Sue Surkes is the environmental reporter for The Times of Israel.
The Israel Nature and Parks Authority this year stopped feeding migrant pelicans in northern Israel over the possibility that bird flu could decimate concentrated herds.
In December 2021, an outbreak of avian influenza in the poultry sector to wild birds, for the first time.
Among the victims were some of the approximately 500 pelicans who arrived near the end of the pelicans’ migration season and stopped at the Beit Shean domain on the southern Sea of Galilee.
Authorities who designed feeding systems to keep pelicans and other birds away from agricultural fields and fish farms ended up concentrating them in a way that allowed one bird to infect another without problems.
Experts say it’s still fully understood how bird flu spread so temporarily among wild birds.
Pelicans migrate through Israel each summer to succeed in wintering areas in Africa, starting to arrive in mid-August.
They don’t stay long before flying into the Sinai Desert and following the Nile to succeed in their winter ponds.
This year, INPA stopped feeding them in northern Israel’s Hula Valley, where highly publicized fish ponds were closed. Pelicans visiting the valley will still be looking for fish, but they will not be provided by a human hand.
The organization continues to supply fish to various bodies of water in the Sharon region of central Israel, not only because the fish farming industry is still located in the region, but also because the birds only fly when their bellies are full. This is your last food station before entering the Negev desert.
“Between mid-August and Friday, 26,000 pelicans entered Israel and 22,000 left, out of a total of 50,000 expected,” Amit Dolev, INPA’s northern environmentalist, told The Times of Israel. The rest will arrive in October and November.
“We are checking them, and so far we have not noticed dead pelicans or evidence of bird flu,” Dolev added.
The precept for all wild birds deserves to be to restrict the synthetic distribution of food as much as possible to avoid concentrating it in a specific area, he said.
But he declined to say whether there would be any adjustment to INPA’s feeding policy regarding cranes, saying only that the factor is more complex.
Cranes were the main victims of last year’s outbreak; an estimated one in five has died from the disease, most commonly in and around the Hula Lake Reserve in the Hula Valley, where birds feed.
Some 80,000 to 90,000 cranes pass through Israel, arriving more and more from October. Some 30,000 to 40,000 cranes spend the winter in the country, leaving only from early to mid-March.
Several agencies are in discussions about the search for food, adds the Ministry of Agriculture.
The cranes take 3 routes, the easternmost of which stretches from Scandinavia and Russia west of the Ural Mountains, Turkey and Israel, and continues to Northeast Africa, Ethiopia and Sudan.
Flanked by vast deserts to the east and the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Israel’s bureaucracy is a key migration route and bottleneck for millions of birds that between Europe, Asia and Africa each spring and autumn, perched birds (passerines), waders and birds of prey are added.
More than one million birds of prey pass through it every year, adding the maximum number of Levantine falcons and steppe eagles in danger of extinction, as well as thousands of honey buzzards and steppe buzzards.
According to Ohad Hatzofe, an avian ecologist at INPA, some 550 species have been recorded in Israel, a richness more characteristic of the tropics consistent with kilometer. Of these, about 120 to 130 live all year round or come to nest.
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