Standing up for Nature
Yesterday Defra revealed that there has been another outbreak of bird flu at a commercial turkey farm in East Lindsey, Lincolnshire. This was in the same district of Lincolnshire as the other main outbreak of H5N8 affecting a commercial premises which was also at a turkey farm and also in East Lindsey back in December….
There have been another four positive tests for H5N8 in wild birds in the last week: and Defra is still being cryptic about their localities. These new records only amount to four birds apparently but the Dorset case involves Mute Swans when presumably it should involve a Mute Swan – this shows the normal attention…
It didn’t take a lot ornithological nous to realise that nine Mute Swans with H5N8 bird flu virus in Dorset were quite likely to have come from Abbotsbury Swannery – as surmised in this blog on Saturday and trumpetted by the national press yesterday (Guardian, Telegraph, BBC). Defra doesn’t test additional birds from a location…
I speculated yesterday that avian flu cases involving White-fronted Goose and other species in Gloucestershire might well have been at the WWT nature reserve at Slimbridge and I’m grateful to WWT for confirming that this is the case. If I had lived locally to Slimbridge I might actually have seen them talking about the case…
Today the RSPB revealed that wild birds with H5N8 have been detected at two more RSPB nature reserves and yesterday the Chief Vet revealed that H5N8 had been found in a small backyard flock in Settle. These wild birds with H5N8 seem almost to be targetting RSPB nature reserves! Of course, the real explanation (I…