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Sea lion dies from bird flu in San Luis Obispo County
March 27, 2026
By KAREN VELIE
The body of a deceased sea lion recently found along Morro Strand State Beach in San Luis Obispo County has tested positive for avian influenza or bird flu, marking the first confirmed case in a marine mammal in the county.
While the risk of bird flu to the public remains low, officials ask residents and visitors to avoid approaching marine mammals and seabirds. This is especially important for animals that appear sick, injured, or deceased.
“Stay 150 yards away from all marine mammals and seabirds; keep children and pets away from sick, injured or dead wildlife; and do not approach, touch or attempt to assist marine mammals or seabirds,” according to the California Department of Public Health.
Officials are asking anyone who spots a sick or dead marine animal to call NOAA West Coast Marine Mammal Stranding Hotline at (866) 767-6114 or the California Department of Fish and Wildlife at (916) 358-2790 for assistance with birds
History of bird flu in SLO County
Positive cases of bird flu have been found in San Luis Obispo County since 2022 from various wild birds. In 2024, many states, including California, experienced outbreaks of bird flu in dairy cattle. There were 38 confirmed human cases in California linked to exposures from infected cattle between Sept. 2024 and Jan. 2025 with none in SLO County.
Two years after it emerged, ‘cow flu’ is still circulating—and baffling scientists
Researchers still aren’t sure how H5N1 influenza spreads between cows and from farm to farm
- 27 Mar 2026
- 1:45 PM ET
- ByJon Cohen
- Two years after it emerged, ‘cow flu’ is still circulating—and baffling scientists | Science | AAAS
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After 2 years, the U.S. outbreak of the H5N1 influenza virus in cattle appears to be waning, easing fears that the virus could cause long-lasting damage to the dairy industry or mutate into a form that could cause a human pandemic. The last new detection of an affected herd occurred on 13 December 2025 at a Wisconsin farm, according to the website of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Data from a USDA program that tests milk for the virus suggest 16 of the 19 affected states have gotten rid of the virus, which originated in wild birds.
But it could still bounce back, and efforts to eliminate it entirely face formidable challenges. How it spreads between cattle remains unclear. And although candidate vaccines look promising in early tests, farmers and the government may be reluctant to embrace them.
H5N1 continues to circulate on farms in California and Idaho, those states’ agriculture departments told Science. Texas remains “affected” in USDA’s latest update, even though it has not had a detection since May 2025, because it has not complied with the National Milk Testing Strategy requirement that it sample all silos at milk-processing plants. In other states the virus may simply have escaped detection.
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The first cases of H5N1 in dairy cattle were discovered in Texas in March 2024. The virus—a variant of H5N1 known as 2.3.4.4b—has been killing poultry and wild birds worldwide since 2020. It rarely kills cows but it thickens their milk, turns it yellow, and leads to steep drops in production.
Early in the outbreak, milking machines—which can be used on hundreds of cows every day—were fingered as an important conduit for the virus. The fact that infected cows had inflamed udders and milk from affected farms had high levels of the virus seemed to support the suspicion.
But research has revealed a far more complicated picture. “It seems like there are a variety of different ways that the virus is transmitted,” says epidemiologist Jason Lombard, a veterinarian who worked at USDA for 20 years and now is at Colorado State University. A growing number of scientists think the virus readily drifts on the wind from farm to farm and cow to cow. Contaminated waste milk fed to calves could infect them. One study found the virus in semen from a bull, which could lead to infections in cows, too. Even flies may transmit H5N1.
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“I don’t think we’re 100% sure about anything when it comes to figuring out how this virus is getting around,” says virologist Richard Webby, an avian influenza specialist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
As the outbreak dwindles, scientists have fewer opportunities for field studies that could provide answers. And some complain that funding has become scarce and USDA has been slow to share its data. “I’m frustrated because I feel like we should know more,” says veterinarian Andrew Bowman of Ohio State University.
