Victoria is considering pulling some of its rarest birds out of the wild to save them. As the H5N1 strain of avian influenza spreads through the wild bird population and spring fills the state's wetlands with nesting flocks, the government is weighing "emergency extractions" of threatened species, the ABC reports — with nearly 100 bird species identified as at risk, black swans and brolgas among them.
The timing is the problem. Northern Victoria holds thousands of individual wetlands across public and private land, and September is when threatened species congregate to nest, lay and hatch — exactly the conditions that let the virus circulate. James Todd, chief biodiversity officer at the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action, said he was concerned the already small populations could plummet. "We are looking at whether there's also some direct interventions that we can undertake for ... species that are not yet in captivity," Mr Todd said. "We might consider doing some sort of emergency extraction."
Zoos Victoria and other wildlife facilities already hold populations of threatened species in captivity for their protection. "That's the orange-bellied parrot, plains wanderer, regent honeyeater, and the helmeted honeyeater, one of the state's formal emblems," Mr Todd said. The regent honeyeater's wild population sits at fewer than 250.
There is one hopeful data point, Mr Todd noted: there are no reported cases worldwide of the virus driving a species extinct yet. "That's kind of the light on the hill," he said. "But again, we have to be careful because we can't exactly translate the overseas experience to Australia and Victoria because of our unique fauna."
A thousand brolgas, and fifty
The brolga shows what's at stake. Victoria's population sits around 1,000, most of it in the state's south-west; in northern Victoria and southern New South Wales the estimate is just 50 birds. Common in northern Australia, the species is listed as endangered in Victoria, and Mr Todd said the state's population is effectively isolated from the central Australian one, "where they're obviously much more abundant and common and not threatened". The numbers have been worn down by habitat loss and predation by introduced foxes. "They've been impacted by loss of habitat, you know, because of agriculture and urbanisation areas and they rely on temporary wetlands," he said.
The farm where a brolga chick hatched
Just outside Rushworth, among the wheat and canola, Adrian Weston keeps about eight hectares of wetland on the farm he bought 35 years ago. A former director of the Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority, he has watched farmers' attitudes turn. "I think out of the 3,000-odd wetlands in the Goulburn Broken catchment, the overwhelming majority of them are on private land and a lot of them got drained," Mr Weston said. "Over time I've seen a shift in the attitudes toward incorporating … more ecological outcomes into farm enterprise."
This year his wetland hosted nesting brolgas — and a chick hatched. Each week, volunteers from the local Field and Game branch and students from the local school check the hen houses and nest boxes, and through the year the group hunts foxes to keep numbers down around the water. It is the quiet, hopeful end of a spring that began with the virus reaching Victorian mammals and carried through a penguin vaccination campaign.
Mr Weston is watching the season the way the state is. "There's a lot at stake," he said. "I suppose we hope for the best, but time will tell."
