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Bird flu ‘inevitable’ in the NT as authorities turn to bird watchers and conservationists for help

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A mustachioed Datto holds his pink and grey galah on a finger.
Bird owner Datto says the NT could “lose a lot of good birds” once the new strain of bird flu arrives in the territory. (ABC News: Tristan Hooft)

In short:

Authorities say it is only a matter of time before the latest strain of bird flu arrives in the Northern Territory, but conservationists and wildlife experts say vaccination of native species is not an option.

Instead, the NT government is looking to enlist the support of the territory’s network of birdwatchers and conservationists to help slow the disease’s spread.

What next?

Chief Veterinary Officer Sue Fitzpatrick is calling on bird owners to protect their flocks and report any symptoms.

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Veterinary authorities say it is “inevitable” H5N1 bird flu will spread to the Northern Territory, almost two months after the first case of the disease was identified in Australia.

The virus, first detected in Western Australia in late June, has now been found in all six states, leading to bird vaccination programs in some of them.

Senior Director of Species Management at the NT Department of Lands, Planning and Environment Tony Griffiths said the disease’s arrival in the territory was imminent.

A close up side profile of Tony Griffiths.
Tony Griffiths says it’s only a matter of time before the H5N1 bird flu strain arrives in the NT. (ABC News: Tristan Hooft)

“It’s definitely going to happen,” he said.

“It could be weeks, it could be months, but it’s a national event, it’s the biggest national disease event that has ever occurred in Australia for wildlife.”

For bird owners like Darwin local “Datto”, who frequents Nightcliff Jetty with his galah Buddy, the threat of the flu has created a looming sense of anxiety.

A flock of white birds in flight against a background of blue sky.
The NT is home to 450 species of bird, 37 of which are considered threatened. (ABC News: Tristan Hooft)

“It’s going to take away a lot of privileges of me taking [Buddy] where the other birds are, and we’re going to lose a lot of good birds over it,” he said.

Datto said an outbreak in Darwin’s northern suburbs, where wild birds routinely flock along the coastline, would devastate locals who come to enjoy the wildlife.

“We get all myriads of birds here — the firebirds, the honey eaters and everything else — and it’ll be a shame to see all of them in a little pile of feathers on the side of the road,” he said.

The NT’s Chief Veterinary Officer Sue Fitzpatrick said it was not just wild species that were at risk, urging backyard poultry farmers and other bird owners to be vigilant against the disease.

Sue Fitzpatrick looks straight ahead while wearing a striped, sleeveless top.
Sue Fitzpatrick says the Territory’s backyard poultry owners can do their bit to help stop the spread of bird flu. (ABC News: Tristan Hooft)

“While we don’t have a commercial poultry industry, we certainly have many backyard poultry owners,” she said.

“We’re looking for bird keepers to protect their birds from wild birds, enclose their runs and put some roof over their runs, protect feed and water sources from wild birds.”

Birdwatchers essential to response

Dr Griffiths said the plan to combat H5N1 in the NT would largely rely on wide-scale surveying of areas where birds are known to flock, such as the Top End coastline and Barkly Lakes.

He said while experts had been rigorously sampling faeces and water supplies to identify contamination, vaccination of native species was not on the cards.

A masked lapwing stands in the grass facing the camera.
The masked lapwing has small spurs on its wings which it uses to protect its chicks. (ABC News: Tristan Hooft)

“We have 450 species of bird in the territory and 37 of those are threatened, but we don’t rely on captive breeding programs to support the management of those species,” he said.

“The threatened birds we have are dispersed over very large areas and it’s very difficult to catch them to vaccinate.”

With a vast network of birdwatchers across the NT, Dr Griffiths said the government was looking to harness the power of the territory’s avian enthusiasts to tackle the tyranny of distance.

A blue-eyed bird walks along the ground.
Keen birdwatchers are being urged to use their skills to help monitor the spread of bird flu in the NT. (ABC News: Tristan Hooft)

Biodiversity Watch NT’s Graeme Sawyer said having boots on the ground would be essential to the mitigation effort.

“The authorities’ problem is always that they haven’t got any staff in most places,” he said.

“By using bird-watching fraternities, Indigenous communities and ranger programs, you’ve got people right across the country, and a lot of them know a heck of a lot about their birds.”