Still, control measures have made major inroads. After recognizing that cow shipments spread the virus, USDA required that lactating dairy cattle test negative before they could be moved between states. To pinpoint infected farms, USDA also launched the milk-testing program. It required labs and vets to report positive tests and farmers to provide information about the movement of animals in and out of affected herds. State-mandated quarantining of infected herds also helped, as did natural immunity in herds that saw an outbreak. “Most herds and affected states have been able to eliminate the virus,” USDA told Science in a statement. (The agency denied requests to interview its scientists.)
But the virus remains ensconced in some farms. Veterinarian Edith Marshall, an epidemiologist with the California Department of Food and Agriculture, says a few have had cows that remain infected for more than 1 year. These cows could act as “superspreaders” of the virus to the new calves and heifers, which typically replace one in every three adult cows in a dairy herd every year. Infections could also result from infected cows that show no signs of disease and never are tested, or if tests produce false negatives.
Marshall, Lombard, and Webby teamed up with a California veterinarian, Blaine Melody of the Lander Veterinary Clinic, to study in detail how the virus is transmitted. In a preprint posted last year, they looked closely at the role of milking machines at 14 California dairy farms. The milking equipment harbored the virus, but lab studies by Bowman and USDA that attempted to transmit it to cows through contaminated machinery have failed.
What’s more, a cow udder has four teats, and many only have the virus in one “quarter.” Milking machines have four “teat cups” that milk the same quarter on each cow, but the study of the California dairies found no pattern between the infected quarters in a given herd. “If it was the milking equipment, I would think that we’d see the same quarters infected,” says co-author Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University.
Data from several studies hint at other transmission routes. Air samplers at the California farms readily detected the virus, supporting the idea that the virus transmits through the air. And in a separate long-term study at 18 farms in California’s Central Valley, Melody found provocative, as-yet-unpublished evidence suggesting the wind can spread the viruses long distances.
Dairy farms in the southern part of the Central Valley had an explosion of the virus in the early fall of 2024, whereas those in the north were spared. Then in late November, a bomb cyclone walloped the state, sending strong southern winds across the northern Central Valley. Within 4 days, all 18 farms had an outbreak. Webby is now sequencing virus samples from those farms, which might confirm that their infections had a common origin.
Previous research has suggested the wind can give flu viruses wings. A study from the Netherlands showed it played an important role in the spread of a deadly subtype named H7N7 between poultry farms in 2003, and a 2025 report from the Czech Republic contends the wind moved H5N1 between poultry farms separated by 8 kilometers. “The head scratcher we all still have is how does it get from a particle blown in the wind into the udder of a cow?” Webby asks. But Melody is convinced cows’ noses are a main route for infection, even though nasal swabs often test negative.
Flies may also help transmit the virus. Biting flies are known to transmit bacteria that cause mastitis between cows, and last year, Lombard and Melody reported that cows had H5N1 in their bloodstreams. “Could flies be biting the cows and injecting virus?” Lombard asks. Marshall and colleagues have found the virus on house flies and blow flies. Those species don’t bite, but they regurgitate what’s in their guts, another potential route of transmission, the researchers suggested in a November 2025 preprint. “If a fly is vomiting on the teat end of a cow, is there enough viral particle in there?” Marshall asks.
“Waste milk” from infected cows could also be a route of spread, says veterinarian Richard Pereira, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis. Only about half of large farms and fewer than 1% of medium and small ones pasteurize waste milk, which is often fed to calves or dumped, a potential threat to humans and pets. Pereira has developed a method to inactivate the virus in waste milk by adding citric acid to it, which is far cheaper than pasteurization.
Even if H5N1 were eliminated from U.S. dairy herds, it could jump back in, scientists warn. The virus now circulating in cows, a genotype called B3.13, stems from a single introduction into cattle that likely occurred in the fall of 2023. But results from milk testing showed that another genotype, D1.1, jumped into cattle from birds on three occasions, quickly dying out each time. An unknown variant seems to have made the jump in the Netherlands, where researchers recently found antibodies against H5N1 in cows, indicating they were infected at some point.
