Some 20.9 million birds were culled in infected domestic flocks from October through December to prevent the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI).

By Staff Author

and 

Chuck Abbott

https://www.agriculture.com/nearly-80-million-birds-die-in-almost-two-years-of-bird-flu-8422689

Published on January 5, 2024

One-fourth of U.S. losses to bird flu in outbreaks that began in early 2022 were recorded in the past three months, when the viral disease staged a resurgence, according to USDA data released on Thursday. Some 20.9 million birds were culled in infected domestic flocks from October through December to prevent the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI).

Bird flu hit egg farms so severely in 2022 that egg prices soared 32% above the 2021 average, the largest increase for any of the food categories tracked by the USDA during a year of high food inflation. With flocks rebuilt, egg prices rose only marginally in 2023 and are forecast to fall 12% this year.

“HPAI was confirmed in egg layers in November 2023 for the first time since December 2022. Price impacts of the outbreak will be monitored closely,” said USDA economists two weeks ago.

A total of 79.7 million domestic birds, mostly egg-laying hens and turkeys being raised for human consumption, have died from HPAI or in eradication efforts since the first confirmed outbreak on Feb. 8, 2022. Since then, the disease has been confirmed in 1,059 flocks in 47 states. Because bird flu can wipe out a flock quickly, standard practice for agricultural officials is to kill all the birds in an infected flock and monitor nearby farms in an effort to prevent the spread of the virus.

Some owners of large poultry operations have received millions of dollars in indemnities for the loss of flocks due to HPAI in 2022 and 2023. Rembrandt Enterprises in Iowa received $17.3 million, Cold Spring Egg Farm in Wisconsin received $12.1 million, and Sunrise Farms in Iowa received $6.6 million, according to California veterinarian Crystal Heath, who filed a public records request for the information. “Killing animals is big business — a big taxpayer-subsidized business. You are paying for it whether you eat animals or not,” said Heath on social media.

USDA press aides were not immediately available to discuss HPAI indemnities or modifications to the department’s HPAI database, which is now focused on recent outbreaks, especially those occurring in the past 30 days.

“While it also includes summary data compiled since the outbreak began, looking at cases confirmed over the last 30 days provides the best picture of how the virus is currently impacting U.S. birds,” said the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which compiled the database. “We expect the number of cases to ebb and flow as the level of virus continues to change in different areas based on wild bird movement.”

HPAI is most prevalent during the cold months. Officials say the disease is spread by migratory waterfowl. They advise owners to keep their flocks away from wild birds and to follow biosecurity practices, such as changing footwear, to prevent accidental contamination of bird housing. The ongoing HPAI outbreak is the worst U.S. animal disease event ever and is far larger than the 2014-15 outbreak that killed 50 million birds in commercial flocks.

The cultural forces that fueled our success now threaten to end it.

• BY KRISTEN FRENCH
• January 5, 2024
• Share https://nautil.us/evolution-led-humans-into-a-trap-483792/

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Evolution has led humans into a dark corner, according to a new study. We bonded into groups to solve local problems. Sometimes we shared our solutions with neighboring groups, and they shared theirs with us. The spread of knowledge was a good thing. Culture led to cooperation. 

But the scale and impact of human groups has kept growing, and the finite resources of Earth have not. Competition for resources has escalated, and global governance doesn’t appear to be in our nature. The authors’ conclusion is not a hopeful one: “Ours is a bleak reading of the possibilities of the future of environmental management and human evolution on Earth.”

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I asked Tim Waring of the University of Maine professor, a coauthor of the study, what gives.

As you say in your paper, over the past 100,000 years or so,  human adaptation to the environment has been driven by culture. How has this contributed to our current predicament?

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In order to understand how the Anthropocene could emerge from an evolutionary perspective, you look at the span of human history, and you have to ask the question: What makes us unique? 

We see two strong themes. One is culture, our ability to react to the environment, and then to pass on the socially learned information or behavior we’ve accumulated, to modify and improve it, test it, and pass it on again. So that gives us cultural inheritance, which we have used to adapt more rapidly to the environment than other species.

The second major theme is that we don’t just adapt individually, we do it in groups. Because of the way we share information and cooperate, we’re really good at exploiting our shared knowledge as a group to do better than other species can. To not just capture one buffalo, but capture many. To divide up our labor and do agriculture. 

Humans come preloaded genetically and culturally with the willingness to go in on risky endeavors.

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Why can’t we use this capacity to transcend the current crisis?

My previous research—and my research generally—focuses on trying to understand when humans come together to share limited environmental resources. We do that all the time. In fact, that is one of the ways that I argue we’ve dominated the planet. But one of the common factors that determines whether we will succeed at solving environmental challenges, according to my prior research, is scale. The resource in question has to be available at a scale where a group of humans can manage it. If it’s too big, we fail. So, for example, ocean fisheries are too big for any one individual nation to control because they are global and every other nation is also harvesting them.

Another factor that has historically made it possible for us to solve environmental challenges is that many individual populations are separately trying to solve the problem at the same time. So one group fails and another group succeeds or succeeds a little bit, and other groups observe this, so we can learn and adapt culturally as a group from the solutions that are out there and improve on them. For example, our modern systems of canal irrigation and reservoirs, with complex dams and gates, didn’t emerge overnight. Some groups copied what other groups had done and improved it and improved it again over a long, long period of time. But there is only one global system on Earth. 

Another major challenge is that if you look at managing the biosphere, it’s an extremely complicated thing to do, really technically demanding and complex. But we don’t have a global society or government than can manage it. If we wanted to tax carbon globally, there’s no government that can say, “Yeah, we’re taxing carbon globally.”

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Is there anything that gives you hope that we can break out of this evolutionary trap?

