Bird Flu is Already a Tragedy.

It was late fall of 2022 when David Stallknecht heard that bodies were raining from the sky.

Stallknecht, a wildlife biologist at the University of Georgia, was already fearing the worst. For months, wood ducks had been washing up on shorelines; black vultures had been teetering out of tree tops. But now thousands of ghostly white snow-goose carcasses were strewn across agricultural fields in Louisiana, Missouri, and Arkansas. The birds had tried to take flight, only to plunge back to the ground. “People were saying they were literally dropping down dead,” Stallknecht told me. Even before he and his team began testing specimens in the lab, they suspected they knew what they would find: yet another crop of casualties from the deadly strain of avian influenza that had been tearing across North America for roughly a year.

Months later, the bird-flu outbreak continues to rage. An estimated 58.4 million domestic birds have died in the United States alone. Farms with known outbreaks have had to cull their chickens en masse, sending the cost of eggs soaring; zoos have herded their birds indoors to shield them from encounters with infected waterfowl. The virus has been steadily trickling into mammalian populations—foxes, bears, mink, whales, seals—on both land and sea, fueling fears that humans could be next. Scientists maintain that the risk of sustained spread among people is very low, but each additional detection of the virus in something warm-blooded and furry hints that the virus is improving its ability to infiltrate new hosts. “Every time that happens, it’s another chance for that virus to make the changes that it needs,” says Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. “Right now, this virus is a kid in a candy store.”

A human epidemic, though, remains a gloomy forecast that may not come to pass. In the meantime, the outbreak has already been larger, faster-moving, and more devastating to North America’s wildlife than any other in recorded history, and has not yet shown signs of stopping. “I would use just one word to describe it: unprecedented,” says Shayan Sharif, an avian immunologist at Ontario Veterinary College. “We have never seen anything like this before.” This strain of bird flu is unlikely to be our next pandemic. But a flu pandemic has already begun for countless other creatures—and it could alter North America’s biodiversity for good.

by Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty

[ed. See also:  Bird Flu Leaves the World With an Existential Choice (Atlantic).]