Mr Sawyer said anyone with a passion for birds and wildlife conservation could help to slow the spread of the virus.

A masked lapwing forages for food while another is silhouetted in the foreground.
Graeme Sawyer says the NT’s bird-watching fraternities, Indigenous communities and rangers “know a heck of a lot about their birds”. (ABC News: Tristan Hooft)

“I would just urge anybody who’s got a remote interest in birds to sharpen up their eyes and get their binoculars out,” he said.

“It is a big unknown and the more information we can get early, the better.”

The Persistence of the Myth of the Big Bad Wolf

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It’s not the job of Congress to pluck wolves or any other species from the endangered list.
By Wayne PacelleJust over a week ago, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., stood at his desk in the ornate chamber and told a story about wolves older than the republic. Without ranting or raving, the three-term senior senator from Wisconsin suggested that wolves menaced game populations, ate up livestock, and caused kids to scurry away from school bus stops.Then he asked the Senate to pass the so-called Pet and Livestock Protection Act — already approved in the House by a narrow margin, 211–204, and co-led by Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis. He was a hair’s breadth away from sending the bill to President Trump for his signature.Sen. Cory Booker stood in the breach. Deciding which rare creatures live under the shield of the Endangered Species Act, he noted, is not a job for senators, who may be under the sway of Farm Bureau or the trophy hunting lobby. It’s a job for wildlife scientists hewing to the conservation standards in the law, with their work, too, subject to judicial review.Booker’s objection blocked the anti-wolf bill. The narrative special interest groups proffered about wolves was more myth than fact, more supposition than science, more “Jaws” than David Attenborough documentary.I know it’s a myth, because I’ve stood where the truth lives. I lived with wild wolves.Help us defend wolves and the laws that protect them!DONATE TODAY TO PROTECT WOLVES
Wolves and MenDuring a summer in college, I spent more than three months in the wilds of Isle Royale National Park, whose rocky shores are buffeted by the swells of Lake Superior.There are no permanent settlements on the 210-square-mile World Heritage Site. It’s closed for half the year, when the wildlife has the run of the place. And even though its shimmering aspens and white birches, its rocky ridgelines, and crystalline inland lakes together compose a breathtaking landscape, it draws fewer visitors than any U.S. national park. It’s that remote.There’s a minor cluster of National Park Service buildings and a rustic commercial hotel at Rock Harbor, and a smaller set of log cabin buildings on the other end of the island. But that’s about it for the human footprint. No matter where you roam, you find wildness.I spent days on backcountry patrols and plenty of nights camping alone, with the moon and the heavens forming a dazzling ceiling that speckled the trees and lakes with light.Three wolf packs stalked their territories, collectively covering every inch of the island.I never worried about a wolf attack. Not for a second.The black flies, the mosquitoes, and the ticks were the animals who gave me anxiety. I had a few thoughts that I might spook a moose and stir a charge by a 1,200-pound bull or a riled-up 800-pound mama. The giant cervids typically ignored me, focused on swallowing up leafy greens as they waded in the island’s bogs.There have been a handful of documented attacks in North America, but no established modern record of a healthy wild wolf killing a person in the United States.So, when Sen. Johnson read the script from the Farm Bureau about Wisconsin children waiting at bus stops and suggesting that wolves are something they should fear, it was more storytelling than reality.A child at a bus stop has bigger worries than wolves: a reckless or a distracted driver, a falling tree, even a lightning strike.Wolves Make People SaferThe irony is that wolves make Wisconsinites safer.A peer-reviewed study in Wisconsin found that the arrival of wolves in a county was associated with about a 24% reduction in deer-vehicle collisions, with the economic benefits of fewer collisions dwarfing the costs of verified wolf predation on livestock.Deer-vehicle collisions declined 24% in Wisconsin counties where wolves returned. The reduction saves an estimated $10.9 million annually from avoided crashes—63 times the cost of verified wolf attacks on livestock.Think about that for a moment. The animal being presented as a threat to Wisconsin families helps protect those families from collisions between speeding vehicles and animals in the road.Wolves keep deer, elk, and moose populations in check, and that phenomenon has been studied longer at Isle Royale than in any other place. Wolves are the bioengineers whose hunting keeps ecosystems humming.That matters even more in the 37 states and four Canadian provinces struggling with chronic wasting disease (CWD), the fatal neurological disease afflicting deer and elk and said to be a long-term threat to their survival across North America. In northern Wisconsin, where there are wolves, there’s almost no CWD in deer. Wolves read the vulnerability in afflicted animals and take them out, leaving the uninfected animals to thrive. In southern Wisconsin, where wolves have been purged, CWD is rampant. CWD-infected deer, or “zombie deer” as they are known, may be a human health threat to hunters who consume the animals. The human variant of CWD is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and it’s always fatal in people, just as it is in deer and elk.Northern and central forest counties, home to about 1,226 wolves in 336 packs, show near-zero CWD positives. Southern farmland without wolves has much higher CWD rates, reaching up to 50% of adult bucks in core counties. The graphic notes this is a geographic correlation, not a controlled study.Why would Wisconsin officials want fewer wolves when stable wolf populations check the spread of this deadly disease? Keep the deer herd healthy? Keep the deer hunting economy alive and well? Allow the collection of organic meat from animals who’ve never known confinement?State and federal authorities provide compensation for farmers and ranchers who lose sheep or calves to wolves. And the best farmers and ranchers deploy nonlethal methods to deter wolves, whether guard dogs, or night penning, or fladry, or lights to deter the wolves.Wolves: The Forebears of the Domesticated Dogs in Our LivesCongress enacted the Endangered Species Act in response to mass killing driven by bloodlust, commerce, and prejudice. The combination of human appetites and technology was devastating to hundreds of species. As for wolves, we poisoned, trapped, and shot them down to small remnant populations in northeastern Minnesota and on Isle Royale by the 1970s, eliminating them from nearly all of the Lower 48.The ESA turned that around. But within the last decade, states revived persecution in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, where wolves had been reintroduced in the mid-1990s. Hunting with packs of dogs. Steel-jawed traps. Night hunting. Even the return of bounties. It’s been a scorched earth policy.Cory Booker put the brakes on expanding the killing we’re seeing in the Northern Rockies. He asked other senators not only to honor the code of mercy but to read the science and heed the law and dispense with the mythmaking.Wolves occupy only 10% of their historic U.S. range; about 1,200 wolves live in Wisconsin alongside 5.97 million people; and there are no recorded cases of a healthy wild wolf killing a person in the modern United States.Wolves occupy just 10% of the land they once roamed before people waged war on them.There are 1,200 or so wolves in Wisconsin. And there are 5,970,000 or so people.Too many wolves?These men doth protest too much, me thinks.Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, “The Bond” and “The Humane Economy.”

