Of twinkles and butt swabs

by Doug O’Harra

Birch leaves were emerging; the search for bird flu in North America had begun.

In late May of 2006, Lee Tibbitts had visited the salt marshes rimming Anchorage Alaska off and on for a week. A shorebird biologist with the Alaska Science Center, a research group of the U.S. Geological Survey, Tibbitts was watching for the arrival of pectoral sandpipers and long-billed dowitchers, two of the 28 migratory species most likely to carry highly pathenogenic H5N1 flu into North America through Alaska.

She and her colleagues were preparing take the very first butt swabs in the state from live birds with strong Asian connections. It would launch an extraordinary project to intercept avian flu before it could cause a U.S. outbreak. In the end, the nightmare strain did not show.

Over the next six months, scientists would swab the butts of some 13,651 birds in Alaska and test 4,696 birds killed by hunters and 1,030 birds found dead. Another 564 samples were taken at foraging and nesting sites.

The season would continue through March 31, 2007. Through Feb. 21, scientists at three federal departments tested 95,131 samples taken in the United States and found no sign of the strain that had killed millions of birds in Asia. Only 16 birds tested positive for a low-pathenogic H5N1 virus. The Asian bird flu has so far not jumped to the Western Hemisphere and been detected by biologists and pathologists.

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The quest began like this. On a workday morning, I met Tibbitts at a city park across the street from balconied town-homes. Accompanying her was biologist Dan Ruthrauff, another shore bird specialist, and Catherine Puckett, a spokeswoman from the USGS’s national office.

We walked along a bike path rimming a lagoon where people ice skate in winter, then entered a tunnel under the Alaska Railroad to emerge on to the city’s popular coastal bike trail with a view of mud flats. Tiny birds skittered along gravel bars. I could hear the “back-up” warning bell from a garbage truck in the neighborhood behind us.

Tibbitts and Ruthrauff studied the flocks with binoculars and spotting scope. Long-billed dowitchers had been present the day before, but not today. Ruthrauff pointed out a group of Hudsonian godwits, one of several exotic species that putter through city wetlands each spring, almost completely ignored by residents.

“If you were a birder, you’d ‘click’ them (off a life list) and move on,” he said.

But the two target species were missing. The birds were probably foraging on a more remote stretch of coast six miles further out the bike trail.

We piled into Tibbitts’ car. After winding through the neighborhood, we took a short dash down an expressway then drove west on a one-way commercial boulevard of grocery stores, camping outlets, exercise clubs and cafes. We were forced to wait for heavy equipment tearing up pavement in a suburban area near an elementary school. At the perimeter of the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, we passed an unmanned Homeland Security checkpoint.

After reaching an overlook of Cook Inlet, we continued along a cyclone fence with an unobstructed view of the runways and parked outside a recycling plant and a group of one-story, camp-like buildings where the Salvation Army cares for hard-core alcoholics struggling to dry out.

We walked through the treatment center’s parking lot, traversed a meadow pocked with moose hoof prints, crossed the same bike trail and, finally, side-stepped down a wooded bluff to the salt marsh of Anchorage’s uninhabited west coast.

Periodically, enormous jets blasted overhead. I thought I could hear the grumble of backhoes at the recycling plant.

Tibbitts and Ruthrauff immediately spied birds and were surprised at the numbers. Dowitchers pranced through ponds, plunging their flexible bills in a sewing-machine motion in quest of invertebrates. Sandpipers fluttered among flocks of related birds. In minutes, the biologists noted nearly 25 different species, including nesting pairs of sandhill cranes. The targeted birds would only be in Anchorage for a week or so before winging toward breeding grounds in Russia and Arctic Alaska. Suddenly time was short.

“It seems like a lot of birds have arrived since yesterday, and they should be,” Tibbitts said. “The sooner we begin trapping, the better, because these birds aren’t going to stick around. Because these birds have an agenda.”

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Most of the 400,000 pectoral sandpipers in the world winter in Argentina and Chili, then travel north up the central North American flyway toward breeding grounds in the Arctic. Another population of pectoral sandpipers winters in Australia and southern Pacific, and then follows a parallel northward migration along China and Japan.

It’s thought that these two populations of sandpipers overlap in Siberia, exchanging viruses, as birds are apt to do, and then transport exotic ones back to their respective wintering grounds. Thus, H5N1, the virulent killer of poultry that has raised fears of a human pandemic, could theoretically hop-skip sandpiper to sandpiper on 18,000-mile roundtrips, reaching first Siberia and then Alaska, and gradually moving south to the rest of North and South America.

But this leads to a startling thought. These Pecs, as the biologists like to call them, almost certainly arrived in Anchorage after migrating from Argentina. If any of them test positive for avian flu, then they probably have been carrying it since last summer.

Thus, a positive find would suggest that the highly pathogenic virus could already be splattered, via sandpiper droppings, across a couple thousand miles of American meadows, ponds and swamps.

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We met the next morning at the treatment center. With Puckett, Tibbitts and Ruthrauff was Bob Gill, the lead shorebird biologist at the science center with 35 years of experience. Also present was Paul Slota, the spokesman for the National Wildlife Health Center where thousands of butt swabs would be screened this summer for H5N1 avian flu, and Bob Dusek, an expert in trapping migratory birds who had come to Alaska to train biologists in techniques.

This time, Gill secured permission to drive through the treatment plant on a dirt road kept open by the municipality in case a passenger jet were to crash on the mud flats west of town. Soon we had decamped to the coast, carrying supplies in Rubbermaid totes. We set them near driftwood.

