Tagged in flu zone, bird flew from Mongolia to Karnataka

Three days later, he was informed by Martin Gilbert of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in New York, through K S Gopi Sundar, a research associate from India at the International Crane Foundation in the US, that the bar-headed goose with the yellow tag was subject E6 in a batch of 50 bar-headed geese tagged in Mongolia in July last year.

The geese had been tagged along with two other species of migratory birds — bean geese and whooper swans — known to carry the deadly H5N1 strain of the avian flu virus. This was done as part of a USAID Global Avian Influenza Network for Surveillance (GAINS) project.

The GAINS project intends to increase knowledge regarding avian influenza strains, their transmission in wild birds, and to disseminate information about the flu.

For the first time, findings in the study are showing that migratory birds like the bar-headed geese could travel very long distances, carrying the bird flu virus.

“Judging from the photo, the bird is a male tagged with the collar E6. He was caught on 19 July 2007 in the Darkhad Valley in the northern Mongolian aimag of Hovsgol. He was one of 50 bar-headed geese we fitted with collars in July, and is the first for which we have received re-sighting information. Based on the information given, the bird has travelled a direct line distance of 4,780 km,” the WCS informed Niranjan.

“Wow, it feels so nice to have photographed this bird and it feels even better to know this guy travelled all the way from Mongolia,” Niranjan commented on the indianaturewatch.net forum on being told of the significance of his photographic discovery.

When he had first posted the picture of the geese from the lake near Mysore, he had stated “shot this at a lake near Somnathpur. Only during processing I noticed a ring on the neck of the bird at the bottom left. Is this for tracking the migration, it would be great if experts share some knowledge on this.” Since the report of the Mysore sighting by Niranjan, the GAINS project has also been provided reports of similar unconfirmed sightings by birding and photography enthusiasts of yellow collar tagged bar-headed geese at a small lake at Paradgaon in Nagpur, Maharashtra and at the Veer Dam, 55 km from Pune.

Dr M B Krishna, Bangalore-based ornithologist, says the jury is still out on wild birds being carriers of the H5N1 virus. “There is still no hard data on birds actually carrying the virus across great distances,” he said.

But suspicion has hung over migratory wild birds since at places like the Darkhad Valley in Mongolia, where there are no poultry farms, incidences of the H5N1 flu have been reported in 2005 and 2006.