A bald eagle found last week at a rural Bosque County home was the second wild bird in Texas known to carry a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu that has been spreading in the United State this year, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department officials said.
The homeowner called a Texas Parks and Wildlife biologist Friday after noticing the bird had been lingering in the backyard for a couple of days without moving, said Shaun Oldenburger, the department’s small game program director.
“It had difficulty flying and was lethargic” and kept twitching its head, Oldenburger said.
The bird, a mature bald eagle, was taken to a facility for observation and euthanized when officials deemed it was unlikely to survive, he said.
The incident came just days after the department announced a great horned owl in a Wichita County rehabilitation facility had been stricken with the strain of bird flu. It was the first wild bird case in Texas, though the disease was spotted at a commercial operation in Erath County in early April.
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Since January, the highly pathogenic strains of bird flu circulating in the United States have been detected in wild birds in 36 states and domestic flocks in 34 states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The type of bird flu now circulating had last been detected in the United States in 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The risk of bird-to-human transmission is low, though a worker who was directly exposed to diseased poultry while culling a commercial flock in Colorado in late April tested positive for the virus and developed fatigue for a few days, according to the CDC.
The location of the infected bald eagle in Bosque County was near the Brazos River, within a few miles of McLennan County, making it less than 20 miles northwest of Waco. Eagle sightings have become common in the Waco area in the last 15 years, usually around bodies of water such as Lake Waco.
Oldenburger said eagles appear to be “highly susceptible” to the current bird flu virus, but knowledge about the overall effect on eagle populations is slim at this point. He said researchers found that eagle reproduction dropped markedly this year in Georgia.
Symptoms of infected birds include diarrhea, incoordination, lethargy, coughing and sneezing and sudden death, though some cases are asymptomatic, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife.
Officials caution people to limit their contact to wild birds and report any suspected infections to their local Texas Parks and Wildlife Department biologist or their Texas Animal Health Commission regional office.