Songbird plague wanes, questions remain

Epidemics run their course. It’s what we learn from that running that’s useful.

It’s best to keep that in mind, for humans and other species.

We humans are still fighting COVID-19. But the plague of songbird deaths throughout the eastern United States this summer seems to be on the wane.

“We’re being cautiously optimistic that it’s going away,” said Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society.

Reports of ailing birds have slowed dramatically. Pennsylvania — which like Connecticut, advised people to take in feeders and birdbaths — has said feeding is OK again. Connecticut did the same Friday.

Which, at this point, leaves a series of questions unanswered. What was the pathogen killing the birds? Where did it originate? How did it infect them?

The answer to all these questions right now is straightforward.

“We still don’t know what’s going on,” said Jenny Dickson, director of the wildlife division of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection;

Which, Dickson said, may be one of the things people have to understand: science doesn’t move from start to finish with ease. Study takes time, especially with what may be a new disease. There may eventually be answers, but it takes a lot of work to get them.

It’s those unanswered questions that led to the state’s advisory of having people stop feeding the birds. If the disease could spread from bird to bird, it was best not to have them congregating around a smorgasbord of sunflower seeds and mealworms. (Think unsuspecting bats returning to fungus-ridden winter caves. Think COVID and college kids on spring break.)

“If we knew it was noncontagious, we wouldn’t have asked people to stop feeding the birds,” Comins said.

Instead of feeding birds in July, the DEEP and others asked people if they were finding sick, disoriented birds with crusty, inflamed eyes in their yard.

Dickson said the DEEP got more than 400 reports of dead birds. Which leads to another thing to think about: Birds die all the time. We ordinarily don’t think it’s worth reporting.

“There are so many things,” said Sunny Kellner, a wildlife rehabilitator at the Sharon Audubon Center, which is owned by Audubon Connecticut. “It happens every year.’’

Kellner said the center got some reports from people of sick or dying birds. These too have waned.

“In the past, we haven’t gotten calls about disease,” she said. “I think people were contacting us because everyone’s so hyper-aware.”

The DEEP collected many dead birds. But of these, Dickson said, only about a half-dozen had the symptoms for further study. The DEEP has sent them to the state Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at the University of Connecticut.

People don’t have to feed birds — we do it for our own enchantment. This is especially true in late summer.

“This is harvest time,” said Ken Elkins, community conservation manager for Audubon Connecticut.

But people miss the winged community that stops by every day for meals. So do the birds, said Phillip Robbins of Wild Birds Unlimited in Brookfield.

“They’re great at inducing guilt,” Robbins said. “They can even tap at windows asking ‘Where’s the food?’ ”

Robbins said Wild Birds Unlimited has lost a little revenue because people aren’t buying seed. But the regular customers there are buying a lot of other naturerelated items, he said, to keep the store going.

“They’ve been wonderful,” he said.

Elkins said people should use this hiatus from feeding birds to think of better ways to help the birds feed themselves. Along with buying sunflower seed, he said, they could buy and plant native perennials that produce seeds and berries. An herb garden in bloom can pull in hummingbirds as easily as a feeder, he said.

This may also be a good time to think about songbird mortality in general. Domestic cats kill an estimated 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion songbirds a year in the United States. Bird-window collisions may kill another billion annually.

“Maybe this is a time when people should think about making their yards bird-friendly and bird-safe,” Elkins said.

Add in climate change and the overuse of pesticides. An even greater problem, said Comins of the Connecticut Audubon Society, is habitat loss.

“Birds migrate back here from South America and find their nesting habitat is gone,” he said.