Some researchers say vaccination is the best way to bring the current outbreak to an end and prevent future ones. “The goal has to be to use a vaccine in conjunction with testing and all the other things in place right now to really try to stamp this thing out,” says viral immunologist Scott Hensley of the University of Pennsylvania.
Hensley’s team has one of several promising vaccine candidates under development. Earlier this month, the group posted results from a trial of a messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine that triggers production of B3.13’s hemagglutinin surface protein. The study found animals that were vaccinated and then exposed to the virus had reduced disease and produced just as much milk, with 1000-fold lower viral levels in it.
Whether USDA will allow use of H5N1 vaccines in dairy cattle—and whether the price will be attractive to farmers—is a huge question. H5N1 vaccines exist for poultry, but USDA has never given them a green light, mainly because of concerns that vaccination could harm the export market. And because of widespread suspicion of mRNA vaccines in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many states are considering banning their use for livestock as well. “It’s amazing to me,” Hensley says.
Pereira sees the limited spread of the virus right now as a lucky grace period that should be used to speed vaccine development and use every existing measure to prevent a resurgence. “Instead of, ‘Oh, no, it’s OK now, we can ignore it,’ we should realize we’ve been given time,” he says. “Let’s use it wisely.”
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Orangutan rescuer Biruté Galdikas, last of “Leakey’s Angels,” dies at 79
Read on blog or Reader Animals 24-7Orangutan rescuer Biruté Galdikas, last of “Leakey’s Angels,” dies at 79 By Merritt Clifton on March 26, 2026 (Beth Clifton collage)Born a “displaced person,” Biruté Galdikas spent her life aiding & advocating for displaced orangutansLOS ANGELES––Orangutan researcher, rescuer, and conservationist Biruté Galdikas, 79, died on March 24, 2026 in Los Angeles, after a prolonged illness.”Born in Germany, on May 10, 1946, while her parents were en route from Lithuania to Canada,” as displaced persons after World War II, according to a Sea Shepherd Conservation Society biography posted in 2009 when she joined the Sea Shepherd advisory board, Galdikas was often misidentified as Lithuania-born.She grew up in Toronto, Ontario.(Beth Clifton collage)Remembered by Paul Watson”Birutė and I were both young children in Toronto at the same time,” recalled Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder Paul Watson, who headed the organization from 1978 to 2022, leaving to form the Captain Paul Watson Foundation. (See Rebuilding Neptune’s Navy: Captain Paul Watson post-Sea Shepherd.)“Later, she became a professor at Simon Fraser University,” in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, “where I was a student,” Watson said. “Over the decades, our paths crossed countless times,” Watson added, calling Galdikas, four years older, “a lifelong friend and hero.”Australopithecus africanus enjoys a carrot and some broccoli. (Beth Clifton collage)Wondered where humans came fromAccording to Galdikas’ Orangutan Foundation International biography, “From the age of five, Biruté Galdikas has wondered where human beings came from. She knew they had evolved from ancient apes but she wanted to know more.”When she was 12, she loved to go into the wilder sections of High Park in Toronto. There she would pretend she was a Huron or Iroquois Native slipping through the woods, at one with nature. She spent hours like this, quietly and secretly observing the wild animals in the park.At age 20, in 1966, Galdikas completed bachelor’s degrees in psychology and zoology from the University of British Columbia and the University of California in Los Angeles, then earned a master’s degree in anthropology from UCLA in 1969 and a doctorate in anthropology, also from UCLA, in 1978.Jane Goodall & Louis Leakey.