The Outdoors

By Scott Rall, Outdoors Columnist

My phone has pretty much been ringing off the hook the past few months as people see dead geese decomposing on the ice of area lakes. The bird flu is not a new thing, but a pathogenic avian influenza outbreak has been working its way across Minnesota since it was first reported in 2022. The danger to humans is very low, but you should avoid contact with infected animals and use protective gear if you must handle them.

Symptoms of bird flu in wild animals is pretty easy to detect. Symptoms include walking or swimming in circles, incoordination, droopy head and inability to fly. The official strain number is H5N1. There is a very low risk to humans and no overall food safety concerns.

I would never do it, but if you fully cook birds and eggs to a minimum temperature of 165 degrees it is supposed to kill the bird flu virus. Dogs and cats can contract it by eating or sniffing infected carcasses. Even with limited issues within the human populations, there have been 261 confirmed cases of human infection, and of those, 142 people died.

I believe that most of the human infection cases came from those working closely in poultry production before the outbreak was fully understood.

So, what is going to happen with all of the dead birds we find across southwest Minnesota? That question is not an easy one to answer. People think someone should go clean them all up. Who is that someone? Because this infection is widespread across a large area, removing all of the dead birds is probably a non-starter.

There are thousands of lakes in Minnesota and that does not take into account the small marshes and wetlands that might remain. This issue will most likely be handled by nature. This will happen much in the same way as large amounts of dead fish and accumulate after a moderate to severe winter kill. They will decompose and be ultimately consumed by other creatures that inhabit our state. One of the bigger questions I have is, as the natural way takes its course, will birds of prey like eagles, crows and small mammals who eat carrion die from becoming infected?  I could not find the answer to that question even though I spent quite a bit of time looking for that answer.

I am confident that the number of wild birds that die of this outbreak, even if they number in the thousands, will not have any major impact on geese or other waterfowl populations overall.

If you remember, a few months back I wrote about the Blue Tongue infection that was coursing across our white tail deer populations. This did a pretty big number on our white tail populations, many were lost as a result, but over time things will return to normal.

Wildlife has so many challenges today. Many more now than at any other time in my lifetime. As we continue to concentrate wildlife into smaller and smaller spaces, their populations will continue to decline. I can’t believe how many times I have heard people tell me that “They love wildlife, but they will just have to go live somewhere else.”

Where is that somewhere else? Habitat loss continues to increase its pace. For each acre of habitat restored, there are 10 acres that are lost. Natural infections are exacerbated by compaction of place and space. This is why you should not feed deer as it congregates them and makes infection spread that much easier to achieve.

I am in no way saying the geese in Minnesota are dying solely from habitat loss, but with more than 95% loss of our natural wetlands over the past 100 years, even they are more congregated than in decades past. We change the landscape and wildlife adapts but not fast enough to keep up.

Let’s hope this wildlife killer will run its course and end as soon as possible. There is no saying when that might be, but it cannot come soon enough for this outdoor and wildlife lover.

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If you have any questions, reach out to me at scottarall@gmail.com.