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Hundreds of thousands of free-range hens locked down after bird flu found in NZ
AuthorTom Rose,Publish DateMon, 20 Jul 2026, 11:45am
New Zealand’s largest egg supplier is putting hundreds of thousands of free-range chickens into lockdown after the deadly bird flu virus was detected in the country for the first time.
Mainland Poultry, which supplies nearly 40% of the country’s eggs, has taken the precautionary step of isolating more than half a million free-range laying hens while officials work out the extent of the disease’s spread.
While there have been zero cases of bird flu identified in commercial poultry flocks, and meat and eggs remain safe to eat, chief executive John McKay said the two detected in wild birds for the first time last week had prompted them to try to mitigate the risks.
McKay, who is also the chair of the Egg Producers Federation (EPF), told Ryan Bridge TODAY the nationwide agribusiness had just over 1.3 million hens, with around 550,000 of those farmed as free-range.
Free-range hens are usually given the freedom to spend much of their day outside and can interact with other wildlife, so McKay said Mainland Poultry staff had a “pretty busy weekend” closing off the pop holes in barns until more is known.
“The birds naturally come in in the evening. They come in to roost and have their final feed before they go to sleep,” McKay said.
Mainland Poultry has isolated over 550,000 free-range hens as a precautionary measure after New Zealand’s first two cases of the H5N1 bird flu strain were detected last week. Photo / 123rf
“In the morning, [the pop holes] aren’t opened as per usual … so the birds are temporarily housed inside those barns for their welfare.”
McKay said free-range eggs made up about 45% of New Zealand’s total egg market, so there was clear consumer demand.
Mainland Poultry would continue to maintain good on-farm biosecurity, even ramping up some measures, as McKay said it was crucial for protecting their hens and businesses.
“Obviously, we care deeply about our birds,” McKay said.
“Let’s better understand the risk, understand where it might have spread or where it hasn’t spread, and then based on better understanding that risk, we can then make good decisions about what we do with those birds going forward.”
New Zealand’s first known case of the H5N1 strain was recorded on Wednesday in a wild brown skua found on Lower Hutt’s Petone Beach, with a second detection in a native kāhu, or swamp harrier, in the Wairarapa announced Friday.
In an update yesterday, MPI’s chief veterinary officer Dr Mary van Andel said no new cases of bird flu had been found since, but they had received a surge in reports about dead or sick birds since the public notification and would be continuing to investigate each one.
Authorities hadn’t found any evidence of widespread transmission or mass mortality affecting wildlife either, she added.
“We have staff on the ground over the weekend carrying out checks in some areas of Wellington’s south coast and Wairarapa,” van Andel said.
“We continue to have a strong response from the public about unwell or dead birds they have seen, and we consider every notification and triage any suspected cases of avian influenza.”
Van Andel urged people not to touch or move the birds they encounter.
“If you see three or more sick or dead wild birds in a group, report it immediately to the exotic pest and disease hotline on 0800 80 99 66 from anywhere in New Zealand or online at report.mpi.govt.nz.”
When elephants play, they rapidly copy one another’s trunk and head movements — a form of bodily mimicry resembling the contagious smiles and laughter seen in humans
The synchronicity suggests something deeper than mere play—a glimpse into how social bonds form through the body rather than the mind.
By Space Daily Editorial Team · Editorial process
Published July 19, 2026
Elephants at play do more than chase, spar and wrestle with their trunks. In a study of African savannah elephants, a player that saw a companion perform a distinctive trunk or head movement became more likely to reproduce that exact movement within the next second.
The researchers call this rapid motor mimicry. Its closest familiar comparison is the way a smile can pull another face into a smile, or one person’s laughter can make others join in before anyone has consciously decided to copy it.
This is one study, not settled consensus. It observed a single captive group in Spain, and its results do not show that elephants laugh, smile or necessarily share a human-like emotional experience. What it documents is narrower: tightly timed matching of bodily play signals.
Five movements and a one-second window
The study, led by Giada Cordoni of the University of Turin and published in Scientific Reports in May 2025, followed 15 African savannah elephants at Parque de la Naturaleza de Cabárceno in Cantabria. The group lived in a 25-hectare outdoor area and included six immature animals, two late adolescents and seven adults.
From 91 hours of footage collected between April and July 2022, the team extracted 30 hours of two-elephant social play covering 188 sessions. Trained coders examined the video frame by frame or in slow motion, achieving what the authors classified as good inter-observer agreement.