(Richard Leakey/Facebook photos)Became third “Leakey’s angel”There, as a graduate student, Galdikas met famed paleontologist Louis Leakey, who was a visiting lecturer, renowned for his discoveries of fossils of proto-humans in the Olduvai Gorge of Kenya. Leakey had earlier recruited Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey to do ethological studies of chimpanzees and gorillas in the wild in Tanzania and Rwanda, respectively.Galdikas asked Leakey to help her similarly research orangutans in Indonesia.Compared to Goodall and Fossey, who brought relatively little formal education to their work, Galdikas was hugely over-qualified.Biruté Galdikas with her parents in 1972. (Orangutan Foundation International photo)Camp LeakeyLeakey was reportedly skeptical at first that Galdikas, with her advanced credentials, would remain in the field, but he convinced the National Geographic Society to help Galdikas and her first husband, Rod Brindamour, to set up a research camp in Borneo to study orangutans.”Galdikas’ Camp Leakey, as she called it, in the Tanjung Puting Reserve in Indonesian Borneo, was modeled after the Gombe Stream Research Center founded by Jane Goodall in 1965 to study chimpanzees in Tanzania and the Karasoke Research Center founded by Dian Fossey in Rwanda in 1967 to study gorillas.(Beth Clifton collage)“A crocodile killed a swimming tourist””Biruté arrived in Borneo with her husband, Rod Brindamour, in 1971,” summarizes the Orangutan Foundation International biography. “They had to live in primitive conditions.”The original Galdikas/Brindamour home “was just a platform with a roof over it. There was no kitchen, bathroom, or protection from mosquitoes or other wild animals, especially the fire ants,” testified veterinarian Carl Palazzol, who visited in 1991.By then, Palazzol said, visiting scientists “shared an outhouse with a squat toilet, and if you wanted to bathe, you jumped in the Sekonyer river, as long as the Dayaks said ‘the coast is clear’ in regard to venomous snakes, like the common krait, that frequents the area.”When I returned to Borneo 21 years later,” Palazzol added, “no one was allowed to go in the river because a crocodile killed a swimming tourist.”Birutė Galdikas, second husband Pak Bohap, and one of their children. (Orangutan International Foundation photo.)Remarried to local rice farmerResumed the Orangutan Foundation International biography, “Within a few years, Biruté gave birth to a son, Binty, who was raised among the orangutans and dubbed ‘the child of the rain forest.’ Biruté had to make difficult choices in the years that followed. She made the agonizing decision to remain in the rain forest when her marriage ended. Her son Binti returned to Canada with her ex-husband.”Later she remarried and had two more children,” with Pak Bohap, “a Dayak rice farmer, tribal president, and co-director of the orangutan program there.”Another early visitor to Camp Leakey––eight years before Palozzol––was Lisa Jones-Engel, who volunteered for Galdikas for seven months while still in high school.Lisa Jones Engle. (PETA photo)Sent 17-year-old into swamps to study macaques“Galdikas studied orangutans, but she asked Jones-Engel to spend time with the wild macaques living in swamps around the camp. Sometimes Jones-Engel paddled a dugout canoe, but mostly she slogged through muck up to her armpits,” recounted Harriet Brown for The Guardian in 2022.“She never once came out dry,” Galdikas said of Jones-Engel. “She was courageous.”Jones-Engel, now chief science advisor to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, went on to become a Ph.D.-holding primatologist, working at the New York University Laboratory for Experimental Medicine & Surgery in Primates [LEMSIP], closed in 1995.(See James Mahoney, DVM, “the Oskar Schindler of laboratory primates,” dies at 77.)Later employed at the University of Washington primate research center, Jones-Engel changed careers in 2019 after 30 years in academic work.(Beth Clifton collage)“Wouldn’t be here without Birutė Galdikas””I wouldn’t be where I am today without Birutė Galdikas,” Jones-Engle told ANIMALS 24-7. “In Borneo in 1983, as her field assistant, she sent me into the swamps each day to follow the long-tailed macaques, then sat with me in her hut each week to go over my field notes, instilling a rigor and clarity that shaped my path, and making clear that our responsibility is not just to the science, but to the animals themselves.”At the same time, her quiet mentoring—and the occasional treat of a Coke—was its own kind of care for a 17-year-old she took a chance on, and it left a mark that never faded.”The bit about a Coke may sound odd,” Jones-Engel said, “but in the middle of the Bornean rain forest, where treats were generally non-existent, it meant something very profound.”Gary ShapiroConditions at Camp Leakey began to improve after Gary Shapiro, a former Galdikas student, helped her to form the Los Angeles-based Orangutan Foundation International in 1986, taking over financial responsibility for the research center from the National Geographic Foundation.Galdikas’ 1995 book Reflections of Eden helped to draw attention to her work, much as Gorillas In The Mist did for Dian Fossey in 1983 and The Chimpanzees of Gombe did for Jane Goodall in 1986.