The New York Times-20080129-Thousands of Miles From Home- and Possibly Carrying Avian Flu
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Thousands of Miles From Home, and Possibly Carrying Avian Flu
Full Text (353 words)Ornitholologists have long known that waterfowl migrate huge distances. But it is rarely possible to be sure where any flock's route begins and ends -- information useful to tracking the spread of avian flu.
These pictures, from the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs New York City's zoos, are the first proof that bar-headed geese -- one suspect in moving the flu around the world -- can travel 3,000 miles from their breeding grounds.
In the Darkhad Valley of northern Mongolia, a remote area with no poultry farms, there were outbreaks of H5N1 avian flu in 2005 and 2006.
Last summer, the conservation society caught 50 wild geese there -- not easy, but moulting birds cannot fly, so they can be blinded with spotlights and scooped from the water at night. Scientists wrapped them in brown canvas swan jackets to keep them still, in photograph at far left, then took blood samples, oral and cloacal swabs, and feather and toenail clippings (isotopes in the last two may reveal, though imprecisely, where they summered).
Then the birds, including one designated E6, were banded.
In December, said Dr. Martin Gilbert, a field veterinarian, we got an e-mail from a chap in southern India who'd been photographing geese at a local lake. He didn't even see it in the field, but in his pictures, he noticed that one had a yellow neck collar. It was E6 (at bottom left of photograph at left).
Whooper swans tagged at the same time, Dr. Gilbert said, went east to China's Yellow River.
But bar-headed geese hold the altitude record for birds, he said. They migrate over the Himalayas, at 30,000 feet. That's the height of jumbo jets.
In the past year, avian flu has been found in chickens north of the area where E6 landed. But it is impossible to know how it arrived, since the disease is also spread by poultry transport.
[Illustration]PHOTOS: LONG FLIGHT: Geese in Mongolia, left, and one, E6, above at left, in India. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY, LEFT, MARTIN GILBERT/WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY; MAP, THE NEW YORK TIMES; ABOVE, NARANJAN M.)MAP: DARKHARD VALLEY, MONGOLIA TO SOMNATHPUR, INDIA