CA Wildlife Environmental Scientist Visits Solvang to Analyze Pigeon Death

Krysta Rogers, environmental scientist for the California Dept. of Fish and Wildlife visited Solvang on Thursday to collect Band-Tailed Pigeon carcasses for analyzing.

Rogers said the events started in mid-December in the Santa Barbara county areas and in San Bernardino County.

As of January experts are seeing sick band-tailed pigeons affected by avian trichomonas with the highest numbers in Santa Barbara and Santa Clara counties. Several other locations they’ve found are in San Luis Obispo County, Contra Costa County, and San Mateo County.

Sick pigeons become weak and pray for raptor so some raptor species that feed on the birds could get the disease.

Other birds can carry the parasite, like the park or rock pigeons introduced from Europe hundreds of years ago. It doesn’t kill the rock pigeons as readily as it kills the native band tail pigeons.

When they become infected they die very quickly. They’re native in California. This time of year they winter in Central and southern California

It spreads through individual birds through contaminated food or water.

Rogers has been researching this disease in band tail pigeons and according to the dept. of fish and wildlife records these events have been documented in California since the mid 1940s. They seem to be appearing more frequently than in the past.

Sometimes they’re worse than others. For the most part they end because they disperse to breed and don’t stick as closely to one another, this slows the disease cycle and the mortality will stop.

Rogers says the diseases is challenging to study, especially to see where they occur because the migration is dependents on food, and this winter their food is acorn. Santa Barbara county is seeing a lot of acorn this winter season.

“This isn’t out of the ordinary it happened in previous winters,” Rogers said, “The most recent outbreak was in San Diego last year.

Prior to that it was in 2012 between mid December and March in several locations.

“Because these events seem to be reported with frequency it is somewhat concerning, the band tail pigeon population has been declining for the 40 years.”

On average, a pair will produce one chick a year., “That’s certainly low, and that will take the population a long time to recover from a high mortality like this,” Rogers said.

They don’t see large-scale mortality events in the summer because birds are paired up for breeding season there isn’t as much interaction.

Avian trichomonis is a parasite that affects their upper digestive tract in band-tailed pigeons and causes lesions to develop, and the birds can’t eat food, they starve to death and suffocate. They can live from a week to 10 days.

In the Solvang Los Olivos area experts estimate up to around 500 band-tailed pigeons have died from the disease.

It’s a very complicated system on where acorns will be its very complex.

Rogers says any time you see dead birds in your yard, it’s a good time to stop providing water, let the birds disperse naturally. Clean bird feeders and bird baths.

“Any time you have sick or dead bird in your yard and you have a feeder or bird bath it’s a good reminder to stop and clean everything real well,” Rogers said.

“It’s not the only reason, but especially this year with the drought conditions that we have is less natural water. Usually they’re drinking out of creeks. So this year it seems a lot of pigeons are utilizing artificial sources of water, so when you have a small volume of water the disease can spread a lot easier within individuals.”

The birds were all collected at the Animal Rescue Team in Solvang; some were humanely euthanized according to Julia Disieno, co-founder of The Animal Rescue team. The group is a non-profit and is asking for donations of latex gloves, ziplock bags and Styrofoam coolers because they are overwhelmed with the number of dead birds coming in.

For more information or to help donate log on to http://animalrescueteam.net/.