'Very scary' bird flu is unsettling poultry farmers in Suffolk

Three owls in the Peconic area that recently died of a highly virulent type of bird flu are the latest Long Island cases of a disease that has poultry farmers on edge.

“It’s very scary,” said Wayne Meyer, owner of Long Island Poultry in Calverton, which sells live birds and eggs. “We talk about it every day.”

The disease has led to the deaths of millions of birds nationwide.

The first cases in New York of highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI, were confirmed Feb. 18 in a “backyard flock” of eight birds in Suffolk, according to the state Department of Agriculture and Markets, which does not identify exact locations.

Since then, two of the seven additional poultry flocks statewide with HPAI cases have been in Suffolk, the department said. A Sag Harbor gaming farm closed last month after thousands of its birds were destroyed following an outbreak, the farm’s owner told Newsday at the time. No cases have been detected in Nassau, agriculture department spokeswoman Hanna Birkhead said.

The disease spreads quickly, and if any bird is found to be infected, the entire poultry flock must be “depopulated,” or killed, said Rob Carpenter, administrative director of the Long Island Farm Bureau.

“Any producer, meaning a backyard person with two chickens up to a large poultry farm, needs to take this very seriously,” he said.

Bird flu in 27 states

HPAI has been detected in nearly 200 poultry flocks in 27 states nationwide, U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Lyndsay Cole said in an email. More than 27 million birds have been affected, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The virus is so virulent and spreads so rapidly that if there are any positive tests in a flock, the entire flock is considered to be positive,” Cole said.

Four wild birds have been found dead with HPAI in Suffolk, out of 16 cases statewide, according to the USDA.

That count doesn’t include the three owls, whose carcasses were collected April 4 by the state Department of Environmental Conservation and later tested positive for HPAI, DEC spokeswoman Aphrodite Montalvo said.

There are many ways bird flu can spread, including from infected wild birds that eat poultry feed and leave the virus behind, or wild birds whose excrement drops onto farms or into backyards, Carpenter said. Soil on boots is another transmission route.

“The disease or virus spreads so easily, you don’t really know every single way it can be brought onto a farm,” Carpenter said.

Increasing precautions

Meyer said that if HPAI were to strike his birds, “We’d go out of business. The state or the DEC will cull — every bird on my property would be wiped out. And then the rumor would go around that, ‘Oh, Long Island Poultry has the bird flu,’ and nobody would come here.”

Meyer has increased precautions. He now only allows prospective customers to view adult birds from behind a fence, rather than allowing them near the pens. He used to allow all his birds to run around free-range during the day, but now he limits the number to about 100. The rest stay in pens.

The number of birds he has often runs into hundreds of adults and chicks, which typically are sold to people who keep birds in their backyards.

At Crescent Duck Farm in Aquebogue, near Riverhead, which focuses on selling meat rather than live birds, company president Doug Corwin said in an email that the farm’s biosecurity standards have been “reanalyzed, and ramped up several degrees.”

Ducks are kept in indoor barns, rather than outside, Crescent says on its website.

Meyer said allowing any of his birds outside their pens and coops increases risk. But “people won’t buy birds if they don’t see them,” so he lets some go outside during the day.

He still allows customers into the greenhouse that houses chicks, but visitors must put bootees on their shoes and wash their hands, and they must stay three to four feet away from the metal boxes that contain the chicks.

Spiking egg prices

Although Meyer is nervous, he puts the recent cases in perspective.

“There are thousands and thousands of people on Long Island that have flocks, and the state has only come across three or four with the flu,” he said. “Hopefully luck is on our side and my customers’ side.”

This year’s HPAI cases are the first confirmed in this country since 2017, the CDC says. A major outbreak in late 2014 and 2015 led to the killing of more than 50 million birds.

That caused egg prices to spike in 2015, and the same thing is happening this year, although other factors also are bringing about the current cost increases. The price of a dozen large eggs rose from $1.20 on average early this year to $2.98, according to a Monday USDA report.

The CDC says there have been no human cases of HPAI in the United States. The virus rarely infects people, the agency says.

Cooking eggs or poultry to an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit kills HPAI and other viruses and bacteria, the CDC says.

By David Olson

david.olson@newsday.com@DavidOlson11

David Olson covers health care. He has worked at Newsday since 2015 and previously covered immigration, multicultural issues and religion at The Press-Enterprise in Southern California.