5 THINGS ABOUT RICHARD BLATCHFORD

Avian influenza is usually seasonal. Why is the current outbreak such a problem?

AThis outbreak has been continuous. There has been no break since last summer.

One of the ways to try to stop that disease is to euthanize all of the birds in an infected area. You are required to kill all the birds in your flock. We have lost around 50 million egg-producing hens. That's 50 million eggs — almost a day — that we're not getting any more. There's just been a quick fast depletion.

It takes time to replace those birds. Chickens don't start laying until they're about 18 weeks of age. So you have this period of time when they're just growing. That will correct itself, eventually.

California hasn't seen had a huge amount of avian influenza, thankfully. But the areas that are getting hit hard, such as the Midwest, have very large egg production. When their egg numbers go down, California's egg numbers go down — because we import so many.

QWhy can't we vaccinate chickens? 1

His favorite breed of poultry is a Belgian bearded d'Uccle, a bantam breed of chicken “with really funky personalities.”

2

As a child, he got his first backyard chickens when he was in the third grade. But he doesn't own any now, to prevent infection transmission on the large commercial farms he visits.

3

A nature lover, he relaxes by hiking with

AIf you vaccinate the birds, they test positive because they have antibodies. There's no way to know: Did they naturally occur? Are they sick? International import-export regulations prohibit the movement of any poultry product that has antibodies.

QIs avian influenza increasing the cost of his children. “I don't know that they find it as fascinating as I do,” he joked.

He is drawn to birds by their sense of mystery. He helped care for flocks of sandhill cranes at the International Crane Foundation, based in Wisconsin.

While doing daily tasks, he wore a crane costume so that birds would not become habituated to the presence of humans.

our dinner table broiler chickens also?

ANo, they don't seem to have been hit as hard as the laying sector, which is probably just a matter of luck.

Their numbers haven't dropped so dramatically that they haven't been able to respond. The generation cycle of broiler chickens is also much

Q

How is the cage-free movement increasing prices?

AIt has to do with labor costs. And with cage-free production, there's a lot more to do.

A lot of poultry operations are automated now. For instance, in cage production, the eggs all come out onto a belt, and they're taken to the processing plant. In a cagefree setting, there is a belt system, but the birds also lay elsewhere. So people have to go in and hand collect all of those eggs. It might only be a small percentage — but when a house has 120,000 hens, that's a lot of individual eggs. It's also a bit harder to do health maintenance checks on cagefree hens.

QIf other states follow our example and