Further spread of avian flu virus in Australian wild birds

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With ever more cases of highly pathogenic avian influenza detected in its wild population, Australia is preparing to vaccinate some endangered native birds against the H5N1 virus serotype.

Jackie Linden

Further spread of H5N1 avian flu virus in Australian wild birds | WATTPoultry.com

August 14, 2026

Australia

BeyhanYazar | iStock.comArticle Summary

H5N1 avian flu cases in Australian wild birds have surged to 205 across six states as of mid-August, more than doubling in nine days, prompting the world’s largest wildlife vaccination campaign targeting 5,000 little penguins in Victoria.

  • 205 confirmed H5N1 cases across six Australian states as of August 13, with South Australia accounting for 139 cases
  • 60 additional wild birds tested positive in the past week, primarily swift terns found in South Australia and Victoria
  • World’s largest wildlife vaccination campaign underway with 5,000 little penguins on Philip Island receiving two-dose vaccine protection
  • Rapid geographic expansion from first detection in mid-June to six states including newly affected Tasmania
  • Regional context: New Zealand remains stable with only 2 cases, while Nepal reports 162 affected poultry flocks with over 835,000 birds culled

Over the past week, a further 60 wild birds have tested positive for the H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus in Australia.

Majority of the birds were swift terns, according to the latest notification from the veterinary authority to the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH). They were found around the end of July and early August in the states of South Australia and Victoria.

The H5N1 virus was first identified in Australia in mid-June. Since then, 88 wild birds had tested positive for the virus across five states of the country up to that date.

