Terrifying bird flu strain ripping through Aussie wildlife
A terrifying bird flu strain is spreading through Australian wildlife, raising alarm among experts over the growing impact on native animals.
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The deadly bird flu strain killing wild birds across the country has now been found in all six states, as Tasmania records its first case.
The carcass of the wild bird was found in Tasmania’s northwest and state authorities revealed on Thursday the brown skua had been infected with the deadly strain of bird flu.
“Although we’ve had a positive detection, I want to be clear that there is no evidence of an outbreak and there is no detection in commercial poultry at this time,” Primary Industries Minister Gavin Pearce said.
The first confirmed case was in a brown skua found on Western Australia’s’s southern coast, and now only the ACT and the Northern Territory have not recorded an infection.
Skuas are large predatory seabirds that breed on Antarctic and sub-Antarctic islands and are native to Tasmania.
Mr Pearce said Tasmania had already been prepared to respond to the detection of H5N1 bird flu.
Department of Natural Resources and Environment secretary Jason Jacobi said it was inevitable the virus was found in Tasmania after other infected brown skuas were found elsewhere.
The department said it was not yet known where the bird acquired the virus, but that would be clear once testing was done at the CSIRO’s Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness.
“When this sample comes back from its analysis at the ACDP in Geelong, that’s when they’ll have really detailed sequencing information,” threatened species scientist Rachael Alderman said.
At Port MacDonnell in South Australia’s south-east, a bird’s unusual and disturbing behaviour catches the eye of locals.
Warning: This story contains images and video that some readers may find distressing.
On the ground it flaps its wings, turns in circles, cranes its neck and then somersaults.
A veterinarian told 7.30 the symptoms exhibited by this bird, which was filmed at Port MacDonnell in South Australia, were consistent with bird flu. (Supplied)
H5N1 bird flu can only be confirmed through testing but after viewing a video of the bird, a veterinarian has told 7.30 its neurological symptoms are consistent with the virus.
“Neurological signs were very obvious including stargazing (opisthotonus), incoordination, and abnormal posture — no signs of seizures or paralysis but that could happen,”
Wildlife veterinarian and associate professor at Adelaide University Wayne Boardman said.
Infected birds will then die.
Maureen Christie is the secretary of Friends of Shorebirds SE in South Australia and has been involved in conserving and tagging birds for research for years.
Now her time is spent documenting the virus’s impact on her local area of Carpenter Rocks.
“It makes me like I’m going to just burst into tears any minute,” Ms Christie told 7.30.
Maureen Christie is worried about the number of dead birds appearing at Carpenter Rocks. (ABC News: Carl Saville)
“You walk onto the beach and there’s one dead bird, and two steps on there’s another dead bird, and you turn around and take one step the other way and there’s another dead bird.
“The crested terns, the ones that I’ve seen that have been sick, tend to be off by themselves and be fairly still, huddled down, hunched down and looking miserable.
A dead bird on the beach at Carpenter Rocks. (ABC News: Carl Saville)
“I’ve seen two silver gulls sick. And one was throwing its head way back, all out of the way they normally act, and barely able to stay on its feet.
“[It’s] absolutely awful because there’s nothing you can do about it. They can’t be saved.
South Australia’s south-east has seen a number of cases of bird flu. (ABC News: Carl Saville)
“It’s not like a sick or injured bird that can be taken into care and brought back to health. Once these birds have the disease, they’re going to die.”
The ‘list of doom’
Fairy penguins on Phillip Island will be vaccinated for bird flu. (AAP: Phillip Island Nature Parks)
A federal government report dubbed “a list of doom” has warned almost 400 native bird and mammal species are at high to extreme risk from bird flu, including penguins, sea lions and seals and the Tasmanian Devil.
“Obviously we have some quite unique animals and wildlife in Australia that we are concerned about,” Agriculture Minister Julie Collins told 7.30.
“In terms of the funding, the $113 million, over $47 million of that has gone into resilience and improving habitat for those threatened native species.”
University of Queensland virologist Kirsty Short said she was concerned about the virus’s impact on native birds, based on research showing black swans were more susceptible to the virus than white swans.
