In brief
Scientists are alarmed as bird flu wipes out thousands of birds, prompting fears of its impact on humans.
Every spring, over 200,000 northern gannets flock to eastern Canada’s coast, filling cliffs with life as they prepare to breed. However, in May 2022, many females were met with tragedy as thousands of these beautiful seabirds began washing ashore, dead. According to Stephanie Avery-Gomm, a seabird biologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, “the culprit was the H5N1 bird flu virus, which had just arrived in North America.”As months passed, the virus spread rapidly, leading to tens of thousands of deaths among northern gannets. “You have to harden your heart to work on this kind of scale of mortality,” Avery-Gomm stated. Originating in 2020, scientists now worry the virus could potentially trigger a human pandemic, a conjecture that is distressing given the ongoing devastation among wild birds. Globally, wild bird populations have suffered staggering losses with estimates of 24,000 Cape cormorants dead in South Africa and over 57,000 pelicans reported lost in Peru. “The scale of the mortalities is truly unprecedented,” noted Johanna Harvey, an avian disease ecologist at the University of Maryland. The avian community is paying a heavy price, and we all need to pay attention.
