“People just didn’t know any better,” says Steve Hampton, the Conservation Chair at Admiralty Audubon, “and the terns paid for it.” By the time the nesting season ended last summer, a colony of more than five hundred pairs had produced a grand total of eleven chicks that survived long enough to fledge, or leave the nest. “It was awful,” Hampton says. “We decided that for this year we needed to have protection for them.”
From this was born the Fort Flagler docent program. Its purpose was to station volunteers on the mainland and educate visitors about the life across the spit at Rat Island, while also dissuading in-person visits. Kayakers were also encouraged to bob in the waters off the island but not land on it.
Breeding season is supposed to be a time of new life, of promise. Instead, at Rat Island, biologists were confronted with nothing but mortality and sickness, and suffering birds.
So it happened that one such kayaker, Sam Kaviar, was leading a tour near Rat Island last July when he saw a Caspian tern lying dead on the beach. He texted Hampton about it. One dead tern in a colony of over a thousand isn’t a big deal, Hampton thought when he read the text. But the next day Kaviar saw another dead tern. Later, he kayaked around the island and saw many dead terns, and others acting sluggish and sick.
Scott Pearson, a biologist with WDFW, happened to be working near Rat Island, and he boated by to collect some of the dead terns. He took them to Katie Haman, a wildlife veterinarian also with WDFW. She had the bodies tested for highly pathogenic avian flu, or HPAI. When the results came back, everyone’s worst fears were confirmed: the dead birds had tested positive. It was the first known outbreak of HPAI in Washington in the marine environment. (Several hundred snow geese died in the Skagit Valley the previous winter, and there have been cases in raptors and domestic poultry.)
Over the next few weeks, HPAI laid waste to the Rat Island tern colony. More than 1,600 terns—both adults and chicks—died. Officials in Oregon and southwestern Washington also confirmed an outbreak of HPAI among the remaining tern colonies in the lower Columbia River. Between Rat Island, the lower Columbia River, and points between, thousands of terns had died by the time the breeding season neared its close in September.
The link to poultry farms
Avian influenza is everywhere, all the time. Many viruses from a particular family cause it; H5N1 is merely the one that happens to be in the public eye at the moment. Scientists classify the different types of avian flus by their hemagglutinin proteins and neuraminidase proteins—the H and N, respectively. Since there are sixteen versions of the H protein and nine of the N proteins, H5N1, then, means the strain has the fifth H protein and the first N protein.
Avian flu types are further separated into two classes based on their virulence, or pathogenicity. Given that the bulk of birds that come down with avian flu tend to be domestic poultry, virulence is defined in chicken-centric terms. A bird infected with low pathogenic avian flu might show symptoms of mild disease and have slightly lower egg production, for example. Highly pathogenic avian flu, on the other hand, might kill 90% or even 100% of affected animals.
As a type, H5N1 is not new; rather, it has been circulating in birds for nearly thirty years. It was first detected at poultry farms in Guangdong, China, in 1996. It confined itself to Asia until early 2006, when it was subsequently found in poultry in Africa and Europe. It was thought to travel by way of migrating waterfowl, in whom it occurs naturally. Millions of domestic chickens, ducks, and turkeys have since died from H5N1, or been culled to prevent its spread.
The nature of H5N1 changed profoundly in the fall of 2020. A strain circulating among poultry swapped some genes with a strain circulating among wild birds, somehow producing a new, more highly pathogenic strain that was especially lethal to seabirds. Reports emerged from Europe of seabirds dying by the dozens, then thousands: great skuas and northern gannets at colonies in northern Scotland, several species of terns in the North Sea and Waddell Sea, razorbills, black-legged kittiwakes. In some places entire colonies were wiped out in a matter of weeks. The virus traveled well. In South Africa, hundreds of critically endangered African penguins died, as well as more than 20,000 cape cormorants. None of these species had been anywhere near a poultry farm.
By the end of 2021, this deadly new strain of H5N1 had reached North America. It spread rapidly, leaving a trail of similarly decimated seabird colonies and populations: northern gannets in Newfoundland, common eider ducks in St. Lawrence. This flu’s reach was long. Migrating snow geese died in Colorado. Hundreds of bald eagles around the country died, perhaps due to scavenging infected animals. In California, twenty California condors died, or 7% of the global population. The virus reached South America in late 2022, and began to race south from Peru like a fire, killing as it went: Humboldt penguins, guanay cormorants, black-necked swans, Andean geese, royal terns. Tens of thousands of Peruvian pelicans and Peruvian boobies died in rolling outbreaks.
The scale of death was unprecedented and hard to comprehend, much less stomach. All the more so because studies have suggested that as the number of poultry operations has increased in recent years, so, too, has the number of avian flu outbreaks in general. More chicken farms means more chances for avian flus to fester and spread, sometimes widely. Millions of animals dying all over the world in part so we can have buffalo wings and cheap eggs.
A grim task
Norris pilots the boat to the shore, and I hop out and scramble onto the beach. He hands me some surgical gloves and tapes them around the sleeves of my Tyvek suit, and then gives me my own large garbage bag. With that I leave to go find Haman, who is leading the effort today.
For a place that has just been visited by the specter of death, Rat Island is still quite lively with birds. Dozens if not hundreds of gulls are on the beach or in the surf, calling incessantly in the way gulls do. I can even hear a few Caspian terns, too. Did they get infected with avian flu and survive? Did they somehow never catch it? But there are other, more immediate questions. I approach the closest Tyvek suit. “Are you Katie?” I ask. It’s hard to tell folks apart given all the protective gear.
“She’s down there,” the Tyvek person says in a muffled voice. They wave off toward Rat Island’s westernmost shore. I tromp off and before long see someone wearing a bright orange life vest and mask, and a ballcap under their Tyvek hood.
“Katie?” I ask.
“Hey!” Haman says. She seems to be in reasonable spirits, all things considered. It wasn’t always so. After those first terns were confirmed to have HPAI, Haman and Pearson instituted a protocol to come out and count all the carcasses they could find to get a sense of the outbreak’s scale. But to be at a colony full of dead and dying birds was gut-wrenching. No one knew how to process what they were seeing, to say nothing of their own emotional responses to it. A breeding season is supposed to be a time of new life, of promise. Instead, at Rat Island, biologists were confronted with mortality, sickness, and suffering birds.
Embedded within the larger tragedy were dozens of smaller ones. Terns build only the most rudimentary of nests, usually just a scrape in the dirt. All around Haman were scrapes with one, two, or three eggs exposed to the elements, the birds that would have cared for them having succumbed. One adult had died while incubating its eggs; underneath its still-warm body, its chicks were hatching. Other orphaned chicks wandered the colony, begging for food from adults sprawled dead on the sand. All of them would starve or get eaten by gulls. “That was heartbreaking to see,” Haman says. “It just hit you really hard sometimes.” But she knew, too, that it was good she was here, to witness what was happening, and then to be able to talk about it. She is a wildlife vet, and wildlife vets are trained to deal with mortality; wildlife biologists aren’t necessarily. “The outbreak brought this conversation of the emotional impact on people out to the front,” she says. “Yes, it sucks, but it’s also good that we can have these conversations.”