The soggy marsh extended a quarter mile toward exposed mud, covered only at the highest spring tides. Soon the biologists had strung mist nets between poles to ensnare sandpipers and erected a few low cages along ponds to trap dowitchers.

The dense, sticky mud sucked hard on shin boots and hip waders. The birds skittered back and forth, intent on eating, not particularly upset by human presence.

“They’re not really afraid of us because they’re not breeding,” Tibbitts said.

The dowitchers appeared to be feeding far from the cages, but a flock of sandpipers foraged nearby. To get the birds to fly into the nets instead of exploding off into the sky, the biologists like to coax them forward by daintily crowding their space. The British call it “twinkling the birds,” Tibbitts said, a maneuver that’s as much art as science.

But before the scientists could spread out for a decent twinkle, a single bird fluttered into the net and began to struggle. Its chirp of alarm attracted the flock, and within a few seconds, about 20 birds were wiggling madly in the mesh. An embarrassment of avian riches.

Gill dashed across the foot-deep water. “I need some people to drive off the other birds,” he called.

Four more biologists rushed up and began picking out birds. For the first time in their careers, the three Anchorage shorebird people wore lightly powdered latex gloves as a precaution against bird flu. It made it much more difficult to disentangle the birds, each weighing about the same as a bunch of table grapes but with wriggling wings, feathers, legs and heads all tangling in the thread-like net. As they were freed, the birds were slipped into cloth bags or set inside the rubber totes.

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At the base of the bluff, the biologists sat down on little folding chairs. After doing a western sandpiper for practice, Gill washed his latex palms with citrus-scented waterless hand sanitizer (also a new experience), and removed the pectoral sandpiper from its bag.

The bird’s sharp beak was closed, its body still. The dark beady eyes blinked alertly. It was impossible to read reaction with any certainty, but it didn’t seem alarmed.

Gill splayed the brown mottled wings and feathers with his fingers, then expertly palmed the bird, took pliers and squeezed a tiny metal band onto its right leg. Using calipers, he measured beak, head, wings, body. Tibbitts recorded the figures. He placed the bird in a bag so Ruthrauff could weigh it on a digital scale. They plucked a small feather from the center of its left wing so that a different scientist could analyze its diet and possibly find out where the bird spent the winter. In a minute, they would take a blood sample for genetic tests and dab the wound with styptic powder. But first came the bird flu.

Gill held the bird stationary in his palm belly up. Tibbitts probed its downy white abdomen with her “textured” latex-covered fingertips, searching for the opening into its cloacal cavity, that multi-purpose exit for the products of avian digestive and reproductive systems.

“There it is,” she said.

She slipped a sterile swab into the opening.

“You need to twist around,” Gill said. “There you go.”

As Tibbitts eased the swab free, the bird blinked several times, showing little reaction to the delicate maneuver.

The tip was brownish, like a Q-tip freshly swiped inside a human ear. Tibbitts stuck it into a vial filled with pink medium for preserving viruses, clipped off the stick and sealed the lid.

It was the first of 39,516 live birds that would be sampled for virulent flu in the United States, more than one-third of them in Alaska. The notion that such a tiny creature could carry the seeds for a poultry pandemic, and possibly trigger a frenzy of media coverage on the scale of the coverage of terrorism, seemed preposterous in the cool sunshine on the edge of the marsh. Results would not be known for weeks.

After the blood test, Gill carried the little bird to the edge of the mud and set it down amid hummocks. It sprang forward, tripped, leapt up again, and began dashing away on a zigzagging trot toward the ponds. But something was wrong. Its left wing, the same one that had provided the feather, was not folding smoothly into place. The bird held it partly aloft.

Gill and Tibbitts watched the bird run away. “You should get it,” Tibbitts said.

So Gill trotted out into the marsh, dodging left, then right, finally flanking the bird, then grasping it with a two-handed scoop like a center fielder chasing down a ground ball. He carried the bird back and closely examined its wings and body.

“Nothing’s broken,” he said. “It could have been strained in the net.”

The bird was put into its own Rubbermaid tote to rest, while the scientists banded, swabbed and sampled other birds.

The sandpiper was kept overnight and later moved to an injured bird treatment center. It was still in custody during the third week of May, eating hundreds of mealworms and getting fat.

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The sandpiper remained at the Anchorage Bird treatment center for the rest of the summer. Staffers reported to Tibbetts that the tiny animal seemed content — loved to eat — but its wing never fully recovered.

On Aug. 31, the shorebird from Anchoage was sent in a cage via airlines to Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary in Green Bay, Wisconsin. “The bird arrived in good shape went successfully through the quarantine period and as put on display with our other shorebirds,” said curator Mike Reed. “It adjusted well to display and we loved the addition to the exhibit.”

On Jan. 2, the staff noticed that the fiesty, active bird was limping. They pulled it from the exhibit and discovered that the band had gotten pushed up on the leg and was now imbedded into the bird’s thigh.

“The band acted like a tourniquet and the muscle was infected and swollen around the band,” Reed said.

The veterinarians tried to remove the band, but the sandpiper’s leg broke. Because the infection had weakened the bird, they concluded it would not recover even if they could finally get the band off and treat the leg. And so, the sandpiper was euthanized. Its body was donated to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicano, Reed said.

“We had all grown fond of this perky, graceful bird and were very saddened by its loss,” Reed said. “In a way, it will live on through its value to science.”

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