They focused on five conspicuous play movements. One was a forward trunk swing towards a partner. Another held the trunk upright in a curved “periscope”. The list also included resting an S-shaped trunk against the forehead in a “circus pose”, flopping the trunk onto the head, and waggling the head from side to side.
When one elephant performed a target movement, it was labelled the trigger. The playmate counted as a responder if it began the same movement within one second. The researchers compared that response with a matched moment in the same session, at least 10 seconds away, when the trigger had not just performed one of the movements.
Copying the same move, not merely moving
The matched comparison is essential. Two excited elephants may move vigorously at the same time because both are already playing. Shared activity alone does not establish mimicry.
Responders were significantly more likely to reproduce the same target movement after seeing it than during the control moment. They were not significantly more likely to perform a different target movement. This specificity supports the interpretation that they were matching the displayed action rather than merely becoming more active.
Only eight elephants had been exposed to at least one target movement in the circumstances required for that core test. The result therefore comes from a small number of individuals, even though the observational dataset covered the full 15-member group. The statistical comparison was exact and within-session, but it does not turn eight animals into a species-wide finding.
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Play becomes contagious at two different speeds
The same group had previously been observed for a 2024 study of play contagion. In that analysis, an uninvolved elephant was more likely to begin playing within three minutes after seeing others play than during a matched control period. Contagion occurred mostly within 30 metres and was strongest between animals that affiliated more often.
Rapid motor mimicry operates on a different scale. It happens inside an existing play bout, between current partners, in less than a second. Behavioural contagion describes an observer joining the general activity without necessarily copying its exact movement. One is a near-instant echo inside the game; the other is the game spreading through the group.
The elephants most central in the rapid-mimicry network also tended to be the ones most likely to catch the broader urge to play. The reported correlation was strong, but it cannot reveal what the animals felt. It shows that two forms of behavioural matching were related in this particular group.
The rougher the play, the more useful a signal may become
The copied movements appeared around more offensive forms of play than target movements that went unanswered. The researchers recorded 48 transitions around mimicry events and 108 around movements that were not copied. Mimicry was often preceded and followed by sparring, and was also preceded by chasing.
That pattern suggests a possible function. Fast matching may help partners coordinate vigorous play and signal that a push, chase or trunk slap still belongs to the game. In rough-and-tumble play, the difference between competition and conflict depends partly on both animals continuing to read the exchange in the same way.
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This interpretation remains a hypothesis. Mimicry was not associated with longer play sessions, unlike findings reported in some primates and dogs. It may help regulate a difficult moment without extending the whole interaction. The study did not test whether preventing mimicry caused play to break down or aggression to increase.
The comparison with contagious smiles and laughter
In humans, rapid facial matching can begin within fractions of a second. Smiles recruit facial responses, while hearing or seeing laughter can elicit laughter and smiling in an observer. An independent experimental study of human participants found that audio-visual laughter was the most reliable trigger, with sound particularly important for laughter contagion.
Comparable rapid matching of play faces has been described in great apes, monkeys, dogs, meerkats and sun bears. Across those species, researchers usually study an open-mouth play face. Elephants present a different anatomical problem.
The elephant trunk combines the nose and upper lip, and its motor control is connected with other parts of the face. An open mouth is not a clean play-only signal because elephants also use it during vocalisation and conflict. Cordoni’s team therefore examined trunk and head movements that function as recognisable markers of elephant play.
The resemblance to contagious laughter lies in the rapid matching and possible coordinating role, not in the outward expression. A raised trunk is not an elephant smile. Nor does a shared timing threshold prove that the underlying neural process or felt emotion is identical across species.
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Yellowstone’s oldest wolf pack leaves the park, raising fears for its future
Mike Koshmrl WyoFile/Daily Montanan
17 hrs ago
This story was first published by WyoFile on July 14, 2026.
Leslie Patten hiked into a remote reach of northwest Wyoming’s Sunlight Basin in December to post a trail camera where she’d earlier seen wolf tracks.
At the time, a winter closure was fast approaching, and the Park County resident wouldn’t be able to retrieve the camera and review the footage for months. When she hiked back to fetch her equipment on May 1, the citizen scientist and author was greeted by one of nature’s most primal noises: the howls of wolves.
