in cases in both wild birds and mammals. So far this winter, it’s been detected in a long-tailed weasel, raccoon, harbor seal and bobcat.
If H5N1 continues to proliferate among wild birds and mammals, isolated or small populations — including threatened and endangered species, such as ferrets and California condors — will be particularly vulnerable. “Flu is … rarely considered a wildlife conservation issue,” said Justin Brown, a wildlife veterinarian and professor at Pennsylvania State University. “But with this virus, now that it causes disease in (other) wildlife, there are some conservation concerns.”
FULLY UNDERSTANDING any wildlife disease isn’t easy, due to the lack of monitoring and surveillance. “There’s just so much about this virus and the epidemiology and disease ecology of it that we don’t understand, especially in wild mammals right now,” Haman said. State wildlife agencies, which are chronically short of funding, primarily rely on the public to report sick and dead wildlife, meaning the numbers could be far greater than recorded.
Regular monitoring and sampling would help researchers better understand H5N1 and its spread. “We could get ahead of avian flu right now with the right resources,” Elbroch said. After cases among dairy cows and farmworkers rose in California last fall, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency to free up resources for monitoring; as of February, it’s the only state to do so. Though the federal government laid out a $1 billion plan to curb bird flu in domestic poultry in late February, the Trump administration is considering cutting funding for the development of a bird flu vaccine for people.
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If the virus acquires the ability to be more readily transmitted between mammals or between humans. “We have a potential brewing pandemic.”
Brown, who is partnering with Washington wildlife officials to continue studying the disease, plans to test blood samples collected from living wild animals for H5N1 antibodies, an indication of recovery from infection. “I think that this is a disease that will be here for the foreseeable future,” Brown said. “The challenge then is: How do we tweak our research, our surveillance and our management to now deal with this new normal?”
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation.
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the April 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Bird flu finds its way into Western wildlife.”
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Alliance transcends boundaries to conserve cougars
The fur is flying
Michael Moss’ 64-acre goat ranch sits on the edge of BLM land in southwestern Oregon. It’s “healthy cougar country,” he says, and he’d like it to stay that way. That’s not something you’d expect to hear from most livestock owners, but Moss is a member of Goat Ranchers of Oregon,…
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Delmarva poultry industry remains on high alert despite bird flu lull
Delaware News Journal
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- The Delmarva poultry industry remains on high alert despite no new cases of avian influenza being detected in commercial flocks for over a month.
- The outbreak has resulted in the culling of 1.5 million chickens on Delmarva to prevent the virus’s spread.
- While the USDA compensates farmers for culled flocks, there is currently no income replacement for growers within control areas who cannot raise new flocks.
- The potential use of an HPAI vaccine in the U.S. raises concerns about its impact on poultry exports.
It’s been over a month since highly pathogenic avian influenza was last detected in commercial poultry on Delmarva, but the industry is still on high alert.
“While it is definitely nice to see the snow geese beginning to migrate away from the area, there are other wild birds migrating north over the next few weeks that poultry owners need to be concerned about,” Delmarva Avian Influenza Joint Information Center spokesperson Stacey Hofmann said. “It definitely is not time to let down our guard, and biosecurity is essential in keeping flocks safe, whether it’s a poultry farm or a backyard flock.”
How many wild birds have been affected is unknown, but dead snow geese and other birds were a common sight on Delmarva beaches and nearby areas like Cape May this winter.
What is known is how badly the outbreak affected the poultry industry. So far this year, 1.5 million Delmarva chickens have been killed to stop the spread of bird flu, according to the Delmarva Avian Influenza Joint Information Center.
There have been nine instances of avian influenza on commercial Delmarva poultry farms this year. All nine control areas have been cleared, Delmarva Chicken Association spokesman James Fisher said. The affected farms are all in different stages of disinfection, with some already hosting new flocks.
The bird flu outbreak
Highly pathogenic avian influenza (also known as bird flu, H5 or HPAI) is a virus that spreads quickly through nasal and eye secretions and manure. It typically affects wild bird species, such as ducks, geese, shorebirds and raptors, but can affect numerous other animals, such as seals, cattle, cats and raccoons. It spreads easily to commercial poultry through infected equipment or the shoes and clothes of caretakers.
The HPAI outbreak began in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. An uptick in cases on Delmarva was noted starting in December when dead snow geese were found at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Milton.
“All indications are that each of the nine cases (on Delmarva chicken farms) came from wild birds,” Fisher says. “What it does to chickens is very different than what it does to wild birds, who can carry it but not succumb and die.”
HPAI is a major threat to the poultry industry, according to the USDA website. Once bird flu is introduced on a chicken farm, if unaddressed, most of the flock will die within a few days, Fisher said. For this reason, when HPAI is detected, the entire flock is killed.Egg prices stress restaurants: Restaurants fight to keep prices down as egg costs soar: ‘We’re dying by a thousand cuts’
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How bird flu is affecting the economy
According to the National Chicken Council website, over 77% of chickens affected by the outbreak nationwide have been egg-producing chickens, while only about 8% have been broilers.
Chicken prices have not gone up the way egg prices have recently. Egg prices have soared 41.1% this year, according to the USDA, and costs could go higher. A 3.4% increase in the prices of all food is also forecast.
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Bird flu affects chicken growers in other ways. When a flock is culled due to bird flu, the USDA pays the grower for the lost flock, according to Fisher.
“That’s important because you don’t want a grower to be disincentivized from speaking up if they see an issue,” Fisher said.
However, when bird flu is detected on a farm, a control area is established, which means nearby growers can’t get new flocks until it’s lifted.
“There are growers who are sitting around and waiting to start making income again and there is no income replacement for them,” Fisher said.
The Delmarva Chicken Association supports the federal Healthy Poultry Assistance and Indemnification Act, proposed by Sens. Chris Coons, D-Del., and Roger Wicker, R-Miss., which would expand USDA compensation to all farmers within a bird flu control area.
In addition, about 10% to 15% of chickens grown on Delmarva are exported to other countries. Some parts of the chicken that aren’t popular here are popular in other places, like chicken paws (toes) in Asia, Fisher said.Is it safe to use bird feeders?: What to know about backyard birds and bird flu
“It’s a very important market,” Fisher said.
The poultry export market could be affected by the U.S.’s consideration of an HPAI vaccine. Some countries already use it, but in the U.S., depopulation (killing an entire flock) has historically been the primary HPAI control tool.
However, in February, the USDA approved an HPAI vaccine for limited use. It must receive full approval before it can be used on commercial poultry, according to Science magazine. However, the National Chicken Council and the “Chicken Caucus” (Coons, Wicker and other Congress members) oppose the vaccine.
The vaccine threatens the U.S. export market, a February letter from the caucus to the USDA secretary said.
Exposing the Big Game 