Bird flu slaughters northern gannets in eastern Canada

 

Photo credit:  Lewnanny Richardson/iNaturalist

Headline:  New York Times, 12/13/2024

Every spring, more than 200,000 northern gannets — stocky seabirds with dazzling white feathers — journey to the coast of eastern Canada. There, they blanket oceanside cliffs and rocky outcroppings, breeding in enormous colonies before flying back south for the winter. 

But in May 2022, as many females were getting ready to lay their eggs, the birds began dying in droves. “Thousands of northern gannets started to wash up on our shores,” said Stephanie Avery-Gomm, a seabird biologist and research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada. 

The culprit: a bird flu virus, known as H5N1, that had recently arrived in North America. Over the months that followed, the virus raced through the region, killing tens of thousands of northern gannets.

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