The sonorous canines’ calls not far away foretold the footage she’d soon review.
“I looked at the camera, and I had the Mollie’s Pack,” Patten told WyoFile.
Patten posted a one-minute clip on her YouTube page. Six wolves, strung out, casually loped over patches of snow in the timber.
“I didn’t identify them,” Patten said.
But a biologist she knew confirmed the hunch she kept concealed: The wolves belonged to Mollie’s Pack. That’s the last remaining pack from Yellowstone National Park’s historic reintroduction of wolves 31 years ago. Originally called the Crystal Creek Pack, in 2000 they were renamed in memory of Mollie Beattie, the first woman to direct the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who died of cancer during the reintroduction.
“There’s a movie out about them right now at IMAX theaters nationwide — the original name of the movie was the Mollie’s Pack,” said retired Yellowstone Wolf Project leader Doug Smith, who’s finishing up a book on the wolves. “Mollie’s claim to fame is it’s the longest-known intact genetic lineage for any pack in North America.”
The pack’s new whereabouts, dozens of miles to the east of their typical backcountry territory in Yellowstone’s Pelican Valley, is “deeply concerning,” he said.
“My worry is that there’s a group of people who just don’t like wolves,” Smith said. “And they’ll hunt them more avidly just to get them.”
Wyoming’s wolf hunting season starts Sept. 15, and state wildlife officials voted Tuesday to allow the killing of up to four wolves in the area, sparking concern about the pack’s future. Although wolf hunting is quite difficult, Yellowstone wolves are accustomed to vehicles and crowds. They’re often naive to the dangers posed by humans, and as a result, they are especially vulnerable to hunters.
“That’s the big issue, really,” Smith said. “It takes them a bit to figure it out, because they’re just so used to people.”
It’s a “unique circumstance” that Wyoming Game and Fish Department wolf biologist Ken Mills does not relish and is handling carefully. State wildlife managers even attempted to relocate the Mollie’s Pack den site away from cattle to reduce the chance of conflict that could lead to their demise.
“It is not an ideal situation,” Mills told WyoFile. “It’s exactly the pack you’d never want to move out [of the park]. But that’s what happened.”
The movement and the den
Yellowstone Wolf Project leader Dan Stahler, who succeeded Smith, says that the historically mild winter and sparse snowpack are the likeliest explanation for why Mollie’s Pack wolves left the park for the most prolonged period in three decades.
“The prey that remained in the park were in better shape — they were harder to kill,” Stahler said. “Wolves need vulnerable prey to be successful.”
Right before Halloween, he said, the Mollie’s wolves took off, presumably in search of easier meals. They’d moved around before, especially in the winter, but historically more than 95% of their travels were within the park, he said.
Mollie’s Pack wolves weren’t the only ones in Yellowstone making extraterritorial forays last winter, Stahler said. The 8 Mile Pack “largely vacated” the park last winter, he said, and the Rescue Creek and Junction Butte packs also made big trips.
There are three tracking-collar-equipped wolves in the Mollie’s Pack, animals that keep wildlife managers apprised of their daily movements. They’ve only returned to the park “a handful of occasions” since last fall, Stahler said.
Around the time the Mollies headed for Sunlight Basin, about an hour’s drive northwest of Cody, seven adults ran in the family group, according to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s annual wolf report. Although the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s wolf population slumped significantly this year due to a distemper outbreak, the Mollie’s Pack only lost one member from natural causes in 2025.
Another member, a 6-year-old male known as Wolf 1339M, peeled off the pack and has mostly been traveling solo after “seemingly” losing his alpha male status, Stahler said.
And another member died accidentally during Game and Fish’s routine capture operations last winter, Mills said. That wolf had “pre-existing injuries” — bruising and hemorrhaging from its head to its hip — and did not survive being tranquilized.
“It’s one of those things that happens,” Mills said. “About one in 100 wolves that we catch from the air die.”
Currently, the Mollie’s Pack includes five adults and five pups, Stahler said. One of its remaining members, Wolf 1090F, is a 12-year-old female and among the oldest wolves on record for both Yellowstone and Wyoming.
The location of the Mollie’s Pack den site, where they’re raising the five pups, isn’t great, Mills said.
“There’s going to be a lot of cattle going into where they’re denned,” he said.
