- Michael Wright
- Feb 20, 2026
- https://www.27east.com/sag-harbor-express/news/environment/article_2c45c8d5-c0c8-491c-91c0-90b856509dde.html
- 6 min to read
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Avian influenza has swept through waterfowl flocks across the East End this month, killing hundreds of Canada geese and ducks, and sparking fears that the disease could decimate the region’s population of bald eagles and other birds of prey that feed on the carcasses of the dead waterfowl.
Last year, at least 40 bald eagles died from the avian flu statewide — and that was just the ones that the State Department of Environmental Conservation documented as confirmed flu deaths.
Just a couple of those were on Long Island, but on the East End this winter it appears the numbers of birds infected and dying locally are much higher than last year. In the last couple of weeks, several people have captured photos from around the region of numerous bald eagles feeding on dead geese in areas where large numbers of the birds have died from illness.
Kathleen Mulcahy, the director of the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center in Hampton Bays, said that the center has been flooded with flu-infected birds this year — primarily Canada geese.
On Wednesday, she said, eight of the birds were brought to the center, all exhibiting tell-tale signs of bird flu infections.
“Their heads were bobbing, they were seizing, their eyes were turning blue,” Mulcahy said. “We had to euthanize them, unfortunately.”
She said the center currently has four live geese in quarantine with less obvious symptoms, which the center is monitoring to see if they worsen and prove to be influenza infections.
Before the current wave of bird flu, one of the most common reasons people brought sick waterfowl to the center was lead poisoning, which can cause symptoms similar to the early stages of the avian flu infection.
The center has not received any sick bald eagles yet this year, but the director said it did get a Cooper’s hawk that was confirmed to have influenza. And with what rescuers have seen over the past week, they think they are certain to see more — soon.
“We think it has been made worse by the freeze, because the geese are all squished together into what small areas of open water they can find, so it can spread very quickly among them,’” Mulcahy said. “There’s some really horrific videos of dead geese and bald eagles eating them. So we expect we will start getting raptors.”
Photographer Tim Regan had been delighting in the dramatic photos he captured of bald eagles ravenously dissecting dead geese on local ponds this month — before he realized that the geese being fed upon had probably died of the influenza and could mean a death sentence for the majestic eagles.
“I’d been photographing these eagles that are on Sagg Pond — there’s, like, six of them that have been there for the last two and a half years,” Regan, who posts many of his photos on Instagram under the handle @southforksalt, said. “I had thought the eagles were hardcore and were going after these geese and killing them, because I do see them grabbing gizzard shad and American eels, so I had just thought, wow, they’re badass and taking down a geese.”
But earlier this week, a friend invited him to walk through a relative’s yard on the pond where he would be able to get closer to where the birds were.
“The first goose I saw wasn’t bothered by me walking toward it, which I thought was a little strange. Then there was a dead goose in the woods, and then I saw a couple of dead geese along the shoreline — I wasn’t even thinking bird flu at that point,” he recalled. “Then I noticed that some of them were behaving really weird, flopping and bobbing their heads, and I realized, like, holy s—-, there were a lot of dead geese — and that’s when it hit me. I started thinking about the scene I was in, about the air I was breathing. I got the f—- out of there.”
Regan said the photos he’d been taking over the previous couple of weeks suddenly had a new, very dark cast of foreboding to them.
The strain of avian influenza that has been prevalent throughout the nation since the winter of 2021-22 is known as H5N1 and has proven to be much more virulent — and durable — than other recent strains of bird flu.
The avian flu that spread in 2015 forced the euthanizing of millions of chickens at poultry farms but did not infect wild birds. It and other strains that arose between 2014 and 2017 — four separate strains in all — each petered out naturally within a year or two.
But H5N1 is now surging into its fourth winter season and is proving to be very deadly to a broad number of wild birds, and can also spread to mammals like red foxes and cats.
“We were kind of hoping it would disappear — but that has not happened,” said Kevin Hynes, the director of wildlife health for the State DEC. “Last year, 2024-25 was a pretty heavy season. It may eventually disappear, but there’s no way of knowing.”
Since last summer, bird flu has been confirmed in 20 counties across the state, including both Nassau and Suffolk counties.
The first cases of H5N1 in New York State were found here on the East End.
In the spring of 2022, just a few months after H5N1 was first identified in North America, a Sag Harbor game farm had to euthanize its entire flock of thousands of pheasants after several birds died from the disease. Last January, a North Fork duck farm euthanized nearly 100,000 ducks — and laid off much of its staff — when an outbreak spread through the flock.
After the DEC was inundated with calls reporting sick and dying birds last winter, the state set up an online reporting system and encourages residents to alert the agency of where they are seeing scenes of dead and dying birds.
But reports are unlikely to draw an official response, as many observers have pled with them for, Hynes said. In areas like the East End where the H5N1 virus is known to be widespread in the wild bird population, the state will log the reports but does not need to confirm whether individual incidents are in fact avian flu cases.
“If we get a report of 10 or 15 dead geese in a pond out there, it’s pretty safe to assume that it’s influenza,” Hynes said.
The State DEC and Cornell University have posted an informational page on the bird flu and its impacts statewide
Some who have seen bays and shorelines littered with the dead geese being set upon by eagles, hawks and vultures, have called on official agencies to remove carcasses and stanch the potential vectors for the disease.
But undertaking that kind effort, Hynes said, would likely be futile and of little real impact — and he warned civilians against attempting to do so.
“The virus is everywhere — there’s no way you are going to clean up all the dead birds out there, and if there is a dead animal someplace, an eagle is going to find it,” the veteran wildlife expert said.
“If it’s a situation where there is a nest and there’s a carcass of a goose nearby and it can be safely disposed of, that would probably be a good thing,” he said, noting that bald eagles are already starting to nest, and that cases of adults passing avian influenza to their brood, who die in the nest, have been recorded elsewhere in the state. “But a lot of these birds are out on the ice, and it’s not worth anyone risking their life for.”
The state does collect some samples of birds that appear to have been infected by the avian influenza. Each year it sends a sample of an infected bird from each county to federal researchers who are tracking the evolution of H5N1, looking for changes to its makeup that could make it more dangerous to other animals, or to humans.
Currently, the threat of transmission of H5N1 to humans is very low — though it is possible. Since 2021 there have only been about 70 cases of human infections, Hynes said, and most suffered only very mild symptoms of illness. The vast majority of the infections were from workers in dairy farms and poultry plants where animals had become infected, and many workers were not wearing personal protective equipment like face masks or gloves.
Nonetheless, if a resident finds a dead goose or other wild bird in their yard and suspects it died of the bird flu and wants to remove it, state officials recommend that they do so very carefully. You should wear gloves and eye protection and use a shovel to pick up the bird and place it in a garbage bag, then place that garbage bag in one or two more garbage bags — then it can be simply disposed of with household trash.
As for the threat of H5N1 to the bald eagle population, Hynes said that remains to be seen.
Nearly wiped out in the 1970s by DDT pollution, bald eagles have rebuilt their population nationwide — from just 417 breeding pairs to more than 70,000 pairs in 2025 — and were removed from the endangered species list in 2007.
But the rise and persistence of H5N1 is a new wild card.
“There is a potential concern for the bald eagle,” Hynes said. “They are recovered and they are doing pretty well, but this is a new mortality for them that they weren’t facing previously. Only time will tell what kind of toll this is going to take on them over time.”
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