The wild and the domestic

   I think birds are awesome, but I’m not a birder. For most of my life I have appreciated birds the way I appreciate the stars – in blissful ignorance. Various people have tried to improve my knowledge of the constellations, and I have stubbornly resisted. Part of what’s great about the stars is how far away they are. They have the good sense to keep their distance. Nothing I say or do is going to make any damn difference to the stars. And generally this is how I have viewed birds. They belong to another realm. I like to know the birds are up there. I tell myself I’m doing my bit by maintaining great quantities of standing dead timber in our woodlot. I love to hear the woodpeckers doing their thing, and I would feel impoverished if I could not step out the back door at night and harken to the calls of owls echoing across the bottomlands. But my earthbound mind is not wired to learn their names or to keep score of sightings.
   However, I recognize that birders do important work. Birds cannot keep their distance from humans, because we have occupied or altered so much of their habitat. Although in some instances we co-exist amicably, overall humanity is squeezing the birds out. So the cataloguing and surveying of birds by researchers and citizen-scientists is essential. Perhaps it is appropriate, at this moment in history, to be obsessed with birds.
   Jonathan Franzen, one of my favourite novelists, is a born-again birder. He recently wrote an excellent essay called “Why birds matter,” to commemorate the centenary of the U.S. Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Under this treaty, Canada implemented the Migratory Birds Convention Act, also in 1918. The Audubon Society has proclaimed 2018 the Year of the Bird, partly to raise awareness of new threats to avian species, and also in protest against the Trump administration’s bold strides toward watering down the legislation. In the U.S., the Act has been re-interpreted, effectively giving a free pass for accidental bird deaths resulting from industrial activity – notably the drilling, transport, and refining of oil.
   Franzen talks about the amazing diversity among the 10,000 or so known bird species – the practical and social functions of their wildly various plumages and songs, and their evolutionary success in even the most remote and seemingly inhospitable corners of the earth. But mostly we are captivated by birds because they “do the thing we all wish we could do but can’t, except in dreams,” he says. “Taken all together, the flight paths of birds bind the planet together like 100 billion filaments, tree to tree and continent to continent. There was never a time when the world seemed large to them.”

**********
   You have probably seen maps or even videos illustrating these bird migration routes wrapping the earth. I saw one recently at an agriculture conference in Halifax, as part of a presentation by Dr. Iain Richards, a British veterinarian who is a specialist in “ecological disease analysis.”
   “They all overlap each other,” said Dr. Richards, pointing to the flight paths projected on a screen at the front of the room. “So it’s very easy for disease to spread across from Asia – where a lot of the problems seem to originate – right through to the U.K.”
   Richards has an interest in the interactions between human activities and the natural environment. He has spent much of his career in the Lake District in northwestern England (where William Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud, writing some seriously cheesy poetry). This famously scenic region was granted UNESCO World Heritage Status in 2017, a designation that explicitly recognized its man-made features – its postcard-pretty agricultural landscapes – as well as its rugged natural beauty. So there is a certain irony in the fact that 2017 also brought an Avian Influenza outbreak to the area.
   Richards pointed out the nearby coastal wetlands on his map. “We have so many millions of birds come in. It’s a stunning sight in the middle of winter,” he said. “A duck, or several ducks, landed, coming in from the Russian Steppes for over-wintering, and it lands and it does what all ducks do, which is to poo everywhere. . . Unfortunately, this is a big pheasant-rearing area. So when the ducks landed, they bumped into these things.”
   Avian influenza is a concern because it can jump species. The H1N1 strain killed between 20 million and 50 million people at the end of the First World War, Richards said. In 2017, the strain was H5N8, which is not one of the ones considered highly dangerous to humans, though it kills turkeys and chickens very quickly. It’s harder to detect in game birds, which is why it was not detected at first.
   “You’ve got this easily transmitted agent, and you’ve got these birds – the host – that don’t show much sign of the disease,” said Richards. “And when you’ve got 25,000 pheasants on one farm, three of them dying is not going to prompt any concern, because they’re dying all the time. It was cold, it was dark, it was wet. This was January, at 54 degrees North . . . And then there are the human factors. This was the peak time for pheasant brooding. January sees the end of the shoots, so the pheasants are then all gathered up and moved around to various areas to breed.”
   I was not aware that in the U.K. many millions of farmed game birds are released each year. But when you think about it, it’s hardly surprising that the highly ritualized sport of shooting, as practiced by well-dressed Brits, requires annual re-stocking. It highlights some tricky territory in the interface between the natural environment and the sphere of human endeavour.

********
   Richards had other fascinating examples. He talked about the “flying sandwich” incident, when an outbreak of Swine fever in the year 2000 was suspected of being caused by a sandwich made with meat illegally imported into the U.K. from Asia. Scientists put forward the theory that a hiker flung part of the sandwich (or possibly a pork pie) over a hedge, where it was consumed by free-range pigs, starting the outbreak that ultimately caused the destruction of thousands of hogs.
   Then there was the U.K.’s 2001 Foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, which was truly a national disaster – resulting in millions of animals being culled, costing some £8 billion, and even resulting in postponement of the general election. Richards compared his involvement to a war experience. “My life – and that of my colleagues, friends, my clients – changed completely,” he said. “Some changes are still there, some of the resentments, because of the impact of this disease.”
   This one was definitively traced to a Northumberland hog fattening operation. The farmer was licensed to collect food waste for swill feeding, but investigators found he had not been following heat-treating protocols. “There was uncooked waste on the farm, and it came from the Chinese restaurants,” said Richards, noting that patterned disposable plates and chopsticks in the slop confirmed its source. Again, illegally imported Asian pork was identified as the infectious agent.
   “The virus lives in the bone,” explained Richards. “That’s why we know it was probably the spare ribs that brought it in.”
   Scabbed-over lesions on pigs at the source farm indicated that the producer ignored the disease, allowing it to be spread to sheep and cattle farms. The constant buying and re-selling of livestock, without quarantining, made matters worse, Richards said. Lack of resources in the government veterinary service was a factor too. With better practices and supports, controlling the outbreak should have been easy, because citric acid, which is “as cheap as chips,” readily kills the virus.
   (“One of the the reasons lots of farmers ended up with brand new Land Rovers at the end of the Foot-and-mouth epidemic is not because they got loads of money, but because citric acid dissolves aluminium,” said Richards.)
   Finally, he talked about TB, and the role of badgers as carriers – which is a social issue as much as a biological phenomenon. He said badgers are protected by legislation in the U.K., partly because some “horrendous individuals” started a craze for digging the animals out of their setts and making them fight dogs. The compassionate response – the desire to shield these weirdly charismatic wild animals from harm – is understandable, but it has caused a spike in TB, and has created great difficulty for farmers trying to protect their herds.
   “One of the problems we’ve got in the U.K.,” said Richards, “is a lot of people would like to see no cattle and no sheep on those hills at all, and have it revert back to forest – this ‘re-wilding’ concept.”
   So we have the challenge of tempering such extreme views, and finding pragmatic ways to manage these altered landscapes – allowing for the production of farm animals in the great outdoors, and the accommodation of wild creatures. How can ecological principles be given priority, in this age of political upheaval and humanitarian crises? Think about what the world was up against in 1918, when people stood up to protect the birds. DL