Every fourth of July or days after, we hear about tragic instances in which birds succumbed to death due to fireworks or fear of the yearly American tradition. It happens annually.
But this year, a new kind of bird conundrum has taken hold.. SOMETHING is killing the songbird.. And it is not just in Pennsylvania!
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BIRD IS THE WORD
The Commission said that health experts from the Wildlife Futures Program (WFP) at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine (Penn Vet) and officials from the Pennsylvania Game Commission were investigating at that time more than 70 general public reports of songbirds that are sick or dying due to an emerging health condition that is presently unknown.
Undoubtedly since then the number has grown..
Even here in Coal Speaker home base, we have seen a lessening of those fantastic morning songbirds, and more than a few dead avian species sadly in the dry, tall summer grass.
Affected birds are being tested for several toxins, parasites, bacterial diseases, and viral infections. To date, test results have been inconclusive… Twelve species have been reported: Blue Jay, European Starling, Common Grackle, American Robin, Northern Cardinal, House Finch, House Sparrow, Eastern Bluebird, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Carolina Chickadee, and Carolina Wren…
The first reports of problems surfaced in Washington D.C. about mid-May as the spring was in full bloom. Wildlife managers and rehabbers in Washington D.C., Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia began receiving reports of sick and dying birds with eye swelling and crusty discharge, as well as neurological signs.
At that time, experts in the D.C. began to tell people to take down bird feeders immediately–the same advice given to Pennsylvanians recently.
The District of Columbia Department of Energy and Environment, Maryland Department of Natural Resources, West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, and National Park Service are continuing immediately began working with diagnostic laboratories to investigate the cause of mortality. Those laboratories included the USGS National Wildlife Health Center, the University of Georgia Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study, and the University of Pennsylvania Wildlife Futures Program.
At this time, nothing conclusive was discovered..
Pennsylvania is now joining the list of other states seeing this strange problem, including Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia..
BULGING EYES
While there is no conclusive information as to what is causing all of this, there is one common trait of the illness: Crustiness around the eyes, some reports say that there are bulging or swollen eyes. Along with that reports of the eyes of birds being sunken in..
The birds also show neurological symptoms like not being able to keep their heads up or are uncoordinated.. they appear that they cannot fly, that they are disoriented when they try.
THE CICADA CONNECTION?
This is just one theory .. But it it an interesting one nonetheless. Brian Evans, an ornithologist with the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in Washington, D.C., brought up the idea to the NPR that the illness began to appear around the same time the Brood X cicadas began to emerge. Experts have said eating too many cicadas can hurt a dog’s digestive system because their exoskeletons and shells are hard to digest.
But since that time, it appears that songbirds and others have been found in locations where there are no cicadas.. potentially eliminating this from the fold. Additional to that, there would most likely have been historical accounts in which previous cicada invasions would have equaled similar results, but a search of previous news organizations headlines don’t yield evidence of that.
What else could it be?
Here is what we know it is NOT: According to published reports, scientists have eliminated a few possible causes, though, including salmonella; avian influenza; West Nile virus; Newcastle disease viruses; other paramyxoviruses, herpesviruses and poxviruses; and Trichomonas parasites.
Coal Speaker went back and studied headlines of the past…
In 1957 it was reported that birds were dying because of lack of food..
In 1979 it went unexplained.
In 1995 it was because of DDT on crops.
Back in 1998, there were reports of songbirds dying from salmonella.. If one bird got it, it spread fast. No social distancing among our avian friends..
Even more, a similar disease in the mid-1990s known as “finch eye syndrome” was found in house finches with swollen and crusty eyes. In those cases, the bacterium Mycoplasma gallisepticum was identified as a cause. It does not appear to be the cause of the current outbreak.
Indeed, time seems different than that.
This time it is not salmonella or the finch eye syndrome, the usual suspects.
That is more alarming than before, when we had a mundane and common explanation..
Scientists are stumped.. so we are too.
Keith Russel, a program manager for urban conservation at Audubon Mid-Atlantic, asks this interesting question:
“The troubling thing in our area is we … haven’t been able to pinpoint the infectious agent, which is worrisome,” he said. “Disease is as potent a problem in the birds in the wild as it is for people, just like the coronavirus. Could this turn into an massive epidemic that hurts or kills massive numbers of birds? We just don’t know.”
