Expert raises hope that spoonbill crisis might soon end

The mass die-off of black-faced spoonbills in Tainan County will be over soon "if no new cases are reported," an expert said yesterday.

Veterinarian Chi Wei-lien (祁偉廉), who is helping an emergency center deal with the crisis, said the source of the botulism that has been blamed for the death of 71 birds so far, can be traced to a fish-pond area located several kilometers north of the black-faced spoonbills preservation area in the Chiku wetland reserve at the mouth of the Tsengwen River.

"Both the reserve and the fish pond area are now environmentally safe for the birds," he said.

Judging from the locations of the three waves of deaths and their feeding patterns, he said, it can be reasonably assumed that one location in the fish pond is the source of infection, as 13 out of 20 specimens of clams, fish and soil collected from the location were confirmed to contain traces of botulin, the pathogen that causes botulism poisoning.

He said that among the first 53 deaths reported Dec. 9, 48 were in the northern fish pond area and only five were in a fish pond area to the east of the preserve.

The number of sick birds in the second wave of deaths decreased, and were mostly found in the eastern fish-pond area. The third and latest round of sick birds occurred mainly in the preserve area itself between Jan. 1 and Jan. 5.

Wang Ying (王穎), a National Taiwan Normal University professor who has made a long-term observation of the spoonbills, said that more than 80 percent of the birds hunt for food in the evening and usually go to the northern fish pond first and fly to the eastern one later. They return to feed again just before dawn, before flying back to the wetlands to spend the day.

Chi said that it can be safely presumed that the spoonbills were most likely to have eaten fish infected with botulism in the northern fish pond, as most of the birds that died in the first wave of deaths were unable to fly away from that pond.