Today I attended a talk by Dr Martin Gilbert, a vet with WCS on “Health and Conservation in Asia: From Avian Influenza, Barheaded Geese to the Vulture decline” at the Raman Research Institute. While most of us have heard about the banding of Bar-headed Goose, it was great listening to the man behind the programme. It is interesting on how this is all related to the Avian Influenza. It is also interesting to note that it was Martin’s study on how the drug Diclofenac residues caused the vulture population declination which made the world awake about the issue. Martin began his talk with an introduction to the epidemic influenza virus and how the H and N combination can result in various subsets. So most of the influenza virus spreads through the domestic birds and this being a epidemic can spread to the wild birds too. Since domestic birds in poultry are in large numbers together it spreads very fast. Since India is very populous, it was also interesting for them to study and see if it spreads to humans too. The waterbirds and shore birds are supposed to be more prone to this virus than the others

Female Bar-headed Geese ’79′ on 3/12/09 at the Eastern Range,Kaziranga National Park

According to Martin, there weren’t any cases of wild birds dying due to Influenza before 2005. But in 2005 there was a outbreak in wild birds in Qinghai, China where nearly 5000 birds died out of which 50% were the Bar-headed Geese and the rest included the Ruddy Shelducks, Gulls etc. So they decided to study the migration pattern of the birds since there is high possibility that these long distance migratory birds could be carrying the influenza virus in them. So they started using the Neck Collaring technique where they marked the bird to track their migration. Neck Collaring, he said could be used for most birds like Swan and Geese which had a longer neck but couldn’t be used to ducks because that could be obstacle for their preening. They choose Mongolia as a place to start with because it was a place where they could see a lot of these birds and there was not much poultries around that these wild birds could come in contact with. So they went out in the dark, took one of the birds in a large group and collared them. Even the marking numbers were designed in such a way there would be no scope for ambiguity when the bird was finally tracked somewhere. A lot of interesting results of the collared Bar-headed Headed Geese have come by since then. There have been numerous sightings of the bird while it was wintering in India esp Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and from North-East too. There have been 40 re-sightings with 20 individual sightings until now. There is a certain bird which was tagged in Mongolia and has been tracked in Karnataka for 2 years now and again back in Mongolia with the same family after the Indian winter.

We (Ashwini Bhat, Adithya UN, Konwar and yours truly) had a sighting of a Female Bar-headed Geese ’79′ on 3/12/09 at the (26.6826, 93.5466)Eastern Range of Kaziranga National Park. It was tagged at Sharga Nuur, Bulgan aimag on 14 July 2009. Sharga Nuur is a few miles north of Khunt Nuur, Mongolia. This was out of the hundreds of Bar-headed Geese that we saw there.

Martin also spoke about the Vulture study and the conservation methods adopted for saving the vulture including the concept of Vulture Restaurants where they work with the local community to feed vultures and also promote eco-tourism around it. He then spoke about the Wildlife trade and how human can be prone to deadly diseases due to wildlife trade. He said that Govt and the policy makers would understand it better if it is put forward as a national health issue rather than a wildlife issue. The audience asked a few interesting questions too. One of them if he was really sure that wild birds could get influenza from the domestic birds to which Martin replied that it was a conclusion based on several reports and studies and not something for which they can come out with a proof. It was interesting talk even though I thought he would go a little deeper into the collar programme. Probably given the time, he had too much to cover in a single talk.