Hundreds of dead seagulls found as Nova Scotia’s ‘unprecedented’ bird flu outbreak continues | CBC News

dr Ted Leighton visited Bear Island near Digby, NS in mid-August and knew something was wrong when he spotted a couple of seagulls acting 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 could see that there was a lot of looting going on. A seagull or two could be seen poking at the beach for something totem which was repeated over and over along the straight coast as I could see it. I too thought there must be considerable mortality.

Leighton, an internationally renowned wildlife disease scholar, 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 flesh at all, sometimes feathers.”

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

Leighton believes highly pathogenic avian influenza is responsible for the deaths.

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

Walkable at low tide, Bear Island is an occasional destination for hikers and rock 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 testing. The cooperative, which Leighton co-founded and then ran for many years, provides disease surveillance and mortality tracking in wildlife across Canada.

dr Megan Jones, the CWHC’s Atlantic regional director and an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology and Microbiology at Atlantic Veterinary College, said it has been an unprecedented year for avian flu in the Atlantic provinces and across the continent.

She said that normally in the first six months of a year the cooperative’s Atlantic office performs about 300 diagnostic tests on wildlife, 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, about nine percent of tests came back positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza, and between April and June that number had risen to about 20 percent.

“It’s challenging because there really isn’t much we can do,” Jones said. “They will congregate, there is no social distancing so there is not much we can do about it other than track it and try to minimize transmission.”

Glen Parsons, manager of the wildlife sustainable 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 bird 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 not to feed birds.

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

Tracking H5N1

North America’s outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza, a strain of H5N1, began last December in Newfoundland with the virus being detected at a display farm. After that, 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 deaths in wild bird populations and has been found in foxes in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island and in 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 disease, but public health officials are closely monitoring all cases because human transmission of the virus could cause a global outbreak.

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