by Roland D. Hallee

Recently, I received information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Veterinary Services Labora­tories confirming the presence of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in samples taken from small flocks of non-commercial backyard birds (non-poultry); Lincoln County (March 17); Knox and York counties (March 19); Cumberland County (March 22); and Washington County (March 26).

DACF Animal Health placed the properties under quarantine, and humane depopulation efforts have been completed.

Additional safety measures were implemented, including monitoring properties with domestic flocks within a six-mile radius and notifying bird owners of the importance of proactive safety measures to help prevent disease.

The risk for HPAI remains high, and backyard flock and commercial operators are advised to keep birds indoors to prevent the spread of this disease.

The current outbreak of HPAI is spreading across the country primarily due to the migration of wild birds. There is little evidence to suggest HPAI is being spread from farm to farm (lateral transmission). The virus is very prevalent in the environment in wild birds so flock owners need to practice strong biosecurity. More information on steps they can take to enhance biosecurity is available here: http://healthybirds. aphis. usda.gov.

Birds should be kept inside as long as the disease transmission risk is high. Please reference the Maine DACF Animal Health website for up-to-date information.

Because HPAI is being spread by migrating wild birds, it is difficult to predict what will happen over the next couple months. The trends observed with past North American HPAI outbreaks are that there is often a reprieve in the summer months. Summer is when the virus present on the landscape (outdoors) is degraded by sunlight and heat. Migratory waterfowl (ducks, geese, and shorebirds) moving south in the fall months are likely to shed AI virus again. It is critically important that poultry owners work now to provide indoor shelter for their birds through the fall and provide outdoor access only in covered poultry runs, allowing protection from predators and preventing contact with wild waterfowl and their droppings.

When purchasing new birds it’s always recommended to only purchase birds from a reputable source that follows effective biosecurity protocols and closely monitors poultry health.

Some of the signs to look for are sudden death without clinical signs; Lack of energy and appetite; Decreased egg production or soft-shelled or misshapen eggs; Swelling of the head, comb, eyelid, wattles, and hocks; Purple discoloration of wattles, comb, and legs; Nasal discharge, coughing, and sneezing; Incoordination; or Diarrhea. Learn more.

The best approach to protect the flock is to practice good biosecurity – this means keeping your birds separate from sources of disease, such as infected wild birds and their environment.

Report sick birds or unusual bird deaths to State/Federal officials, either through your state veterinarian or through USDA’s toll-free number at 1-866-536-7593.

Can people contract AI? No cases of this particular strain of the avian influenza virus have been detected in humans in the United States. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recent detections of this strain of influenza in birds in Maine and several other states present a low risk to the public.

Poultry and eggs are safe to eat when handled and cooked properly. Eggs from a known infected flock are safely disposed of.

There is compensation available. Refer to the USDA APHIS website to learn what is covered and how the process works.

USDA has many resources available for commercial poultry producers and backyard bird owners through its Defend the Flock campaign. Information about this campaign and links to toolkits containing biosecurity checklists, videos, and more, are available.

DACF’s Animal Health team is also working closely with the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Maine CDC). Though this strain of avian influenza has not been detected in humans in the United States, Maine CDC is monitoring the health and wellbeing of animal health staff and flock owners who were exposed out of an abundance of caution. Signs and symptoms of bird flu infections in people can include fever (temperature of 100°F or greater) or feeling feverish, cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, muscle or body aches, fatigue, headaches, eye redness (or conjunctivitis), and difficulty breathing.

Other possible symptoms are diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting. As with seasonal flu, some people are at high risk of getting very sick from bird flu infections, including pregnant women, people with weakened immune systems, and people 65 and older. The U.S. CDC provides information on avian flu transmission. The Maine CDC’s Health and Environmental Testing Laboratory is prepared to process samples and quickly provide results for anyone potentially exposed to the virus.

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

What was the nickname of the Boston professional American League baseball team between 1901 and 1907?

Answer can be found here.

by Roland D. Hallee

Recently, a regular contributor to The Town Line, Gary Kennedy, of Chelsea, and his wife Julie witnessed a battle between an osprey and a bald eagle, probably over territorial rites – or food.

I could relate to the story as my wife and I witnessed the same a few years ago while fishing on Webber Pond. In both instances, the bald eagle won the day. So, do bald eagles and ospreys get along?

