You can’t give a cockatoo a face mask. There’s only one way to fight bird flu

How does one prepare Australian birds for the arrival of the deadly H5N1 avian influenza virus – a virus with no treatment and no cure? Has Environment Minister Murray Watt spent the past few years handing out P2 face masks to cockatoos and teaching eastern rosellas the finer points of social distancing?

As absurd as that sounds, that’s the impression one gets from the federal government as it becomes clear that bird flu has established itself in native bird populations in South Australia. “Don’t panic,” they say, “we’ve been preparing for years.”

But a quick look at the government’s bird flu preparation shows how woefully prepared we are to protect our wildlife from this virus.

The H5N1 virus is deadly. Not to humans but to birds and animals the world over. Recently, on the remote Heard and McDonald Islands, over 13,000 elephant seal pups died after the virus swept through breeding colonies – a staggering number that will have generational impacts on the population of this remarkable marine mammal.

The virus has caused heartbreaking devastation on every continent but ours, killing hundreds of millions of animals. Now it is here.

The establishment of the virus on the Australian mainland is such distressing news because our iconic wildlife is already in trouble. Even before it made landfall, many species were already on the brink of extinction, pushed to the edge by the triple threat of habitat destruction, invasive species and climate change. Considering birds alone, the federal government lists 164 species under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act as threatened. Too many of our unique and iconic birds are closer than ever to the same fate as their distant cousin, the dodo, and this bird flu has the potential to send many of them into the history books.

To be fair, the government has developed surveillance, biosecurity and emergency response plans which may help the poultry industry and track the spread of the virus. But while those measures might be effective in preparing for human pandemics, they do nothing to prepare wildlife for a pandemic of their own. This time it is a race, but there is no COVID-style wildlife vaccination program waiting in the wings to save us.

What our birds actually needed was decades of habitat protection and restoration, and control of invasive feral species, which we have consistently failed to deliver. The result is the “list of doom”, published by the federal environment department on Tuesday, which puts one in five Australian bird and mammal species at high to extreme risk from the bird flu virus.

Of the $113 million the government says it has put into preparing for the virus, less than half has been allocated to protective action for threatened species. And that $47 million, a mere rounding error in the $833 billion federal budget, is paltry considering the existential threat facing one in five species. Most of these measures are vague and based around “plans for wildlife”, the details of which are unclear.

Major environment groups, including BirdLife Australia and the Invasive Species Council, are calling for an additional $200 million in funding to protect wildlife from the oncoming onslaught, but surely that is not nearly enough when so many species are facing such a dire future.

There is only one meaningful way to prepare Australia’s birdlife for devastating infectious diseases and that is to ensure we have resilient bird populations connected by healthy habitat where they can live, thrive and survive.

Depleted species with limited places to call home have far less capacity to survive yet another threat. But sadly, for much of our birdlife, that chicken has already flown the coop. Habitat destruction remains a primary driver of Australia’s appalling extinction record, invasive species continue to wreak havoc on our birds and marsupials, and environmental programs are chronically underfunded.

And despite knowing this, we continue to clear the bush in our country at a staggering rate. A report commissioned by the Australian Conservation Foundation, in which the University of Queensland researcher Dr Martin Taylor analysed Queensland government land-clearing data, found that 364,221 hectares of forest were cleared for agriculture in that state between 2018 and 2020. This is more forest lost in one Australian state for beef than destroyed for palm oil production in the whole of Indonesia over the same period. It’s hard to believe, but here we are.

We know COVID-19 wasn’t the final human pandemic and H5N1 won’t be the last for our birds and animals. We cannot vaccinate kookaburras. We cannot hand out face masks to cockatoos. But we can give our wildlife the best chance at surviving future deadly epidemics by providing them with the one thing that really matters: healthy habitats.

We must protect the last vestiges of their homes and restore what we have already destroyed. Because protecting and restoring habitat is no longer simply conservation, it is pandemic preparedness for wildlife.

Dr Stephen Lightfoot is vice president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and a specialist anaesthetist.