Low vibes, high path

This winter, lobsterman and friend-of-gulls, John Makowsky wrote to me to say he’d perceived a drop in the number of great black-backed gulls around his boat. There were still plenty of herring gulls, and his particular favorite black-backed, Red Eye, and her mate Hero, were still turning up, but the overall count of GBBG just seemed depressed.

I heard from a few birders and gull enthusiasts that they were seeing a similar pattern at various coastal spots. Just…a vibe of missing GBBG. Last year’s outbreak of HPAI (high pathogenicity avian influenza) hit the black-backeds particularly hard, and I don’t think it’s impossible that it made a perceptible dent in their population.

Avian flu is on the minds of everyone who works in seabird colonies, as we get closer to the field season. In February, I was leading a field trip along the Merrimack River, and a family of participants found a dead, banded herring gull in the wrack line. It was not an Appledore gull, but sported the white on red, field readable band of John Anderson’s team up on Great Duck Island in Maine.

I wrote to John about the bird, and he wrote back, saying “One of ours, yes, alas, banded as an adult on Great Duck on 6/16/2020. any possible causes of mortality? we are super nervous about HPAI.” There were no outward signs of cause of death (there often are not), and I also wondered and worried about flu.

John and I commiserated about the state of things, and about our plans to band gulls this summer, and how to assess the risks involved.

The federal Bird Banding Lab sent out a memo to all banders in advance of the season advising us on the situation, and how we might elect to mitigate the risks to both humans and birds. They included this graphic to help visualize the various measures a banding team might elect to take. The most effective control is, of course, to not band at all. This is what we decided to do last year, when we canceled our July trip to band fledglings. Gulls are in the highly susceptible category, so we need to be much more cautious than our colleagues who are banding low susceptibility groups like songbirds.

As we plan our summer banding, we find ourselves settling in somewhere in the middle of this hierarchy of most to least effective mitigation measures: we got our flu shots, and have bought ourselves a whole bunch of PPE–disposable gowns, masks, gloves–and we also plan to disinfect our equipment regularly to avoid spreading the disease from bird to bird.

The type of trapping we use does not aggregate the birds together; we trap one bird at a time using wire boxes. This set up means the birds are not kept squeezed together like they are in group trapping. Still, we are concerned that we might carry the virus from bird to bird on our persons, shoes, equipment, and we will strive to limit that, even though it will slow our operation somewhat.

Finally, we are coordinating with regional virologists who have been tracking the disease in birds and seals and other wildlife. We will facilitate viral sampling of the colony this summer as best we can. If we are going to band at all, we want to be as careful as possible, and also maximize the information and knowledge of patterns of disease spread, between and within colonies. You can see from one of their data tables that HPAI swept over colonies from far up in Maine all the way to Massachusetts. And it didn’t stop there either.

So, that’s our plan currently, but we remain open to changing it as we learn more. We love the gulls so much, and we know we already stress them out with our disruptions and scientific harassment. The last thing we want to do is be responsible for further spreading a deadly disease while they are in the middle of the hard work of incubating eggs and raising babies.

Send all the positive vibes you can to the gulls, and we will keep you posted on what we learn about HPAI as we learn it.