00:02It's concerning. It's obviously at the next stage in this panzootic and it enables the
00:09virus to open up new transmission lines. So previously we had these little spot fires
00:15on the coast from these pelagic birds which disperse from subantarctic waters and then
00:21into the more closely distributed birds in the crested terns. But this event into the
00:28silver gulls enables the virus then to skip into freshwater systems and further on into
00:35other landscapes which it hasn't yet reached. Yeah I mean we know that they're you know in city
00:41populations we see them they're you know everywhere in Australia. As you say they spend time with
00:46greater crested terns which have also tested positive and I understand both species are
00:50coming into their nesting season. So just how significant could that be? Yeah that's right. So
00:57silver gulls are very opportunistic as you know they'll happily chow down on a chip or
01:02a turn egg so they can be found anywhere in Australia and you know you see a silver gull
01:08anywhere and you wouldn't necessarily be surprised. At this time of year because they are so opportunistic
01:15they can have a very broad breeding window. So from August right through to December they'll be
01:25aggregating in large flocks and they may also be associating with other birds like
01:31cormorants, tens of thousands of banded stilts in Caddy Tundra Lake Eyre for example
01:37or indeed terns. So these multi-species groups where they're relatively sedentary,
01:44they're doing a lot of feeding, they're defecating in the same area, this is just a prime area for
01:51a disease breed. And are there threatened species among there that they're associating with?
01:56Yeah that's what we're at BirdLife Australia particularly concerned about. In the current
02:03distribution where the disease has been found where we're concerned about things like fairy
02:07terns who are listed on the as vulnerable on the BBC Act. Hooded plovers, these birds fairy
02:15tern only 1,500 left in the southeast. Hooded plovers only around 3,000 and could have really
02:24concerning population level impacts if the disease gets into those populations.
02:30And with Australia now considered past the point where the virus can be eradicated,
02:35what do you understand that to mean for wildlife and what we can expect in the coming months?
02:41Yeah so the storm's coming and you know you can't stop the storm but you can help the birds weather
02:48it better. And so while you can't necessarily control the spread of it, we do know that stressed
02:55birds have a lower immune response so are more likely to succumb to mortalities and succumb to
03:02the disease. We also know that stressed birds shed more disease. So what we can do is we can manage
03:12their these populations. We can give them as much room as possible. We can do what we do in
03:18conservation. What we do is bread and butter. We try to give them as much resilience within their
03:24population as possible. So not only are they spreading less disease but they're having a better immune
03:29response and then passing that on to further generations. Because a bird that's experienced
03:34the disease before, their progeny is going to have a better response to further iterations of this
03:40and other high path strains.
03:43And Chris, I mean volunteers are used to working directly with sick birds. They can't do that in
03:48this instance. So what are they doing now?
03:52Our volunteers are part of the surveillance effort and helping states and jurisdictions with
04:02passive surveillance. So observations of dead and sick birds, but also establishing a baseline where birds
04:10are in our large dispersive water bird population. Wildlife carers are obviously understandably under a lot of
04:22duress and getting a lot of phone calls and in some cases mixed messages on what to do and how
04:28to respond.
04:29But to our broader community, we can just only reiterate the avoid, report, record and contacting the
04:36emergency disease hotline if you do encounter either single dead birds in water birds or especially
04:45multiple dead birds.
04:47And Chris, I mean that is such a big job, tracking a virus across a country as big as Australia,
04:52that the volunteers are doing there. Do they have the support that they need?
04:56They are. So it's part of a multi-agency response and the National Management Plan has been
05:03stood up in Australia and there is cost sharing amongst the jurisdictions. And several states are
05:11doing aerial surveys daily to try to track where birds are aggregating in large numbers and also to
05:18try to detect mass mortalities. And that's what we've seen in recent days, the results of those from
05:24South Australia, as we saw with those turns on the offshore islands, but also in areas like the
05:30log and algostry in Western Victoria. These efforts don't happen in isolation. So we're working as a
05:38community to protect biodiversity, but also to, in a one health response, which will ultimately work
05:46work into agriculture and poultry.
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