9 March 2025
Each autumn barnacle geese (Branta leucopsis) depart their arctic breeding grounds and migrate to Europe. In 2021-2022, these wintering at Solway Firth, UK(*) turned contaminated with extremely pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 and 31% of them died. Regardless that their inhabitants had been devastated, they recovered to full energy in simply two years. This can provide us hope for North American birds hit exhausting by chook flu.
Wild barnacle geese breed in Greenland, Svalbard and Siberia but every inhabitants has its favourite wintering website as proven on the map. Counts on the wintering grounds are instantly tied to at least one breeding location.
The winter inhabitants at Solway Firth breeds at Svalbard.
When chook flu hit Solway Firth within the winter of 2021-2022 researchers started a two+ yr examine to measure the demographic affect of the main HPAI outbreak on barnacle geese. In the course of the outbreak they fastidiously counted useless goose carcasses and, because of fencing, have been in a position to extrapolate for predation.
The barnacle goose inhabitants dipped precipitously in by February 2022 however within the two years that adopted the variety of juveniles elevated even sooner. Excessive beginning charges on the breeding grounds shortly made up for the lack of adults.
Researchers speculated that …
The massive affect of HPAI-related mortality on the Solway Barnacle Goose inhabitants was quickly recovered, in all probability by means of a mixture of the widespread growth of pure immunity and excessive ranges of breeding success within the years following the outbreak.
In Pennsylvania, snow geese have been exhausting hit with wild chook flu. It will likely be attention-grabbing to see how their winter inhabitants fluctuates within the jap U.S. within the years forward.
(*) Solway Firth varieties the western border of Scotland and England.
