On beaches from Wellington to the far north this winter, small groups of volunteers are walking the high tide line with notebooks, counting dead birds. It is unglamorous work that has been going on quietly since 1951. In the past fortnight it has become one of the most useful early warning systems New Zealand has for the arrival of highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu.
The Beach Patrol Scheme is run by Birds New Zealand and relies almost entirely on volunteers who walk set stretches of coast and record every bird carcass they come across. The data has built one of the country’s longest running wildlife monitoring programmes, and it now doubles as a way of spotting the kind of unusual die off that would signal the virus is taking hold in wild populations.
Volunteer coordinator Ian McLean described the routine to 1News. “We’re going to do a patrol along the high tide. That’s where most of our birds are going to be. We’re going to be looking for any sort of bird carcasses, including land birds as well,” he said.
His other message is just as important as the counting, and it is aimed squarely at the public. “We shouldn’t panic about one or two dead birds being found,” McLean said. Winter storms and migration routinely wash seabirds ashore, and they have done so every year for as long as the scheme has existed. A single dead gull on a beach in July is ordinary. What matters is the pattern.
The advice from the Ministry for Primary Industries reflects that. People are asked to call the exotic pest and disease hotline on 0800 80 99 66 if they find three or more sick or dead wild birds together, rather than reporting every individual carcass. Seabird researcher Ariel Haswell has pointed out that collecting dead birds has long served wider scientific purposes anyway, helping track population changes, migration timing and the effect of rough weather.
New Zealand’s first confirmed case of the H5 strain came on 15 July, when a brown skua found on Petone Beach five days earlier tested positive. A member of the public picked up the live bird and took it to Wellington Zoo. MPI chief veterinary officer Mary van Andel said the bird’s behaviour was what gave it away. “It wasn’t reacting as you would expect a wild bird to do, it was allowing people to approach it,” she told RNZ.
A second case was confirmed two days later in a harrier hawk, known in te reo Māori as kāhu, found near Carterton in the Wairarapa. Wildbase Hospital’s Professor Brett Gartrell described the bird as “wobbly on its feet and dull, instead of bright and responsive”. Biosecurity Minister Andrew Hoggard said the finding was not a surprise given how harriers feed. “Hawks can get bird flu by hunting, eating or scavenging infected birds,” he said.
Since then, nothing further has been confirmed. MPI said on Monday that no additional cases had been detected beyond those two birds, and that surveillance sweeps through the Wairarapa and Wellington region had turned up no mass mortality events. Officials are not treating the quiet spell as an all clear. Van Andel said migratory ocean birds cannot be stopped from reaching New Zealand and native birds cannot be stopped from moving around the country, which makes further spread a question of timing rather than possibility.
What has surprised officials is how closely the public is watching. More than 500 reports of sick or dead birds have come in since the first detection, including 157 in a single day on one Saturday. “People are really paying attention,” van Andel said. That volume creates work, but it also means the odds of a significant outbreak going unnoticed for long are lower than they would otherwise be.
How badly the virus hits New Zealand wildlife is still an open question. Van Andel has been careful to say the effect on different species remains uncertain, because susceptibility varies. Overseas the strain has killed seabirds and marine mammals in very large numbers in some places and passed through others with far less damage. When the first case was announced Hoggard noted that “there is no evidence of any mass mortality in wildlife or transmission between wild birds in New Zealand”, and said the country had prepared as thoroughly as it could. “We’re as prepared as we possibly can be,” he said.
Some of that preparation has been going on for years. The Department of Conservation has been vaccinating the most vulnerable native populations, including a programme to vaccinate ninety kākāpō, among them this season’s chicks, which we covered last week. Conservation Minister Tama Potaka has acknowledged the practical limits of that approach for anything living outside a managed sanctuary. “Wild birds are a little bit harder to catch and you have to catch them twice to vaccinate, which can add additional stress to those birds,” he said.
The commercial poultry sector is running a separate track. Poultry Industry Association chief executive Fiona MacMillan has said the industry’s focus is on keeping the virus out of commercial flocks by tightening biosecurity, and MPI has been working directly with farms on those measures. Van Andel has warned that the virus can reach a flock through direct contact with wild birds, through feathers, or through contact with infected carcasses, which is why farm level hygiene matters more than perimeter fences.
For most people the practical response is small. Do not handle sick or dead wild birds. Keep dogs away from carcasses on the beach. Report clusters of three or more to the hotline. And if you happen to pass a couple of people walking slowly along the tide line with a clipboard on a cold Sunday morning, they are probably part of a scheme that has been running for seventy five years and has never mattered quite as much as it does now.
Have you come across dead birds on your local beach this winter, or do you volunteer on a beach patrol? Tell us what you are seeing in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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