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DR. Ted Leighton visited Bear Island near Digby, NS in mid-August and knew something was wrong when he saw a pair of seagulls behaving strangely.

“They were behaving in a way that suggested some kind of neurological disorder,” said Leighton, a retired veterinary pathologist and animal health researcher.

He noticed something else.

“I saw that a lot is being cleaned up. You could see a seagull or two on the beach pecking at something totem, repeatedly and over and over along the straight shoreline as I could see. So I figured there was significant mortality.”

Leighton, an internationally recognized wildlife disease scientist, did not have an opportunity to investigate further that day, but when he returned to Bear Island on September 3, his suspicions were confirmed.

“There were skeletal remains everywhere,” he said. “Often it was just wings and sternum, no meat at all, sometimes feathers.”

Leighton said it’s impossible to know how many seagulls recently died on the island because the tides wash carcasses into the Annapolis Basin twice a day, but he said the number was certainly in the hundreds.

Leighton believes the highly pathogenic avian influenza is the cause of the extinction.

“It’s very unlikely it’s anything else, but of course you have to do the expensive work of virus testing to be sure.”

Bear Island can be reached on foot at low tide and is an occasional destination for hikers and climbers. The town of Digby recently asked people to stay away from the island.

An unprecedented year

Leighton collected some specimens from the island, which will be sent to the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative (CWHC) for research. The cooperative, which Leighton co-founded and then ran for many years, provides disease surveillance and death tracking in wildlife across Canada.

DR. Megan Jones, CWHC’s Atlantic Regional Director and assistant professor in the Department of Pathology and Microbiology at Atlantic Veterinary College, said it had been an unprecedented year for avian influenza in the Atlantic provinces and across the continent.

She said the cooperative’s Atlantic office typically performs about 300 diagnostic tests on wildlife in the first six months of a year, but this year staff performed 1,400 tests during that period. The organization has faced such high demand that it now has to prioritize specific cases, having already spent its entire diagnostic budget for the year.

From January to March around nine percent of the tests were positive for the highly pathogenic bird flu, from April to June it was around 20 percent.

“It’s challenging because there’s not a lot we can do,” Jones said. “They will come together. There’s no social distancing so there’s not much we can do about it other than monitor it and try to minimize transmission.”

Glen Parsons, manager of the Sustainable Use of Wildlife Program at Nova Scotia’s Department of Natural Resources and Renewable Energy, said the county has received reports of dead birds in every county and has seen cases of highly pathogenic bird flu from Yarmouth to Sydney.

Parsons said the virus is transmitted through direct contact, including feces and liquids, so people are advised not to touch or approach sick or dead birds and not to feed them.

Anyone in Nova Scotia who finds a sick or dead bird or animal should call Natural Resources at 1-800-565-2224.

Follow H5N1

The North American outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza, a strain of H5N1, began last December in Newfoundland with the virus being detected at a show farm. Then a case appeared in a Canada goose in Nova Scotia and then in other birds in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. In recent months, the virus has spread across the continent after sweeping across Europe last year.

It has caused significant mortality 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 US, it has been found in skunks, raccoons and bobcats, Jones said.

This particular H5N1 strain has not caused significant human illness, but public health officials are closely monitoring all cases because human transmission of the virus could trigger a global outbreak.

The CWHC sends samples of all positive wild animal cases to the National Center for Foreign Animal Diseases lab in Winnipeg, which conducts genetic sequencing of the virus to try to detect mutations that make humans more likely to be infected.

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