It was a glorious day for field work on the shores of Delaware Bay. The late afternoon sun cast a warm glow over the gently sloping beach. The falling tide revealed the fragmentation of shells. Dune grass rustling in the breeze. Beach vines are in full bloom. And the bird droppings were fresh and plentiful.
“There’s one,” says researcher Pamela McKenzie of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, pointing to a small white spot and then a gloved finger to another. “There’s one, there’s one, there’s one.”
For the next two hours, Dr. McKenzie and his colleagues scoured the shore, scooping up avian excrement. Their goal: to stay one step ahead of bird flu, a group of avian-adapted viruses that experts have long worried could easily spread to humans and start the next pandemic.
Every spring, this part of southern New Jersey becomes a bird-flu hot spot. Shorebirds wing north to local beaches to rest and refuel, shedding viruses along the way. And every year for the past four decades, scientists from St. Jude have flown into town to follow them.
The work requires patience — waiting for birds to move and tides to align — sharp eyes and resilient knees, sometimes tough enough to withstand hours of shuffling and squatting along rugged shorelines. “These are not beautiful, sandy beaches,” said Lisa Kercher, a member of the St. Jude team. “They’re thick, muddy, gritty beaches full of bird droppings.”
But these droppings-covered shores are helping scientists learn more about how avian influenza evolves, how it behaves in the wild, and what it might take for these bird viruses to become a global public health threat. These scientific questions, which have driven the St. Jude team for decades, have become more urgent as the United States grapples with its largest bird flu outbreak in history, caused by a new, highly pathogenic version of a virus known as H5N1.
“Delaware Bay has become an influenza gold mine,” said Robert Webster, the St. Jude influenza expert who first discovered the hot spot in 1985. He has returned every year since then, or so have his colleagues. “And we’re going to keep mining that gold until we find the answer.”
Beaches for birds
In June, the southern New Jersey shore fills with vacationing families, their colorful beach umbrellas sprouting across the sand.
But in May, the beach belongs to the birds. Hundreds of thousands of migrating shorebirds and gulls make pit stops here on their way to their summer breeding grounds, some arriving after a days’ journey from South America, bedridden and emaciated. “They have a desperate need to regain weight,” says Lawrence Niles, a wildlife biologist who leads local shorebird conservation projects through his company, Wildlife Restoration Project.
Fortunately, the birds arrive just as flocks of horseshoe crabs come ashore with thousands of eggs. Dr. Niles said the birds may spend two weeks roaming the gelatinous green eggs, “almost doubling their body weight.” During that time, they blanket the beach, mingle with local birds, and give each other the flu like kids in a crowded classroom.
Wild waterfowl – including ducks, gulls and shorebirds – are natural reservoirs of influenza A viruses, which come in several subtypes. Generally, wild birds carry relatively benign versions of these viruses, which pose little immediate threat to birds or humans. But flu viruses can change rapidly, accumulating new mutations and swapping genetic material. These changes can, and sometimes do, turn a ho-hum virus into a deadly one, such as the version of H5N1 currently circulating.
Most of the time, the flu is performed at low levels on the shorebird and cheeks, often Less than one percent Specimens But in Delaware Bay in May and early June, it explodes, easily passing from bird to bird. Over the years, the St. Jude team found it in 12 percent of their samples, although that number has risen as high as 33 percent. They found almost every subtype of influenza A, in addition to novel remixes, which can arise when an animal is infected with multiple viruses at once.
To keep an eye on what is happening, St. Jude scientists Dr. Niles works closely with his colleagues, who use the spring stopover as an opportunity to assess the health of shorebirds, which face a variety of threats, ranging from climate change. Overharvest of horseshoe crabs. Dr Niles and his team usually go to the beach first to count, catch, examine and tag the birds. They then relay the bird’s address to flu-hunting avian-clean-up crews. “We then go outside and defecate,” Dr. Kercher said.