Using a method that’s as simple as walking near a wolf den — a technique Mills has studied — state wildlife officials attempted to get the pack to relocate their den to a safer site. The adult wolves naturally move their puppies after being disturbed, and the idea was to get them away from tempting domestic cattle, which can doom depredating wolves that can’t shake the habit.
“We tried to be proactive,” Mills said. “They’ve moved, but not as far as we would prefer.”
If the Mollie’s Pack does stay out of trouble during the summer grazing season, they’ll face another threat to their persistence come fall.
Where Wyoming manages wolves as trophy game, hunting is tightly restricted. And the seasons are especially conservative this year: The state agency proposed a 50% reduction in hunt limits following a canine distemper outbreak that dropped the state’s population to the lowest level in two decades.
The coming hunt
Even so, Wyoming plans to allow the killing of up to four wolves between Sept. 15 and Dec. 31 in hunt area 1, where the Mollie’s Pack has been dwelling. On Tuesday, the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission approved those regulations, although not before hearing from folks concerned about what the fall hunt means for the Mollie’s Pack.
“They are one of the most studied, scientifically important wolf families in the world,” Marc Cooke told commissioners. “Once they are gone, decades of irreplaceable knowledge are gone with them.”
Cooke, who’s the vice president of Wolves of the Rockies, the day before had emailed Game and Fish commissioners a letter asking them to temporarily close hunt area 1.
“Wyoming has been getting pretty beat up lately with some wildlife issues, and I think there’s an opportunity here for you folks to do the right thing,” Cooke said.
Cooke’s request didn’t stand alone. Rep. Liz Storer, a Jackson Democrat, emailed commissioners asking for a one‑season closure in response to an “exceptional biological and public‑interest circumstance.” And Jackson Hole resident Lisa Robertson, who founded Wyoming Untrapped, urged commissioners to do the same in both emails and in public comment on Tuesday before the seven-person board approved the wolf hunting regulations.
“The commission’s decision in this matter extends beyond a single hunting season,” Robertson testified. “It presents an opportunity to demonstrate that Wyoming’s wolf management framework can recognize exceptional circumstances and respond with targeted science-based management action.”
Game and Fish Commissioner John Masterson engaged Mills after the requests. Could the state agency “logistically, mechanically” protect an individual wolf pack like the Mollie’s, he inquired. And from a “purely scientific management standpoint,” he asked, “is there anything substantially unique about that pack?”
Game and Fish’s wolf biologist responded: “When we look at packs across the landscape, a breeding pair is a breeding pair. A pack is a pack,” Mills said. “That’s how we implement our management plan: based on the broader population assessment.”
Mills told WyoFile in an interview that Game and Fish has taken the same approach when other Yellowstone wolf packs have moved out of the park in the past, not treating them differently than others.
The last two hunting seasons, seven wolves were hunted from the Willow Creek Pack, a former park pack last assessed with six remaining members. And two wolves remain in Shrimp Lake Pack after one of its wolves was killed by a hunter and three more died due to conflict-related issues, Mills said.
Only time will tell if the Mollie’s Pack also loses some of its members when hunting begins this fall. At least as of Monday, the pack was in a place where hunters wouldn’t have the chance.
“Ironically, just yesterday one of my staff members did a monitoring flight, and they were in Pelican Valley,” Stahler said Tuesday morning. “I’m looking at some data, and it does look like they were still in Pelican Valley, as of about 12 hours ago.”
They were over 30 miles from the den site, he said. Although Yellowstone-area packs have been observed moving pups long distances, the pilot did not spot any pups in tow during the overflight.
“I don’t have any reason to think that their visit to Pelican Valley means they abandoned the den or lost pups,” he said. “Wolves can cruise that distance in a day and a half or less.”
Should the wolves remain long term in Wyoming’s hunt area 1, Stahler doesn’t anticipate Yellowstone seeking any special relief for the Mollie’s Pack. Park leadership has taken that step before, when Montana hunting seasons took an especially heavy toll on park packs.
“Packs adjust their range in response to prey availability,” Stahler said. “This is evidence of a wolf pack behaving naturally.”
Stahler remarked that he’d “hate to see” an old alpha female, like Wolf 1090F, lose her life to hunting.
“But you know,” he added, “that’s part of the world of a wolf now, when they leave the protection of a national park.”{span class=”print_trim”}
This story was originally produced by Idaho Capital Sun, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Daily Montanan, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Exposing the Big Game 