This week, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported that the first wild bird case had been confirmed in the island state of Tasmania.

Latest update on the disease situation from the federal government (dated August 13) puts the total number of cases at 205 — more than double the number of reported nine days previously. — across six states (including Tasmania).

Recording by far the most cases to date has been South Australia with 139 virus-positive birds, while outbreaks have also been recorded in Western Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

In order to protect key endangered bird populations from the disease, around 5,000 little penguins on Philip Island in Victoria will be rounded up to receive the first of two doses of vaccine, reports ABC. This is thought to be the largest wildlife vaccination campaign anywhere in the world.

According to the same source, Australia’s federal government has so far acquired around 1,500 doses of vaccine. 

Update on the disease situation in New Zealand

No more wild birds have tested positive for the H5N1 virus serotype in New Zealand.

Since the country’s first ever cases of this virus were detected in mid-July, the number of infected wild birds remains at two, reported the Ministry for Primary Industries on August 12. Both of the infected birds were found in the Wellington area in the south of the North Island.

To date, the H5N1 HPAI virus has not been detected in any of New Zealand’s poultry flocks. 

More outbreaks in Nepal’s poultry flocks

Based on notifications to WOAH, poultry at 91 of the nation’s farms tested positive for the H5N1 virus variant between mid-March and the start of July this year.

However, Kathmandu Post reported recently that the number of affected flocks stood at 162 (as of July 23). Officials confirmed that more than 835,000 poultry have been culled in order to control the spread of the infection, along with over 1.22 million eggs and 264 metric tons of feed.

According to this source, the virus was first detected in Nepal in this disease series in mid-February, and that cases had been identified in 12 districts up to mid-July.

To compensate affected poultry owners, the government is reported to have paid 507 million rupees (NPR; US$3.3 million) to 104 farmers, this source reports. 

Avian flu developments elsewhere in Asian poultry

In the Philippines, the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal Industry reports that new H5N1 HPAI infections have been detected in just one municipality in the previous 31 days (up to August 7).

This latest outbreak appears to have been at a chicken farm in Kalinga, a province in the Cordillera Administrative Region on the island of Luzon. Meanwhile. the outbreak situation remains on-going in Pangasinan province in the Ilocos Region — also on Luzon — where the virus has been detected in 27 flocks of chickens and ducks.

Taiwan’s animal health agency has recently declared to WOAH that an earlier HPAI outbreak series has been “resolved.”

Between July of last year and the end of the same month in 2026, the H5N1 virus serotype was detected at 28 locations in eight cities/counties, according to the closing report. Directly impacted through mortality or preventative culling were more than 873,000 commercial poultry.

In the past week, the authorities in India have also declared an end to earlier H5N1 HPAI outbreak series.

Two declarations followed six outbreaks in poultry in the northeastern state of Sikkim, and another in wild birds in Bihar the east of the country. Both series commenced in January of this year, and were considered closed in late July.

Testing to open in September for Cheboygan’s archery deer hunting season

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Portrait of Jillian FellowsJillian Fellows

Archery testing to open in September for Cheboygan deer hunters

Cheboygan Daily Tribune

Aug. 15, 2026, 4:01 a.m. ET

Those wishing to take part in the City of Cheboygan’s limited archery deer hunting season will need to pass mandatory archery testing next month. 

According to rules posted on the city’s website, the testing will begin on Sept. 2 at the DPW complex and continue throughout the month. Testing will be from 5-7 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays and from 9-10 a.m. on Saturdays. There will be no testing on Labor Day, Sept. 7, and no testing will be available after Sept. 30. 

Mandatory archery testing will begin on Sept. 2 for those wishing to take part in the City of Cheboygan’s limited archery deer hunting season.

More: Cheboygan council allows fall bow hunt to control deer populationMore: Cheboygan council extends special deer bow hunt in city for another month

Last year, the city council approved a fall archery hunt to manage the growing deer population. The hunt is restricted to designated private parcels of land. Less than 25 hunters qualified for a hunting permit. During the Oct. 1 to Nov. 14 period, the hunters killed 17 deer — 14 does and three bucks.

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The hunt was later extended for another month due to its success.

Applications for the hunt are available at cheboygan.org/news.