The birds loiter on the shore to breed but spend much of their time at sea. At hazard from habitat loss, heat stress, pollutants, disease, predation and climate change, the colony is carefully protected and examined. Taking advantage of their reliable daily pilgrimage to the water, Phillip Island Nature Parks showcases the penguins to hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, funding research and conservation programs. The little penguins are famous.
Not only penguins live on Phillip Island, known to the Bunurong/Boonwurrung people as Millowl, but also Australian fur seals, wallabies, koalas, swamp harriers, Cape Barren geese, nankeen kestrels and many others. The island is also on the migration routes of short-tailed shearwaters – or mutton birds – and straw-necked ibis. The shearwaters, whose passage north is encouraged each year by the Dark Sky So Shearwaters Fly campaign to turn off distracting home and street lighting, are due to arrive, more than a million strong, in the spring. With them, however, comes the risk of a new avian flu – a troubling threat to the little penguins.
The management of Phillip Island is not able yet to detail its plans to protect the little penguin colony and other wildlife, but the emphasis will likely be on monitoring. There is not much else possible, apart from responsive quarantining and public education. Collecting dead birds before predators can find them is effective but has to be weighed against colony disturbance. Biosecurity cautions, such as safe handling of infected animals, and care when encountering both domestic and wild birds, are recommended. Public reporting of unusual deaths or illness in birds, including backyard chooks, will help.
Vaccines are not widely used for animals, but humans accessing our own influenza vaccination can help lessen the flu load throughout the world and minimise both our own vulnerability and the chance of “reassortment” – where different strains combine into hybrids able to thrive in other species. Several agencies, including the CSIRO’s Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness, Agriculture Victoria and the Invasive Species Council, are all engaging, and Wildlife Health Australia has released a toolkit for wildlife managers. Phillip Island Nature Parks chief executive Catherine Basterfield released a statement saying they’re working closely with departments
and organisations to prepare.
Still, devastation is possible.
There’s increasing concern about avian flu, and a fair bit of confusion. At present there are three main strains being discussed in Australia, and they each have dangers, but for different species. All avian flu, a relative of the terrible Spanish flu, is caused by influenza A viruses, originally emerging from wild waterfowl in Asia, jumping into domesticated animals and still spreading through wild populations. It is distinguished into high and low pathogenicity – HPAI and LPAI. These varieties are all still largely restricted to animal and bird species. They can intensify in pathogenicity, and there is the risk of reassortment. Nevertheless, the viruses generally stay within their host limits, and, though some humans have directly contracted avian flus, including a child returned to Australia from India, there is no sign of human-to-human transference. There are vaccines and management plans in case of outbreak. Severity in humans can range from itchy eyes to an estimated 60 per cent mortality rate, depending on the strain.
Avian flus play havoc with birds and economies. More than 400 million chickens, turkeys and ducks have been culled globally since 2003, and, in the first outbreak since Australia was declared HPAI free in 2014, highly contagious strains have recently been found at poultry and egg farms in two states and the ACT.
Australia guarded itself from Covid-19 for a while by closing air routes. No such policy is possible when it comes to more than a million shearwaters and other migratory species, due to arrive from August to November, and which are, of course, welcome. The shearwaters, which come 15,000 kilometres from Alaska to lay their eggs on Cape Woolamai, are already threatened by the usual clamour of human interferences. Now they themselves may bring catastrophe.
High pathogenic H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b, a fast-evolving and very transmissible strain discerned in 2021 and now tracked across much of the globe, is largely transmitted through aerosols and faeces, often dropped in flight, against which it’s very difficult to protect wild species. It is recommended that farmed chickens and backyard chooks are kept indoors as much as possible, but in a natural environment it’s likely that the disease will eventually be deposited where the penguins will encounter it. Already other continents have suffered: since 2020 Peru has lost 40 per cent of its native pelicans and 10 per cent of its penguins; Israel lost 8000 cranes; Germany, 3000 red knots. Disturbingly, the disease has jumped to mammals, with animals such as foxes, bears, minks and raccoons infected. South American sea lions died en masse. Hundreds of millions of seabirds have perished.
Across the world, more than 500 bird species and 60 mammal species are becoming ill. Just a few months ago, Federation University Australia biologist Dr Meagan Dewar reported the many deaths in Antarctica of Adélie penguins, elephant seals, skuas, and others. The outbreaks continue and are worsening. There are images of people, masked and melancholy, standing in icy landscapes over rows of dead birds. There is a beach littered with the slumped bodies of elephant seals.
Animals move, they secrete, they slobber, they shit, they mingle on shores. In wild places such as Antarctica and Peru’s northern coast, natural movement is possible – and suddenly, lethal. With domesticated animals, husbandry structures, however unfortunate in other ways, enable quarantine and efficient management. Conservation areas, however, already hemmed in by restricted space and the needs of vulnerable wildlife communities, are both too small and too big to manage easily. Threatened species – in Australia there are about 200 bird species considered at risk – have small populations and can be in danger from too much interference. They are also at risk from insufficient protection and, it seems, from natural wild churn, from birds doing as birds must, migrating to breed.
Up to a point this is all a “natural” phenomenon: animals die, sometimes in mass mortalities. Viruses organically arise, mutate, thrive, fail, transmit, fade. The question for us human animals is, what have we done? As we learnt with the Wuhan origins of Covid-19, the more wildlife is forced to unnaturally mix and encounter human habitat, the greater the chances that viruses hybridise and get into places and bodies they were never otherwise going to. That includes human bodies.
Cook your eggs and chicken properly, notice when birds are rheumy, wan or diarrhoeic, don’t panic yet about bird flu in humans, then prepare to be appalled by what might happen to our bird and mammal cousins, and the consequences. We are not directly responsible for this environmental cataclysm, for once, but by endangering Australian wildlife we’ve made robust populations vulnerable to perils such as avian flu.
There is a recent term, “One Health”, that integrates human, animal and environmental health and understands a unified model of dependencies and effects to be the best way of answering global health crises. Simply unpicking the subtleties and distinctions of avian flu – different strains, in varying places, over several moments in time, affecting multiple species in a variety of ways – is complicated. Dealing with the enmeshing of risks and advantages in our contemporary ecological tangle is far more daunting, but if the beloved little penguins and our backyard chooks begin to drop dead, we will have to try harder.
As told by the associate dean of the School of Science, Computing and Engineering Technologies at Swinburne University, Professor Enzo Palombo, and Dr James Kempton, Merton College, Oxford.
Emergency Animal Disease Hotline 1800 675 888.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
July 13, 2024 as “Operation penguin”.
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