H5N1 has officially returned to Great Britain. 

This past Sunday, workers at the Redgrave Park Farm in Suffolk, near the border with Norfolk, made an unsettling discovery.  In one of five poultry sheds on the property, the workers found sixty dead birds,  DEFRA was quickly called and tests clearly showed the presence of high-path H5N1.

What is interesting is the proximity of the poultry operation to a lake teeming with wild migratory birds.  About two football fields away, these wild birds -- including wild swans and Canadian geese - frolick.

Wild swans have also been the focus of H5N1 scrutiny in Germany and France.  So the appearance of wild swans in an area also suffering an H5N1 infestation is certainly not, at first glance, coincidental.

Of course, the retail companies who would have ordinarily bought these turkeys, ducks and geese would now have you believe they had no plan to buy these fine, plump birds just before the holiday season started!  One spokesperson said:

"The farm was due to supply us with a small percentage of our Christmas turkeys, ducks and geese. It is a relatively small farm and it would have accounted for less than 2.5 per cent of all our Christmas turkeys. We will be working closely with other farms that supply us and we are confident we will meet public demand."

Here is the article link, from the London Daily Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/13/nbird313.xml

The following snippet clearly shows that the British authorities are all too quick to throw those frolicking wild birds under the proverbial bus:

I think these wild birds need legal representation.  Recall that at first, the Bernard Matthews H5N1 fiasco was laid at the webbed feet of migratory wildfowl.  But, as we learned later, it might only have been partially true.  Matthews'  poultry may indeed have been contaminated -- in Hungary.  But then, the Hungarian turkeys were shipped to Matthews' processing plant in Britain, and all Hell broke loose last February.  While the virus may be antigenically similar to Czech and German strains, the lineage is most certainly Qinghai -- and migrating wild birds and deficient industrial farming techniques may both be at fault here.

But news reports say these turkeys are free-range fowl, which conjures up images of fun-loving, blissfully ignorant turkeys running in slow motion toward other turkeys of the opposite sex, or else running toward the feeding troughs.  But hold on there, Baba-looie!  Maybe free-range is a nice feel-good word that simply means "gotcha."

From the Website http://www.eastbayanimaladvocates.org/, and its subsidiary Web page  http://www.free-range-turkey.com/wst_page3.html :

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the single condition for the term 'free-range' is that birds have access to the outdoors. All other facets of a free-range turkey's life can be indistinguishable from the living conditions of a conventional-raised bird.

University of California-Davis poultry specialist, Ralph Ernst reports: "Most free-range birds are still fenced in corrals, though people like to imagine the birds are out roaming the range. They're not out exercising. These birds are raised much like the regular turkeys." (3)

Thousands of free-range turkeys are raised in a single warehouse-like structure (known as a grow-out shed), forced to stand on accumulated fecal waste and breathe in ammonia fumes.

Recall the beginning of this story.  Five sheds and 60 dead birds.  So until we know exactly how free-range these free-range turkeys were, the jury is out on the immediate cause of the outbreak.  And if the local wildfowl tests negative for H5N1, then we have a real conundrum on our hands.