News Clippings

By MICHAEL RISINIT
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original Publication: July 8, 2006)

Tackling bird flu, one feather at a time

GARRISON

Maybe it was the 15 minutes he spent wriggling in the white-cloth bag that made him flee when the opportunity arose. Perhaps it was the shameful talk of being "swabbed."

Instinct aside, a bird in Eric Lind's hand was worth more than one flying out the porch's open screen door. The American redstart ducked out of his grasp and flew back into a summer morning about 90 minutes past dawn.

"Sorry, guys," Lind, director of Constitution Marsh Audubon Center and Sanctuary, told his colleagues on the porch - disappointed to lose one, but aware more would come.

The redstart may have kept his dignity intact with his exit, porch left. What awaited was a weigh-in, an appraisal of his body fat, the yanking of two tail feathers and the aforementioned swabbing, in which a polyester-tipped probe is inserted in the bird's posterior opening in search of fecal matter.

This summer marks the fifth year researchers have unfurled almost-invisible nets to snare songbirds winging through the cattails, oak forests or streamside habitat of the Hudson River preserve. As in previous years, birds are weighed, aged and sexed and a numbered metal band is placed on one leg as part of a nationwide effort to monitor avian populations. This year, researchers are plucking tail feathers and sampling fecal material from some captures to track the potential for avian flu. Everyone, though, returns to their nest or perch afterward.

"They're trying to pinpoint what strains (of influenza) birds are carrying and where in the country they're carrying it," Lind said. "When (bird flu) gets here, they'll want to know which strains it interacts with and changes with."

The morning last week - and the others that Lind, Assistant Director Rich Anderson and two college interns, Jessica Griggs and Grace Diehl, head out on this summer - started like any other summer dawn in the Hudson's thousands of years of existence. Songs from a Northern cardinal, a Louisiana waterthrush and a mourning dove were among just some to fill the gray light. But bit by bit, the day crept through the centuries.

A rumbling thunderstorm was replaced by thumping artillery echoing from the U.S. Military Academy across the river at West Point. That then mixed with the horn of a train on Metro-North's Hudson Line. Fat raindrops plunked in the river as Lind and Diehl untangled a worm-eating warbler from a black nylon net stretched across a hillside like an overgrown spider's web.

With winters spent in Central and northern South America, the adult warbler was a candidate for the swab-and-tail-feather-taking routine. DNA from the quills can determine more specifically where a bird lived during the cold-weather months. Those yet to leave the country and possibly rub wings with infected birds, such as juveniles or non-migratory species like a woodpecker, aren't candidates for the procedure.

"I think they're more interested in birds that have migration under their belt," Anderson said, slogging into soupy wetlands to find an empty net.

Banding season runs from about June 1 until the first week of August, when birds on their way south from points farther north pass through the sanctuary's 270 acres of wetlands and 50 acres of upland. The Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) Program, which Lind's group is part of, concentrates on birds that breed on site. The early hours - banding days are held about every 10 days - are ones of hiking to each net, anticipating what may be in each one and sometimes getting pooped on.

"This one's not frightened of me at all," Griggs said yesterday, untangling a quiet Carolina wren from a net.

Some birds, like a tufted titmouse, spend their mesh time shrieking their displeasure. The wren and a gray catbird later on would both relieve themselves on her.

"He's sitting there patiently saying, 'Rescue me,' " said Griggs, 21, of Atlanta, who will be a senior at Bucknell University. Diehl, 22, from Mount Laurel, N.J., just graduated from Messiah College. Both schools are in Pennsylvania.

Since birds don't come with ID cards, conversations like the following occurred as an ornithology book was used to determine age.

"They have buff tips on their feathers," Anderson said of two just-captured Carolina wrens.

"The gape is still white," said Lind, referring to the skin between their jaws that provides a light-colored target for food-toting parents and will eventually darken.

"Juveniles?" Anderson asked.

"I'll go with that," Lind replied.

The researchers use hand sanitizer between birds and wash the cloth bags after each use to prevent contamination. Avian influenza is caused by Type A strains of the influenza virus and many wild bird species carry these viruses with no apparent signs of harm. H5N1 is the most deadly strain. Easily transmitted bird to bird, scientists fear it may mutate and smoothly spread from bird to human and then human to human.

It's been blamed for 131 deaths in Africa, Asia and the Middle East since 2004, mainly people who come in close contact with poultry, and detected this year in European birds.

The virus is usually found in domesticated birds, and researchers are trying to determine the role wild birds may play in its transmission. The virus has yet to show up in the Western Hemisphere, although the worry is a few infected birds from Siberia could cross the Bering Strait and pass the virus to birds in Alaska. Those, in turn, would head south for the winter.

The World Health Organization issued a statement about a week ago warning that the risk remains high of H5N1 becoming a more transmissible agent in humans. Lind's group is among 256 banding stations in North America out of 474 that are collecting pathogenic data this year, said David DeSante, who heads the nonprofit, California-based Institute for Bird Populations. The institute oversees the MAPS program.

Health and environmental officials in Massachusetts, Maine, Indiana and Alaska, among others, are testing birds for the flu. The New York state Department of Environmental Conservation expects to sample up to 1,000 migratory waterfowl and shorebirds by early winter for the virus, spokeswoman Maureen Wren said. Waterfowl are known to carry very low disease-causing levels of the H5 and H7 subtypes.

At Constitution Marsh, Lind and his crew hope to sample 40 birds for flu strains - about a third of the season's total captures. But not everyone eyed for the procedure undergoes it. Like the redstart, a marsh wren manages to slip away.

"You're lucky," Anderson calls as the bird disappears in a briar thicket. "I was going to swab you."

"He knew that was coming," Diehl said.

Link to accompanying slideshow