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Has bird flu killed millions of chickens in Colorado?
200 Million Birds. 2,100 Flocks. The Largest Avian Influenza Outbreak in US History Is Entering Its Most Dangerous Window. Right Now.
Mar 22
Written By My Vet Candy
The numbers alone should stop you.
200 million birds affected. More than 2,100 flocks. Four times the devastation of the 2015 outbreak that, at the time, was considered the worst in American history. And right now, as spring migration pushes millions of wild birds across flyways that run directly over and through domestic poultry operations from commercial egg farms to backyard coops, the most dangerous seasonal window of the year is opening.
Highly pathogenic avian influenza has not behaved like previous outbreaks. It has not peaked and receded and allowed the industry to rebuild and exhale. Since the current strain was first detected in 2022, it has persisted continuously in wild bird populations — year after year, season after season — creating an ongoing exposure pressure that the 2015 outbreak never generated and that no amount of farm-level biosecurity can fully neutralize as long as the wild reservoir remains active.
“There is an ongoing and/or continuous exposure to the virus that we did not see in the 2015, or earlier, outbreaks,” said Alan Huddleston, acting chief veterinary officer with the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
That sentence is the most important context any veterinary professional advising poultry clients can have right now. This is not a repeating outbreak. It is a continuous one. And spring just made it worse.
Where It Stands Right Now
Wisconsin has emerged as one of the hardest-hit states in the current surge, with more than 4.3 million birds currently affected — the second-highest number of any state in the nation over the past month. More than 11.6 million birds have been infected across approximately 50 flocks in Wisconsin alone since 2022. Active outbreaks are concentrated in Pennsylvania and Indiana, but the geographic spread is national and the pattern is consistent with every previous spring surge since the outbreak began.
Nationally, more than 14.3 million birds have been infected across 84 flocks in the current active outbreak period. Wisconsin has recorded four cases already this year after five detections across all of last year — a pace that state officials are watching closely.
“We’re definitely entering a period of increased concern, where we’re concerned that the risk from wild birds sharing this virus with domestic birds is higher than it was in the previous months,” said Heather Roney, program veterinarian for the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.
The cause in the vast majority of cases is the same: exposure to wild birds. The agency is still investigating specific recent outbreaks, but the epidemiological picture across Wisconsin and nationally has been consistent since 2022. Wild birds carry the virus. Domestic birds encounter them directly or indirectly. The virus moves.
The Industry Changed. The Virus Stayed.
Here is the story that deserves more attention than it is getting.
The commercial poultry industry in the United States has fundamentally overhauled its biosecurity protocols since 2015. The changes are not cosmetic. Farms now operate with controlled single-entry access, detailed visitor and equipment logs, strict limits on shared personnel between facilities, dedicated clothing and boot protocols, and a pervasive operational focus on what comes in and what goes out.
“Poultry farms have very controlled access, in one gate and out the other,” said Roney. “Logging who’s been there, limiting shared equipment or personnel between poultry farms. A lot of focus on what comes in and what comes out, and keeping those premises clean to avoid introducing anything new.”
The USDA reports broad compliance from the industry. The practices being implemented now are meaningfully more rigorous than anything in place during the last major outbreak. The industry has done, by most assessments, what it was asked to do.
And yet the number of affected birds is four times higher than 2015.
The explanation is not a failure of biosecurity. It is a failure of the underlying premise that farm-level biosecurity alone can stop an outbreak driven by continuous wild bird reservoir persistence. You can lock down a farm. You cannot lock down a flyway.
What Veterinary Professionals Need to Be Saying Right Now
For the mixed practice veterinarian, the poultry specialist, and frankly any practitioner whose clients include backyard flock owners — and that is more practices than most clinicians realize — the spring migration window is the moment for proactive client communication, not reactive outbreak response.
The clinical signs to communicate clearly: birds dying over the span of days without prior symptoms, decreased feed and water intake, lethargy, and purple discoloration or swelling of the wattles, combs, and legs. These are the presentations that require immediate reporting, not a wait-and-watch approach.
The biosecurity guidance for commercial operations is well established and the industry is largely implementing it. The gap is backyard flocks — owners who are passionate about their birds, often well-intentioned, and frequently unaware of how quickly this virus moves or how little direct wild bird contact is required to introduce it to a domestic flock.
Key messages for backyard flock clients right now: keep birds indoors during spring and fall migration where possible. Register your flock with your state agriculture department. Avoid introducing new animals for a minimum of 30 days. Use dedicated clothing and footwear when tending birds. Do not share equipment between flocks.
The USDA offers free biosecurity assessments to poultry owners with 500 or more birds. That resource exists. Your clients with larger backyard operations should know about it.
The Human Health Dimension
It warrants mention, because your clients will ask: there have been 71 confirmed cases of HPAI in humans in the United States, including one confirmed case in Wisconsin. Two people have died. The risk to the general public remains low, but it is not zero, and it is not static. Anyone with direct exposure to infected or potentially infected birds — which includes the farmers, flock owners, and veterinary professionals on the front lines of this outbreak — warrants monitoring and should know the reporting channels.
Anyone suspecting an outbreak should contact a state veterinarian or call the USDA at 1-866-536-7593. For wild bird concerns, contact your state’s department of natural resources.
The Bottom Line
The largest avian influenza outbreak in American history is not a past-tense story. It is a present-tense emergency entering its highest-risk seasonal window with no clear end in sight and a wild bird reservoir that shows no sign of clearing.
