Bird flu and turkeys

In the context of my job, I get all kinds of press releases about the avian influenza affecting domestic and wild birds. Worrying about turkey hunters, I asked Mark Hatfield from the national wild turkey federation about the effects on wild turkeys.

There have been a few occasions in which there have been some birds in Wyoming, some birds in Montana that have been killed through exposure to the avian influenza on a large scale. Turkeys have not been impacted by that. That has been detected. Not to say that there has not been some other isolated instances, but in Wyoming there was a few birds, and in Montana there was a few birds. And those are the confirmed cases. We have received turkeys the way they are spread across the landscape and they don't congregate as much as some other birds. Avian influenza was traditionally a disease or a virus that impacts migratory birds because they congregate and roost in high numbers, a lot higher than turkeys do. But wild turkeys are susceptible to this, and so is poultry. Some of these were exposures around an infected pheasant farm in Wyoming, and then some other turkeys in Montana were in urban areas and were probably exposed through maybe another vector or other birds. But it's primarily a waterfowl disease. Turkeys are susceptible to it and there is once a poultry is chicken and or domestic turkey, they're expose. You do have to eradicate the flock but we have not seen anything to a population scale in wild turkeys yet. Speaker1: A collective few.