Dr Ted Leighton traveled to Bear Island near Digby, Nova Scotia in mid-August and knew something was wrong when he spotted a few seagulls acting strangely.
“They were behaving in a way that suggested some sort of neurological disorder,” said Leighton, a retired veterinary pathologist and wildlife health researcher.
He noticed something else too.
“I could see there was an awful lot of scavengers going on. You could see a gull or two picking up something dead on the beach, repeated over and over and over along the right shore as I could see. So I thought there must be substantial mortality going on.”
Leighton, an internationally renowned wildlife disease specialist, did not have a chance to investigate further that day, but when he returned to Bear Island on September 3, his suspicions were cleared. confirmed.
“There were skeletal remains everywhere,” he said. “Often it was just wings and breastbone, no flesh at all, sometimes feathers.”
Leighton said it’s impossible to know how many seagulls have died on the island recently because the tides wash carcasses into the Annapolis Basin twice a day, but he said the number is certainly in the hundreds. .
Leighton thinks highly pathogenic avian flu is to blame for the mortality.
“It’s highly unlikely to be anything else, but of course you have to do the expensive work of testing for the virus to be sure.”
Bear Island is walkable at low tide and is the occasional destination for hikers and rock climbers. The town of Digby recently asked people to stay off the island.
An unprecedented year
Leighton collected specimens from the island, which will be sent to the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative (CWHC) for testing. The cooperative, which Leighton co-founded and then led for many years, provides disease surveillance and tracking of mortality events in wildlife across Canada.
Dr. Megan Jones, CWHC Atlantic Regional Director and Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and Microbiology at the Atlantic Veterinary College, said it has been an unprecedented year for avian influenza in the Atlantic provinces. Atlantic and across the continent.
She said that normally in the first six months of a year, the co-op’s Atlantic office performs about 300 wildlife diagnostic tests, but this year staff performed 1,400 tests over the course of this period. The organization has faced so much demand that it now has to prioritize some cases because it has already spent all of its diagnostic budget for the year.
From January to March, about nine percent of tests came back positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza, and between April and June that number rose to about 20 percent.
“It’s a challenge because there’s really not much we can do,” Jones said. “They’re going to congregate, there’s no social distancing, so there’s really not much we can do other than track it and try to minimize transmission.”
Glen Parsons, manager of the sustainable wildlife use program at Nova Scotia’s Department of Natural Resources and Renewable Energy, said the province has received reports of dead birds in every county and has seen cases of highly pathogenic avian flu from Yarmouth to Sydney.
Parsons said the virus is transmitted through direct contact, including through feces and liquids, so people are advised not to touch or approach sick or dead birds and to refrain from feeding the birds.
Anyone in Nova Scotia who finds a sick or dead bird or animal should call Natural Resources at 1-800-565-2224.
H5N1 monitoring
The North American outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza, a strain of H5N1, began in Newfoundland last December with the discovery of the virus in a show farm. After that, a case arose in a Canada goose in Nova Scotia, then in other birds in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. In the months that followed, the virus spread across the continent after sweeping across Europe last year.
It has caused significant mortalities in wild bird populations and has been found in foxes in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island and in harbor seals in Quebec. In other parts of Canada and the United States, it has been found in skunks, raccoons and bobcats, Jones said.
This particular strain of H5N1 has not caused significant illness in humans, but public health officials are closely monitoring all cases because transmission of the virus to humans could cause a global epidemic.
The CWHC sends samples of all positive cases in wild animals to the laboratory at the National Center for Foreign Animal Diseases in Winnipeg which is genetically sequencing the virus to try to detect any mutations that may make it more likely to infect people.
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