(Orangutan Foundation International photo)Support from SuhartoGaldikas somewhat surprisingly enjoyed substantial political support from the Suharto government during her first three decades in Indonesia. Suharto (1921-2008), who used only one name, ruled Indonesia as head of a notoriously ruthless, murderous, and corrupt military dictatorship from 1967 until his resignation under pressure in 1998.”From March 1996 through the end of March 1998 under a special decree, Biruté served as a senior advisor to the Minister of Forestry on orangutan issues,” says the Orangutan Foundation International bio.”In June 1997 she won the prestigious Kalpataru award, the highest award given by the Republic of Indonesia for outstanding environmental leadership and activity. Biruté Galdikas was the first person of non-Indonesian birth and one of the first women to be so recognized by the Indonesian government.”(Beth Clifton collage)“We are looking at what happened to American bison””It’s very scary,'” Galdikas told New York Times correspondent Seth Mydans in December 1997.”We are looking at the demise of the orangutan as a species in the wild, which basically is what happened to American bison. It’s a terrible situation, and unfortunately it’s not going to change. Illegal logging and the clearing of trees for plantations,” chiefly to grow palm oil, “are absolutely demolishing the forests.”India Prume Minister Narendra Modi with young orangutan. (Beth Clifton collage)Pet orangutansWrote Mydans, “It is against the law to own an orangutan in Indonesia, but the laws are widely flouted. Pet orangutans,” captured as babies after their parents were shot by poachers and loggers, “are sometimes dressed in human clothes, given pillows for their beds and fed together with the family. Sometimes they are taught to perform simple tasks as servants, like opening doors and fetching food.”When they are fully grown — some reaching five and a half feet and 150 pounds — orangutans can be unruly. Their owners often dispose of them, sometimes selling them to traders for zoos.”With the backing of national and local officials,” Mydans continued, “Galdikas began recovering these pets and training them to live in the wild.”Over the years,” Mydans said, “she has helped more than 100 orangutans return to the forests. But many of these remain immigrants in their own habitat and spend much of their time close to Camp Leakey, their second home, where they receive daily feedings and beg for treats from visitors, together with several cats.”(Orangutan Foundation International photo)“Suharto was at heart a conservationist”During this time Galdikas also became known as one of several researchers who documented a marked decline of most well-known Indonesian wildlife, including as well as orangutans, tigers, the Asian rhinoceros, and flying fox bats.Wrote Galdikas in a 1999 installment of the Orangutan Foundation International newsletter, “In May 1998 the government of former President Suharto was toppled after massive student demonstrations and rioting which rocked Jakarta and the country. But while some things got better, some things got a lot worse.”Suharto was at heart a conservationist and honestly wanted to leave behind forests and some wilderness for his grandchildren,” Galdikas argued. “After his government was toppled, there was a power vacuum at the center, and many people realised very quickly that they could now do whatever they liked.(Orangutan Foundation International photo)“Invaded by illegal loggers””Tanjung Puting is a case in point. The good news is that the fifty square kilometer forest area with Camp Leakey at its center where I have worked with orangutans for the past twenty-eight years has not been touched. But every other part of the national park has been invaded by illegal loggers.”Throughout Indonesia, all national parks with stands of timber are being logged and the situation is so bad that illegal logging now outstrips legal timber production. In our province, Kalimantan Tengah, it is estimated that 80% of the timber production is illegal,” yet “entirely commercial, highly organized,” and destroying orangutan habitat.Galdikas lobbied for military protection. Meanwhile, in 1999, she continued, “an American