Even though the cooperation dynamics do not look good, the fact is that humans come preloaded genetically and culturally with the willingness to go in on risky endeavors with groups of people and to cooperate with them even when the outcome is unknown. We do that again and again. We’re also pretty intelligent. But we have to solve this on the first go, and usually it takes us multiple tries to solve big environmental problems.

We don’t have time for multiple tries.

We don’t have enough time. And we don’t have neighboring planets to learn from. If we were able to look at Mars and say, “Wow, Mars did a terrible job with their atmosphere, let’s not do that,” that would really help. 

Miles Blumhardt

Fort Collins ColoradoanView Comments

https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2024/01/04/colorados-released-wolves-photographed-for-first-time-after-reintroduction/72111203007/

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The first images of what are believed to be one of Colorado’s released wolves in the wild was captured Tuesday in Grand County.

That photo comes after a representative of Windler Ranch, located near Yampa in southern Routt County, said in a video on its Instagram page Dec. 22 that on Dec. 21 the family saw what they believe were four of the five wolves from Colorado’s initial wolf release Dec. 18.

The Coloradoan reached out to Colorado Parks and Wildlife on Thursday afternoon to verify the Tuesday photo and the Windler Ranch claim, but the communication went unanswered as of Thursday night.

The Windler Ranch representative, who identified herself as Kathryn and a member of the family that owns the ranch, said in the Instagram video that Colorado Parks and Wildlife was at the ranch within an hour to investigate the sighting, answer questions and provide them with resources.

However, the Coloradoan asked the state wildlife agency in a Wednesday email if it had received any verified sightings of the released wolves, and the agency said it had not.

Todd Schmidt told the Coloradoan on Thursday the photo of the wolf he took while driving to work Tuesday morning about 6 miles southeast of Kremmling and 5 miles from the initial release site is authentic.

The Kremmling business owner said he was driving along the Trough Road (Grand County Road 1) looking at bighorn sheep when a wolf ran across the road in front of his vehicle near Inspiration Point.

He said he pulled over and took photos with his cellphone out his back window of the wolf trotting through the sagebrush, but the images were “foggy.”

That’s when he said the wolf offered a better photo opportunity.

“When I stopped, it wasn’t like he was hauling a– like he’d seen a ghost,” Schmidt said. “He just meandered up the hill, at one point just looked at me, then parked himself in the sun on the rock.”

He said the wolf was about 20 yards from him, but factoring in the incline of the hill, he estimated it was less than 50 yards from him.

Schmidt said he took several photos of the wolf before it wandered off. He said it wore a collar and was by itself. The wolves released by Colorado Parks and Wildlife in December were fitted with GPS satellite collars.https://www.google.com/maps/embed/v1/place?key=AIzaSyD9HrlRuI1Ani0-MTZ7pvzxwxi4pgW0BCY&zoom=10&q=Grand+County,+CO

Schmidt said he tried to report the sighting, calling the Colorado Parks and Wildlife office in Kremmling. He was referred to the Hot Sulphur Springs office but then ran out of cell service and didn’t report the sighting.

“I was just trying to do the right thing and make the call; I didn’t know it was such a big deal,” said Schmidt, who said he is against Colorado’s reintroduction of wolves. “There are a lot of different opinions about wolves.”

https://cm.coloradoan.com/article-body/inline-desktop_121223_Holiday

He said he’s been asked why he didn’t shoot the wolf, to which he replied, “because I don’t carry a firearm and don’t want to get fined.”

The Windler Ranch family member said in the Instagram video that they saw three gray wolves and one black wolf, capturing the black one on camera. The video did not include a visual of the black wolf. Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s initial release included three gray and two black wolves.

She said they have not seen the wolves since. The ranch is located about 30 miles northwest of the initial Grand County release site.

She said immediately after seeing the wolves, the family checked their livestock, notified their neighbors and called Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

“This has hit close to home,” the Instagram post read. “There is a lot of unknown, uncertainty, and fear. To be honest it’s overwhelming and another obstacle for ranching families in the State of Colorado to overcome. Please continue to pray for Western Colorado as we navigate these uncharted waters while protecting our livestock, families and small businesses.”

In the video, the woman said: “None of us know what to expect, but I can truly say no matter what side of the line you are on prior to the reintroduction, the reality is here, and we need to build a relationship together as livestock owners and with the state to move forward to make this as successful as possible for all of us and work cooperatively as possible.”https://www.instagram.com/p/C1KyFMoRzUE/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=12&wp=1116&rd=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.coloradoan.com#%7B%22ci%22%3A0%2C%22os%22%3A23249.099999904633%7D

The state wildlife agency released 10 wolves that were captured in Oregon as part of its initial reintroduction effort at various sites in Grand and Summit counties in late December.

The controversial release riled Colorado ranchers who claimed Colorado Parks and Wildlife reneged on its promise to avoid bringing wolves into the state that have been confirmed to have killed livestock in Oregon.

“They lied to our faces,” Grand County rancher Gordon Lewis said of the state wildlife agency. “They told us if they dropped the wolves off, they would notify us and that hasn’t happened. We are tired of this dog and pony show they are putting on.”

Colorado Parks and Wildlife told the Coloradoan Thursday in an email that it will not make staff available for an interview regarding its release of wolves in Grand County.

In a Wednesday email, the Coloradoan asked the agency if it would send news releases involving naturally migrating and released wolves’ mortality, depredation, movement out of state or onto tribal lands or other significant events.

It responded none of those events have taken place since the wolves were released and added: “CPW is currently determining the regularity with which it will report on wolf-livestock depredation events and movement information for both released and naturally migrating wolves.”

Note: This story was updated through Friday morning with more details.