Crows with News

Oh, who needs to hear this? Crows with West Nile Virus (WNV) have come to Western Washington. Public health people have, for the first time, found several dead crows who tested positive for WNV. It had previously been found in Eastern Washington, on the other side of the mountains, but apparently some corvid (crow, raven, jay) with the virus made its way across recently.

It’s not the worst possible news, of course. The birds transmit it to mosquitoes and then people get it from mosquito bites. Most bitten folks don’t get anything at all but WNV in their blood (which makes them ineligible for blood donating: all blood is tested for WNV). Some people get a mild flu-like condition called West Nile Fever. A few people, the elderly in particular, may end up with encephalitis. We have had two friends, of the elderly variety, who have recently had (and recovered from) encephalitis (probably not from WNV), but for neither was it a mild experience; more like life-changing. A very big deal. Background here.

Poking round on the net, I found that British Columbia does not appear to have yet found any evidence of WNV in its mosquito or corvid/raptor population. One would think it was just a matter of time, since it’s been found in all the provinces to the east of B.C., but maybe there’s something in the crow/raven/jay population that is just saying, ‘NO!’ Both the B.C. and the Washington public health agencies, however, are doing regular testing and want us to inform them about any dead birds we run into, particularly corvids and raptors. You can do it via the internet, although they may also want you to preserve the bird specimen by putting it in a double plastic bag. And don’t touch it with your bare hands, even though WNV can’t be transmitted that way. Just don’t.

It’s an amazing thing about dead birds. When you think about how many of them we see alive and how short their lives are, doesn’t it seem like you’d be seeing them dead regularly? I occasionally see a flutter of disconnected feathers and thereby know that some bird has dined on a smaller one, but they surely die of causes other than being eaten by something bigger and/or wilier. And yet, you almost never see one. I did see a dead towhee a couple of weeks ago, when we were out cleaning up litter on the roads. He was right there, spread out on the asphalt, as if he had had a heart attack midflight and had plunged directly down to the road, wings still spread. If I’d known I should report him, I would have. If only to see what happened next.

Well, for those of us in Western Washington, what should happen next is that we should make sure we’re not breeding mosquitoes in our yards--in tires, jars, bird baths, any of numerous kinds of receptacles sitting around that fill up with quickly-stagnant water. Not such an issue in the winter, of course, but now, still for awhile, and again in the spring, those mosquitoes will be looking for not-fresh water to repopulate the place with their young. And next year, some of those mosquito offspring will have WNV to offer us. People in other places: google your county name + public health + west nile virus, to find out your situation.