proboscis monkey researcher working for Conservation International was chased from her camp in the park by 100 local men waving machetes who claimed that they were ’emancipating’ her camp for the local community.”As soon as she and her assistants left, the illegal logging which had already been quite blatant in her study area absolutely exploded.”Tourists were diverted to Camp Leakey.Biruté Galdikas & friend. (Orangutan Foundation International photo)Protected by marines”Local illegal loggers stressed they supported Camp Leakey and would protect it from logging as Camp Leakey had more legitimacy, in their eyes, than any other area in the park,” Galdikas continued.”Part of that legitimacy was derived, they claimed, not just from our long-term presence but also from the fact we worked for the ‘social good’ of the local communities.”Eventually, “on the direction of the [new] president and his cabinet, a warship and two other Navy ships appeared and seized three barges loaded with illegal ramin timber from the park,” Galdikas said. “At the same time, 100 marines began patrolling the park using the warship as a base. The logging stopped almost immediately.”Orangutan Foundation International in September 1999 “agreed to help the local government by underwriting the cost of distributing government-supplied rice to the people of the three Melayu villages in the immediate vicinity of the park,” Galdikas detailed.Erik Meijaard. (Instagram photo)Erik MeijaardThis helped, “But after I left Pangkalan Bun to come back to North America during September,” Galdikas recounted, “the logging started up again”Orangutan Foundation International proposed “funding one hundred local volunteers, Dayak and Melayu, to patrol the park,” Galdikas mentioned, but that came to little.Galdikas’ approach already had a legion of mainstream conservationist critics.In a 1999 biography entitled A Dark Place in the Jungle: Following Leakey’s Last Angel into Borneo, Canadian author Linda Spalding questioned whether Galdikas’ emphasis on individual animal rescue was an effective approach on behalf of orangutans as a species, as opposed to preserving orangutan habitat, a concern Galdikas scarcely ignored.Borneo-based Nature Conservancy scientist Erik Meijaard alleged that Galdikas was “playing around with symbolism without getting to the core of the issue.”Meijaard now chairs the Wild Pig Specialist Group for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.Birutė Galdikas. (Orangutan Foundation International photo)“Acts of local revenge”Galdikas escalated her work on behalf of habitat.”For decades,” Galdikas explained in a 2001 sequel, “the Dayak and Melayu people of Kalimantan Tengah were kept on the outside looking in as cronies of President Suharto and his family exploited the region’s timber and mineral wealth.”During those years, the government in Jakarta enforced protection of Camp Leakey and the orangutan study area around it, as it did many such areas in National Parks throughout Indonesia. Former President Suharto and some of his strong-arm generals considered themselves conservationists and so stayed informed about forest and conservation issues.”Villagers, local timber barons and economic predators from other parts of Indonesia all kept their distance. Now, there is a gold and timber rush by the people of Kalimantan and others smelling new opportunities. Acts of local revenge include violent confrontations between machete-wielding village men and officials who try to control their outlaw activities. Some of this I actually witnessed,” Galdikas testified.(Orangutan Foundation International photo)“Looted and destroyed as we watched””Tanjung Puting National Park offices in Kumai were looted and destroyed. My video camera was slapped from my hands and smashed to smithereens.”Even the Orangutan Foundation International study area “began to be looted and destroyed as we watched,” Galdikas said.Her response was to launch “a five-year $10 million economic and eco-development initiative,” providing “employment––daily, dependable, paid labor for village people––to improve roads, schools, and medical and sanitation facilities for their communities, and lodging and water transportation for eco-tourists.”Biruté Galdikas became an advocate for all animals. (Orangutan International Foundation photo)Rainforest Reptile RefugeMeanwhile, during her returns to Canada to teach at Simon Fraser University, Galdikas became involved in other wildlife issues, not all of them involving orangutans. |
Exposing the Big Game 