A veterinarian told 7.30 the symptoms exhibited by this bird, filmed at Port MacDonnell in South Australia, were consistent with bird flu. (Supplied)
“We hypothesised based on this that Australia’s geographic isolation could cause some species to have a restricted immune response because there wasn’t that selective pressure, and as a result, being more susceptible to H5N1 than say Northern Hemisphere species,” Professor Short said.
“Unfortunately, Australia has a very strong history of extinction. And the thing that I’m concerned about is that this may be the tipping factor that tips a species into extinction.”
Kirsty Short says Australia’s isolation may mean some native species have “a restricted immune response” to H5N1. (ABC News: Chris Gillette)
Professor Short told 7.30 that Australia and New Zealand were the “last holdout”, with H5N1 having ravaged more than 80 countries worldwide.
Globally, hundreds of millions of poultry have died or been slaughtered because of the virus.
“H5N1, which we often refer to as bird flu … really first emerged in Southern China in 1996,” Professor Short said.
“And what happened is that H5N1 then spread around the world, but it continued to evolve.”
Farmers fearing the worst
Egg producer Brian Ahmed is preparing for the worst. (ABC News: Nick O’Farrell)
While the virus has been found in wild and native birds in Australia, it has yet to be detected in poultry here. The risk to humans is low.
Professor Short told 7.30 the virus was brutal on poultry.
“Chickens can actually have a lot of swelling and haemorrhaging, and they can die within 24 hours,”
she said.
Farmers like Victorian egg producer Brian Ahmed are preparing for the worst.
“At the moment we’re very strict on who we allow onto the property. We have a fenced-off area where all our sheds are and no one’s going to go into that section unless they have to,” Mr Ahmed told 7.30.
As a caged egg supplier, he said his farm was at less risk than free-range producers.
Brian Ahmed has introduced strict protocols on his chicken farm. (ABC News: Nick O’Farrell)
Ms Beaty said poultry fanciers had spent years breeding and developing their flock.
“Some of the breeds of birds are rare and that means there’s not many people showing them,” she said.
“Now, if those breeds are lost, they’re lost for good. That’s it. They’re done.”
Vaccines have been used in Asia to manage bird flu in poultry, but not in Australia.
A duck at the Geelong poultry show. (ABC News: Nick O’Farrell)
Ms Collins said that was “not something we’re ruling out here”.
“We’re certainly working very closely with industry and with the technical experts on what is viable and feasible,” she said.
The federal government has said it will stop testing every dead bird as it was moving to a reporting system based on events.
Professor Short said it was difficult to predict how bird flu would continue to spread across Australia but based on the overseas experience, the virus is here to stay.
Australia’s first confirmed case of local transmission of H5N1 bird flu was among greater crested terns in South Australia in July. (ABC News: Carl Saville)
“This particular strain of H5N1 seems to be incredibly effective at spreading as well as infecting different species,” she said.
“This [strain] first emerged in the Netherlands in 2020 and still now the Netherlands are having outbreaks. So this is not a short-term situation.”
A dead bird on the beach at Carpenter Rocks. (ABC News: Carl Saville)
In Carpenter Rocks, Ms Christie was trying to stay positive and hoped whatever the impact on birds, species would eventually bounce back.
“The death toll? It will be what it’ll be,” she said.
“[But] I can’t imagine life without the variety of the animals and plants that we’ve got.”
A bobcat is seen at the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources’ Salato Wildlife Center in Frankfort. (Provided by Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources)
FRANKFORT — Regulations to expand bobcat hunting, including at night with thermal equipment, moved forward Tuesday, despite bipartisan concern from some lawmakers about the status of Kentucky’s bobcat regulation.
The state legislature’s Administrative Regulation Review Subcommittee has the authority to vote to declare a regulation as “deficient” if lawmakers disapprove of it or recommend changes to a regulation. The committee Tuesday took neither action on regulations proposed by the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources.
Sen. Steve West, R-Paris, a co-chair of the committee, told the Lantern lawmakers decided to defer to the department’s decisionmaking with the understanding that “if there’s some type of impending doom with a collapse of the bobcat population” the department can come back to lawmakers with revised proposals.
