bird flu – Go Retire Psychiatrist

I’ve heard about the recent contract a drug company (Zoetis) obtained to make chicken vaccine for the H5N1 bird flu virus which is hopping from birds to cows and even to humans. So far, I haven’t heard that the bird flu is transmitted between humans.

As far as eating eggs, I’ve read that the chance of getting bird flu is pretty slim—but experts tell you to cook your eggs to a temperature above 165 degrees. No soft egg yolks for me.

Anyway, Zoetis is making a vaccine for chickens. I got to wondering how you would vaccinate chickens. Obviously, you have to catch them first, wrestle them down to the barnyard floor and stick a needle into them somewhere under all the feathers.

There’s a Wikihow with instructions (including a video) for giving chickens vaccines. One of them says to inject the bird in the spot for which you have the easiest access and which is the “most comfortable for the chicken.”

How do you tell which is the most comfortable spot for the chicken to be impaled by a needle? Maybe it’s marked by a Walgreens sticker. You have to sterilize the spot, maybe with a splash of that moonshine you’re making on your property. Make sure you don’t drink any of it during the vaccination process. You want to make sure of your aim.

When and how do you wrap a rubber band around the beak? You know darn well the chicken is going to peck you. You can tell we don’t have chickens in the backyard.

And then there are all the stories on the internet about how chickens can run around for a short while even after their heads are cut off. If they’re that energetic without their heads attached, how much more frantic are they going to be if they see you chasing after them with a needle? And remember, you’re going to probably poke them in the neck. Chickens know that. They also know you’re wearing only thin rubber gloves.

And aren’t chicken farms or ranches or coops, whatever, just chock full of thousands of chickens? Vaccinating all of them is a dawn to dusk proposition so you better have your Wheaties in the morning.

Are the roosters also up for the vaccine? One way to get them ready is to let them crow until they pass out. Then you can poke them. You’re welcome.

The story so far on the house finch family is that the eggs are intact. We still don’t know when they might hatch. The video from yesterday shows what the birds typically do and I think it would be redundant to make videos daily. The critter cam captured over 400 video and image files in the space of almost 5 hours yesterday. The short YouTube was produced from a tiny fraction of those.

Their behavior doesn’t change from day to day. I’ll be checking the nest once a day to check on the eggs, which will cut down on the number of intrusive visits that only startle the birds.

One thought I had was about bird flu which is in the news a lot lately. The CDC web site on Avian Influenza A makes it clear that water fowl are the main wild bird transmitters, not the typical back yard songbirds.

Another thing I found was a new edition of Iowa bird expert Stan Tekiela’s book, Birds of Iowa Field Guide (new edition 2023, last one was in 2000). I think it’s a great guide, partly because it helps readers to identify bird species starting with a very simple feature—their color. The image below shows the old edition on the left and the new one on the right.

One new item about the house finch is that, rarely, males who are not well-nourished might have a yellow rather than orange or red head, chest, and rump. Another is that both males and females can get a disease that causes the eyes to crust over, leading to blindness and death.