‘A Unique Year’
But on the team’s first full day of field work this spring, as the conservationists finished their work, the tide was roaring again. So for several hours, St. Jude scientists spent their time, waiting for the water to recede and hope they will still be able to find some sails. “We’re at the mercy of the birds, and the birds don’t tell us what they’re doing,” Dr. Kercher said.
It was about 4pm when they finally reached a local beach, crossing a gravel road, pine forest and swamp, where shorebirds had been spotted earlier.
Dr. McKenzie, wearing black joggers and a hooded, gray waffle-knit top, got out of the car and surveyed the beach. Horse crabs stretch along the high tide line. In the distance, a flock of small birds is moving around in the water. Dr. Mackenzie picked up his binoculars. Bingo: They were rowdy turnstones, sandpipers whose tricolor markings are sometimes compared to calico cats. These birds, the St. Jude team learned, are especially likely to carry the flu virus.
The scientists wore gloves and masks, recently added safety precautions. “It’s not something we’ve done in the past,” Dr. McKenzie said, “but this is a unique year.”
The new H5N1 strain first appeared in North America in late 2021 and spread rapidly across the continent. It leads to death About 60 million Cultivated birds, killed Score wild ones And even kills some unfortunate mammals, from red foxes to gray seals.
The St. Jude team found no trace of H5N1 in Delaware Bay last spring. But at that time, the virus had not yet entered the South American wintering grounds of shorebirds. By this spring, it was, meaning the birds could bring it back with them. “We’re absolutely concerned that this is going to show up,” Dr. Kercher said.
So the scientists were doubling their surveillance, aiming to collect 1,000 stool samples instead of their standard 600. They began to pick their way down the beach, casting their eyes down to find the right white spot. No dropping to be done; This should be fresh excrement, ideally from Raddy Turnstone and Red Knot, another sandpiper species. Scientists have become adept at distinguishing between the two types of dropping. “Turnstones are mostly logs,” Dr. McKenzie said. “Red knots have more of a splat.”
When the scientists found a suitable spot, they got down on their knees and pulled out round-tipped swabs. Sometimes it takes a few attempts to successfully collect a sample. “It’s not the easiest technique with these tools,” Research team member Patrick Seiler said. “In the flowing air, trying to defecate and put it in a small vial.”
Flu Clues
They put the samples in a small plastic cooler, the kind a vacationer might bring to this same beach. Later, the samples will be sent back to the lab in Memphis for testing and analysis.
Typically, researchers sequence the viruses they find, look for significant mutations and chart their evolution over time, and then select a subset to study in different types of cells and animal models. Over the past few decades, this work has helped scientists learn more about what “run-of-the-mill” bird flu viruses look like and how they behave, said Richard Webby, an influenza expert on the St. Jude team.
It also helped them identify outliers. “And that leads us to a chase,” Dr Webby said, which may reveal “something about the fundamental biology of these viruses”. In 2009, some of the viruses they found surprisingly spread among ferrets. Further study of these viruses helped the researchers Detecting genetic mutations which may facilitate airborne flu transmission in mammals.
If the team finds H5N1 this year, Dr. Webby and his colleagues will look for changes that the virus may have acquired as it passes through shorebirds, as well as ones that could make it more dangerous to humans or resistant to vaccines and treatments.
The virus has already evolved significantly since arriving in North America, Dr. Webby and his colleagues report In a recent paper, which was based on analysis of viral samples isolated from birds outside the Delaware Bay region. The new variants they found did not acquire the ability to easily spread among mammals, but some were able to cause severe neurological symptoms in infected mammals.
If the virus turns up in this year’s Delaware Bay samples, it would be another sign that H5N1 is increasingly making inroads into North America. It can also create problems for some shorebirds, particularly the red knot, whose numbers have declined rapidly in recent decades. For these birds, H5N1 is “a great unknown threat,” Dr. Niles said.
And so, while the process of collecting excrement remains as fascinating as ever, the stakes seem high as scientists get down to work on the beach.
All they can say is that they haven’t found the new H5N1 virus yet. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t,” said Dr. McKenzie. Birds carefully pick out the scatological clues left behind. “I guess we’ll find out.”
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