“Anecdotally across the state if you talk to hunters, the bobcat population seems to be pretty strong,” West said. “If we felt that there was harm to the overall population, or that they were endangered in any way, or things of that nature, we probably would have acted, but the members of the committee didn’t feel that way today.”
The proposed regulations from the wildlife management agency would expand the bag limit — the number of bobcats that a hunter or trapper can kill during a season — from five to 10 bobcats and allow, for the first time, a hunter to kill one bobcat at night. The Kentucky Fish and Wildlife Commission, a volunteer board that votes on hunting regulations, approved the bag limit expansion last year and approved the nighttime hunting of bobcats in June.
“It’s curious to me that we would hunt something that was not overpopulated, that we don’t have a definite number of them in the state, and that it seems to me that we have biologists that are not in lockstep on this,” said Sen. Julie Raque Adams, R-Louisville. “It would be my opinion that we would have more of a unified opinion on this before we tackle this issue. But that’s just my opinion.”
In May, the department’s director of wildlife and the manager of the state’s furbearer program told the Fish and Wildlife Commission they haven’t been able to get adequate tooth samples from hunters and trappers to estimate the state’s bobcat population, along with having concerns over the safety of nighttime hunting. The chief executive of the department, Commissioner Rich Storm, worked with a powerful state lawmaker to legalize the nighttime hunting of bobcats through the passage of a last-minute bill, Senate Bill 39, during this year’s legislative session. The department’s deputy commissioner Gabe Jenkins told the Fish and Wildlife Commission it was the “intention” of Senate Bill 39 that the board move forward with regulations for hunting bobcats at night.
Sen. Julie Raque Adams, R-Louisville, questioned why the department was expanding hunting of an animal when wildlife biologists were not in “lockstep” on the decision. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Liam Niemeyer)
Rep. Mary Lou Marzian, D-Louisville, told department representatives she was concerned that people could wipe out bobcats and that “it’ll be another species that’s going to be gone forever in Kentucky.”
Todd Blevins, the state director of the animal welfare and protection group Humane World for Animals, also told the committee it would be a risk to expand the bag limit for bobcats and allow the nighttime hunting of bobcats when “we simply just don’t have the numbers.”
“You’re not going to find the trappers and organizations like mine on the same page very often. But when you do, I think that tells you that there’s something wrong with the policy,” Blevins said.
But representatives for the department defended the decisions to move forward with the bobcat hunting expansion. Jenny Gilbert, the legislative liaison for the department, said there had been requests to “increase the harvest” of bobcats before this year’s legislative session.
She also said the department and commission took “the most conservative approach” to complying with changes to state law. Despite the increase in the bag limit to 10 bobcats, the proposed regulations limit hunters to only killing one bobcat at night during the season. Hunters can kill only three bobcats out of the 10 overall, both daytime and nighttime hunting. Hunters are allowed to kill the remaining bobcats in their bag limit with other weapons such as bows or traps.
Benjamin Monarch, the general counsel for the department, said “the process of informing our decisions is one of methodology that we take very seriously and is very comprehensive.”
“Does that mean that you’re always going to have perfect information? Certainly not.” Monarch said. “We do the best we can to gather data and extrapolate from that data to make reasonable conclusions.”
West told the Lantern that wildlife management issues get “very complicated” and “there’s a constant struggle” over hunting seasons with various interested groups.
“We have to call balls and strikes and just be an umpire, and that was our call today on this one,” West said.
The proposed regulations will now go before the Interim Joint Committee on Natural Resources and Energy where lawmakers on that committee can also consider the regulations, according to a committee assistant for the Administrative Regulation Review Subcommittee.
Correction: This article previously misstated that the department would hold a September 30 hearing on the regulation changes allowing the nighttime hunting of bobcats. That September 30 hearing is for a regulation that limits the nighttime hunting of beavers and bobcats on public lands. This article was also updated to clarify the process in which regulations go before the Interim Joint Committee on Natural Resources and Energy.
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