Avian Flu? Don't Feed The Birds

If you haven’t heard, I’m here to tell you: Enough about COVID — the new disease in town is avian flu.

Humans don’t get it, birds do. Dave, who runs Spring Farm in Sag Harbor, lost all of his pheasants in a matter of a few days. They died of bird flu.

How did they get it? He thinks it was from mallards that come and go from the pond on the site. Some birds can be carriers; apparently, the mallards that he is so familiar with, are.

He says he has had enough. He’s run the game farm for many a year, now he’s going to retire.

Quick calls to chicken marketers on the South Fork were more optimistic.

Neither North Sea Farms on Noyac Road in North Sea nor Iacono’s on Long Lane in East Hampton near the high school lost any chickens — none were reported to be even a bit sickly. Those two growers don’t have any permanent standing water around.

But all sorts of birds, big and little, can come down with the deadly disease. Bald eagles in Florida and upstate New York have succumbed to it.

When Mary Laura Lamont of Fish and Wildlife, who knows more about Long Island bald eagles than anyone else I can think of, was asked, she said that she doesn’t know of any local eagle disease problems, but she did say that a sick sanderling, one of the Long Island shorebird species, was brought to a wildlife rehab center, then died. Sounds like the avian flu.

We may be lucky. From first appearances, we may have escaped a full-scale epizootic situation. But it is much too early to tell. Other local naturalists have yet to report cases.

On the other hand, Sag Harbor, which is usually overrun with fish crows by this time, has only a few and they tend to be silent, keeping a lid on their nasal caws. And Vicki Bustamante, who reported two ravens at “the farm” off Merchants Path in Southampton Village, adds that fish crows are not as common in the village as they usually are. Their ranks could well have been decimated by the disease during their annual trip north.

The same Vicki Bustamante, who lives in Montauk on a hilltop east of Lake Montauk, has observed many, many red-winged blackbirds, grackles and cowbirds at her feeder. She reluctantly says she will stop feeding, as doing so will cut down on the chances of spreading the avian flu disease should it suddenly appear. Stopping bird feeding is the best and cheapest way of stopping the spread of this dreaded disease.

I grew up on the North Fork in Mattituck next to my grandfather’s white leghorn chicken farm. His father raised bard rocks. In 10 years of existence, surrounded by two kinds of chickens, not a single one died of avian flu disease as well as he could remember.

If it comes to Long Island and ravages farms with chickens, turkeys, and other feathered species and wild birds, as it is killing so much poultry in America’s Midwest and the South, it will be a very, very sad day, indeed.

I checked six local osprey nests in the Sag Harbor area: All of the nests were occupied and active. If these ospreys were coming down with something, one couldn’t see it.

So keep your ears and eyes open. Don’t feed the birds, and keep your fingers crossed. Two terrible diseases, one atop the other, might otherwise prove to be two too many.

An aside: Terry Sullivan sent a photo to me and asked for an identification. I looked through many books with local flora but couldn’t tell what it was. The flowers were pink, five-petaled, and the leaves were basal. Terry discovered it growing In the sandy soil of a backyard of a house on Northwest Harbor.

I sent the picture of the mystery flower to Vicki Bustamante by email. Less than a half hour later, I received an email from Vicki. “Erodium” was her brief answer.

I looked up Erodium in my plant books, and she was absolutely right on. Storks’s-bill, it said.

I added a new plant to my already very long life list.