Finding Winged Travelers and Ourselves in Troubled Waters
<p>Aswe observe World Migratory Bird Day in 2023, the chosen theme — water — ripples with profound significance. Water, in its various forms, serves as both a barrier and a facilitator in birds’ extraordinary travels. Oceans, rivers, lakes, and wetlands are indispensable waypoints for these resilient travelers. But in helping to shape birds’ migratory routes, water also helps to create aerial superhighways for opportunistic, hitchhiking pathogens to travel the globe.</p>
<p>Historically these hitchhikers were predominantly low pathogenic avian influenza viruses, meaning they did not cause high mortality in wild birds. Then about two years ago, a highly pathogenic lineage of avian influenza took advantage of the flyways and became an unprecedented global pandemic. Likely <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.02.539182v1.full.pdf" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">millions of wild birds</a> have been killed worldwide and the breadth of species impacts have been astounding:</p>
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