by Dan Simon

Wildlife rehabilitators and avian specialists are bracing themselves for the worst, as the community is becoming aware of just how devastating the West Nile Virus is to birds.

While the disease usually produces flu-like symptoms in humans (with a very small percentage becoming seriously ill), birds are very susceptible to it, said Robyn Graboski, a wildlife rehabilitator in Lemont, Penn.

"Part of the problem is that we don't know that much about it," she said. "There's a little bit of a panic in the rehab community because some are losing their education birds. There's a lot of concern about birds of prey.

"We probably won't know the full impact until sometime down the road."

A member of the Shaver's Creek Environmental Center team talks about an educational golden eagle the center displays. Shaver's Creek is one of many environmental centers trying to find ways to protect their educational birds from the West Nile Virus. ©GreenWorks photo by Dan Simon

Educational birds are ones that were found injured and were nursed back to health, but can no longer function on their own in the wild. Educational centers use them as representatives of their species to help teach people about why wildlife is important. Environmental educational centers and wildlife rehabilitation specialists freely admit that no one is really sure what to do even to protect these captive educational birds.

At the Shaver's Creek Elementary Center, which houses a menagerie of 20 raptors, the hope is that by keeping mosquitoes from the birds, they can keep them free from danger.

"We have mosquito netting on order," said Jen Brackbill. "It will affect their viewing in the enclosures here at the center. We will also include netting in their travel enclosures, but they will still be publicly shown."

Shaver's Creek is hoping to make it through the fall okay, thanks in part to some potent allies in the mosquito control department, a colony of bats that live nearby.

"We have a bat colony here of about 1500 brown bats," Brackbill said. "The time we're most concerned about is when they leave in the fall. Something else we're considering that is still being debated, there is a West Nile vaccination that hasn't yet been approved for raptors. Some folks are trying that out, we're still trying to figure out what dose and how often it needs to be done to be effective."

Wendy Looker, a Dillsburg, Penn., wildlife rehabilitator, is in the inoculation camp, hoping that a vaccine developed and approved for horses will offer her center's raptors some measure of protection.

"It's pretty horrific," Looker said about the disease. "It tends to be isolated in individual pockets. Fortunately for me, we're not seeing a lot of it in my county, but Dauphin County has been hit hard.

"I know a rehabilatator out there with eight owls infected. The survival rate is not promising. They're usually dead in 48 hours. A lot depends on what kind of shape they were in to begin with. There are a tremendous number of raptors coming in symptomatic of central nervous system problems.

Rehabitat, a Dillsburg, Penn., wildlife rehabilitation center, is innoculating its educational birds, such as this one-eyed owl, with the horse vaccine that's been developed against the West Nile Virus. ©GreenWorks photo by Dan Simon

"The really tragic thing is, a bird will come in from an area where you know there is a mating pair, and then the other one comes in. It's not just old birds or weakened birds, in some cases it's extremely well-fed, healthy birds and they're just kind of sitting ducks."

Looker said her center's 19 educational birds have been tested (results aren't back yet) and the three-shot vaccine regimen has been started. She's also spraying the area around her center with a pyrethrum spray, plus the Department of Environmental Protection has been trapping mosquitoes and spraying for them in her region. She's even talking to a manufacturer about insect lures to try and make trapping mosquitoes more effective.

Rehabilitators also have to worry about human concerns about catching West Nile from a sick bird, something current evidence suggests is very unlikely.

"There is a fear from the general public regarding the birds," Graboski said. "People are calling me because they're seeing birds in their backyard, and they're afraid of getting West Nile Virus, but you don't get it from birds, you get it from mosquitoes.

"The birds are the ones that are the victim here. A lot of people think they're the problem. They're not the problem. They're the victims because they're the ones that are dying from West Nile Virus."

The true impact of the disease may not be known for several years or more. Migration counting sites such as Hawk Mountain in Kempton, Penn., which has been counting raptor migrations since 1934, may provide the best picture of how hard hit raptor populations are from year to year.

Information may be a little harder to figure out for wild songbirds, Looker said.
"I would suspect it's hitting the song birds pretty hard," she said, "but once that population is hit, they're immediately taken by other birds, so we're not seeing as many of them.

"Numbers are incredibly minimized at the Department of Agriculture because they're interested in its affect on humans. They don't have the resources to test the large number of birds that may be ill."

While a successful inoculation program might help captive birds and aggressive mosquito control efforts might possibly lessen the number of mosquitoes, the disease is now entrenched in North America. The best hope in the avian community is that the birds will be able to develop a resistance to the virus before populations are hit too badly.