Your clients with birds — commercial, backyard, or anywhere in between — need to hear from you before the next detection, not after it. The biosecurity measures exist. The guidance is clear. The window to act is right now, while the flocks are still healthy and the options are still preventive rather than reactive.
Spring migration does not wait for the profession to catch up.
Report suspected HPAI outbreaks to your state veterinarian or the USDA at 1-866-536-7593. Wild bird concerns can be reported to your state Department of Natural Resources.
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UC Davis: Global Strategies to Protect Seals and Sea Lions from H5N1 (Avian Influenza)
Last Updated: Sunday, 22 March 2026 03:27 Published: Sunday, 22 March 2026 06:28
An adult male northern elephant seal attempts to mate with an adult female near the end of the breeding season.
A Birds-Eye View of the Impacts of H5N1 on Pinniped Conservation
March 22, 2026 – By Kat Kerlin – When the H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza virus was discovered on a poultry farm in Asia in 1996, there was little indication that it would become so widespread and so destructive. Within 30 years, it reached every continental region except Oceania, infecting more than 400 million poultry, tens of thousands of elephant seals and sea lions, about 1,000 people and many other mammals and wild birds.
Related: Due to H5N1 Bird Flu the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) Urges Public to Avoid Sick or Dead Marine Mammals and Birds Along California Coast
First Cases of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in Northern Elephant Seals Confirmed in California at Año Nuevo State Park. First Detection of the Disease in a Marine Mammal.
Pinnipeds, which include seals and sea lions, have been hit unusually hard by the virus.
A study from the University of California, Davis, steps back to look at the overall impact of the virus on pinnipeds worldwide and offers recommendations for moving forward to monitor, characterize risk and build resilience in the affected species. It also suggests ways to help prevent the virus from reaching currently unaffected but vulnerable pinniped species, such as the endangered Hawaiian monk seal or Galapagos sea lion.
The paper is published in Philosophical Transactions B as part of a themed issue, “Managing Infectious Marine Diseases in Wild Populations.” It states that throughout Peru, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, highly pathogenic avian flu outbreaks have killed at least 36,000 South American sea lions, 17,400 southern elephant seals and 1,000 South American fur seals.
“There is a huge, unprecedented conservation risk,” said corresponding author Christine Johnson, director of the Institute for Pandemic Insights at the UC Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine. “Influenza is constantly changing, and that is a big problem now that it’s widely circulating in birds and marine mammals.”
Elephant seals: Canary in coal mine
Co-author Marcela Uhart, a veterinarian with the UC Davis Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center and its Latin America Program, witnessed and chronicled a massive 2023 outbreak of HPAI H5N1 in southern elephant seals in Argentina.
“Southern elephant seals were the canary in the coal mine alerting us to a bigger issue of pinnipeds throughout the entire world,” said Uhart. “We can do something better to be prepared the next time before it spreads to other species.”
In late February, northern elephant seals in California marked the first cases of HPAI H5N1 in a marine mammal in the state. The speedy detection was due to routine surveillance for H5N1 that was set up over a year prior by UC Davis and Año Nuevo Natural Reserve in collaboration with UC Santa Cruz’s long-term monitoring of the northern elephant seal colony at Año Nuevo State Park.
At the end of 2025, in response to a growing number of H5N1 cases in Bay Area seabirds, the team increased surveying efforts, walking the length of the reserve to document and sample any sick or dead bird or mammal throughout the elephant seal breeding season.
These efforts in advance of the outbreak allowed teams to quickly respond to changes in the seals’ health and collect samples for testing at UC Davis. Johnson called it an “exceptionally rapid detection of an outbreak in free-ranging marine mammals,” and an example of the kinds of preemptive efforts to detect and respond to outbreaks effectively.
Key recommendations
The paper’s key recommendations include:
- Fund and support long-term wildlife monitoring, and conduct surveillance both between and during outbreaks to detect trends early and respond swiftly before outbreaks spread.
- Build stronger communication and coordination networks among local, national and global researchers, agencies and academic partnerships to prepare for outbreaks. This includes working with public health practitioners and social scientists to engage and protect people at risk of disease exposure.
- Make wildlife health surveillance a routine part of conservation research and management activities.
- Improve technologies for non-invasive monitoring. For example, the UC Davis Institute for Pandemic Insights brings together engineers and wildlife health experts to deploy auditory and thermal imagery with satellite imagery to better understand key events or tipping points that may indicate an outbreak is likely.
- Pursue high-level policy changes and international agreements that address the root causes of avian influenza outbreaks.
- Address concurrent conservation threats. The authors emphasize that avian influenza is just one of many stressors affecting marine wildlife. Many species face challenges including habitat loss, declining food supply and climate change. Small populations are especially vulnerable.
“H5 avian influenza viruses are an emergent threat to seal and sea lion populations already facing numerous conservation pressures,” said first author Elizabeth Ashley, a graduate student researcher pursuing a dual degree in veterinary medicine and epidemiology at UC Davis. “Understanding how this virus spreads in coastal ecosystems is critical for protecting vulnerable marine wildlife.”
Additional authors include co-first author Ralph Vanstreels of UC Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine, Michelle Barbieri of NOAA Fisheries, Wendy Puryear of Tufts University, Frances Gulland of the Marine Mammal Commission, and Cara Field of The Marine Mammal Center.
The research was funded through a US National Science Foundation Center for Pandemic Insights award, National Marine Fisheries Service-Sea Grant fellowship, and California Sea Grant. Source: UC Davis
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