Australia is taking every one of its people off Macquarie Island before bird flu gets there.
The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water said on 28 August it would temporarily withdraw the 24 tradespeople, scientists and support staff living at the research station in the Southern Ocean, about 1500km south-east of Tasmania. The icebreaker RSV Nuyina will collect them in late September or early October, well short of the full year they signed up for.
H5 bird flu has not reached Macquarie Island yet. The department is moving people out because it expects the virus to turn up during the spring breeding season, when thousands of elephant seals are born within metres of the station buildings.
“This is an unusual measure but it’s the most appropriate course of action based on our assessments of risk and operational realities,” deputy secretary Sean Sullivan said in the department’s statement. “Our first priority is the health and safety of our expeditioners.”
Sullivan said the department could not ignore what living through a mass die-off would do to a small isolated crew. “While the risk to humans of H5 bird flu is considered low, we can’t ignore the psychosocial risks of living near potentially large numbers of affected animals,” he said. “Our expeditioners already live and work in one of the world’s most remote and challenging environments.”
The precedent sits a long way west. On Heard Island, an Australian territory in the far south of the Indian Ocean, elephant seal pup mortality of more than 90 per cent was recorded in some areas after the virus arrived. RNZ reported that about 13,000 pups died there. The department said expert assessments predict a high likelihood of something similar at Macquarie Island this season, and that overseas experience shows few direct actions can be taken to stop it.
That decision matters here for a simple reason of geography. Macquarie Island sits roughly 700km west of Campbell Island, which is about the same distance as Campbell Island is from Bluff. The Auckland Islands are a little closer again. New Zealand’s subantarctic islands are in the same weather, the same water and the same seabird flight paths.
They are also carrying a lot of the world’s wildlife. The Department of Conservation says more than 40 seabird species breed on the islands, or at least 11 per cent of all the world’s seabirds. Ten albatross species nest there and six of those are found nowhere else. No fewer than 15 land and freshwater bird species are found nowhere else on earth. About 8500 pairs of southern royal albatross breed on Campbell Island each year, which is more than 99 per cent of the world population of the species.
The New Zealand sea lion is in the same basket and in worse shape. It breeds almost entirely at the Auckland and Campbell island groups, and more than half of all its pups are born on one small island, Dundas, in the Auckland group. DOC’s most recent field survey put pup production at the Auckland Islands at 1376 pups in the 2024/25 season, down from 1457 the year before and only just above the historic low of 1278 recorded in 2022/23. The species is classed as nationally endangered and its main breeding colony is already in decline.
The virus is no longer hypothetical in New Zealand. H5N1 was confirmed here for the first time in mid-July, in a brown skua found at Petone Beach in Wellington. A kāhu, or swamp harrier, was confirmed near Carterton days later. The most recent case was a northern giant petrel found dead by a DOC ranger on a remote Cape Palliser beach in the Wairarapa, confirmed on 21 August.
Ministry for Primary Industries chief veterinary officer Mary van Andel said the giant petrel was no shock. “Although it’s disappointing to find one of these infected birds, it’s really not surprising,” she said. “We can definitely expect to have more of these ocean-going seabirds arrive in New Zealand. We know that they come here. We know that birds in the Southern Ocean are infected with clade 2.3.4.4b.”
Van Andel said the detection did not change the domestic picture much. There has been no spread detected in New Zealand wildlife and no infection in poultry, and she said chicken and eggs were absolutely safe to eat.
The giant petrel is the part worth sitting with. It is a subantarctic bird that spends most of its life at sea, and it is exactly the sort of traveller that has been moving the virus around the bottom of the world. University of Auckland conservation biology professor James Russell made the point to the Science Media Centre in early July, before the first New Zealand case was confirmed.
“The giant petrels that are introducing the disease are a subantarctic species found throughout the Southern Ocean and the virus may already be on our subantarctic islands which are usually unvisited over winter,” Russell said.
Nobody has been down there since autumn to look. The islands are nature reserves, entry needs a permit, and the field season runs over summer. DOC’s sea lion team worked Enderby, Dundas and Figure of Eight islands from 2 December to 25 January last summer. The next crews will not be on the ground until roughly the same window this year, which is also when the pups arrive.
Russell also warned that watching is not the same as acting. “Surveillance is important to determine where, when and what populations are being impacted, but without consequential interventions in response to detection, surveillance alone will only document the inevitable spread,” he said.
DOC senior science advisor and wildlife vet Kate McInnes told the Science Media Centre that mammals get caught up in it too. “Cases have also been seen in mammals associated with bird mortality events including seals and sea lions,” she said. She said colony nesting birds such as gulls, gannets and terns are the most likely to be hit hard, because the virus moves through close contact with secretions and faeces, and that if it spreads in wild birds here it cannot be eradicated and management options will be limited.
What can be done is being done, at a small scale. DOC is vaccinating about 300 core breeding birds from five critically endangered species, being kākāpō, takahē, tūturuatu or shore plover, kakī or black stilt, and kākāriki karaka, the orange-fronted parakeet. Those birds are in captivity or on predator-free offshore islands. There is no version of that programme that reaches an albatross colony on Campbell Island or a sea lion beach on Enderby.
Australia has decided the sensible thing is to get its people out of the way and let the season happen. New Zealand has not had to make that call, mostly because there is nobody stationed on our subantarctic islands to withdraw. The question is what the summer teams find when they finally get down there.
If you see three or more sick or dead wild birds in a group, Biosecurity New Zealand asks that you report it on 0800 80 99 66 rather than touching or moving them.
Have you visited New Zealand’s subantarctic islands, or worked with seabird colonies closer to home? Tell us what you think should happen next 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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