Dead Birds

There have been several unexplicable bird deaths on the island this year. A few of them were my own chickens which dropped dead from who knows what. I have a feeling with my chickens it is old age or being egg bound but you never know, we are on the edge of the world out here. So it was with interest that I learned my daughter discovered a dead Great Blue Heron on the farm this past weekend. She found it shortly after it had died, so we decided it could be a good test specimin and promplty froze it, taking precautions lest it be something nasty.

It turns out I have a cousin involved in studying bird migration and Avian Influenza and he’s stationed in Alaska at the moment. I phoned him wondering what to do with my heron, and if he could explain cross species deaths in multiple birds. We hashed out a few scenarios, including West Nile but there are no mosquitoes at the moment, it being so cold. Without saying anything definitive we left it that the bird should be tested to determine if it had died of something interesting.

Great, now I had to track down someone to take this frozen bird off my hands and get it too them, all the while thinking I well could be the one to end up with a first case of BirdFlu on my land and here come the men in hazmat suits to disinfect the farm and carry off all my lovely chickens. . . . Nevertheless, in the name of science I began making phone calls to try to get someone interested in my dead heron. I called some of the obvious choices, but to no avail–only recorded messages. I phoned West Nile Virus Hotlines to no end. I phoned the local wildlife refuge and explained the situation. They didn’t seem to care or be concearned one way or the other but gave me some more numbers to call. All offices were either closed or had recordings leading to dead ends. Finally I phoned a marine biologist on the island who put me in contact with a veterinarian who tests marine wildlife for unknown causes of death. Hurray! I guess. I really didn’t even want to be dealing with this thing. However, it will be weeks before the bird is tested and perhaps months before the results come back.

What gets me is that in this day of high alert over Avian Flu it was so hard to get a dead bird tested, which probably did not die of anything other than old age–but who knows? I find all of this interesting in light of these two articles.