Opportunistic bald eagles and ospreys share much of the same habitat, so ospreys are frequently the victims of nest raids by the eagles. Proud, powerful and the national symbol of the United States, bald eagles are birds of prey that are extremely territorial during nesting season but highly social at other times.

They use their talons to fish; or, instead of catching their own, they’ll go after an osprey or another fish-eating bird, forcing it to drop its prey, which the eagle grabs in midair.

Opportunists, they’ll also scavenge carrion or catch and eat amphibians, invertebrates, small mammals, reptiles and other birds’ fledglings.

Once an eagle gets you in its sights, it can be a vigorous foe—as that osprey recently learned.

Ospreys require nest sites in open surroundings for easy approach, with wide, sturdy bases and safety from ground predators, such as raccoons.

In Kennedy’s video, you see a bald eagle and an osprey do combat. As part of their plan of attack, at dusk, with both osprey parents away, the bald eagle will sweep in from over the water toward the nest containing three chicks. One of the osprey parents will engage the eagle, ready to defend the nest, but it can’t match the speed and strength of the eagle, which manages to nab one of the chicks with its huge talons before taking off.

It’s not uncommon for osprey to lose their entire brood to eagle attacks.

Adept at soaring and diving but not as maneuverable as other hawks, ospreys fly with stiff wingbeats in a steady, rowing motion. They do, however, vigorously chase birds that encroach on their nests.

But ospreys, too, launch their share of attacks ­– and some of them are on eagles. They have been observed attacking a Canada gooose who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Is it a coincidence that bald eagles will frequently build their nests near osprey nests. Not really. It’s just the bald eagle is smart enough to know that if it nests near ospreys, that it will have ample opportunity to steal fish from the ospreys throughout summer?

However, there are many differences between ospreys and bald eagles.

Size: Osprey have an average 59- to 70-inch wingspan and weigh three to four pounds. They have long, narrow wings with a marked kink that makes them look like an M-shape from below.

The bald eagle is one of the largest birds in North America, with an average 80-inch wingspan and weighing 6.5 to almost 14 pounds.

Diet: Osprey eat a diet of about 99 percent fish, usually 4 – 12 inches long. The type of fish varies depending on where in the world the osprey lives.

Bald eagles love fish as well, and sometimes rather than doing their own hunting they will harass osprey, making them drop their fish or even steal their fish right out of their talons.

Bald eagles also eat birds, reptiles, amphibians, rabbits and muskrat, both live or as carrion. They sometimes gorge on food and digest it over several days, and they can also survive fasting for many days or even weeks.

Beak: An osprey’s beak is black, short and has a sharp hook that helps it tear into fish to eat.

Bald eagles have a yellow beak which is also hooked for tearing into flesh.

Special abilities: Osprey can dive about three feet into the water to catch fish, and they can dive both head and feet first. They also have the ability to take off straight from the water instead of having to swim to shore.

Sometimes bald eagles hunt cooperatively, with one individual flushing prey toward another.

Nest: Osprey nests are built of sticks and lined with bark, sod, grasses, corn stalks and other softer materials. Most nesting platforms are about 5 feet wide and a foot deep. However, it has been seen that osprey who nest in the same place year after year have ended up with nests 10-13 feet deep and 3-6 feet in diameter.

Osprey also like to nest in open areas, usually built on snags, treetops, cliffs or human-built platforms, cell phone towers or light towers.

Bald eagles nest in trees, usually conifers, and create huge nests — five to six feet wide and two to four feet deep – out of sticks lined with grass, moss or corn stalks. Nests can take up to three months to build. Bald eagles typically build near the trunk of a tree, high but not at the crown like osprey. Some eagles also nest on the ground when necessary, using kelp or driftwood for construction near coastal shorelines.

Ospreys and bald eagles, although they usually share territory, and in the case of the eagle, the osprey’s catch of the day, are quite different in their own right.

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

Has anyone pitched a no-hitter in the World Series?

Answer can be found here.

by Roland D. Hallee

I saw an article recently in one of the local newspaper that fossils of an octopus were found in Montana, probably dated back before dinosaurs, some 330 million years. Let’s take a look at these denizens of the deep, at a creature we really don’t know that much about. We know what they look like, and some of what they do, but for what else would they be useful .

An octopus is a soft-bodied, eight-limbed mollusk. The soft body can radically alter its shape, enabling octopuses to squeeze through small gaps. They trail their eight appendages behind them as they swim. Octopuses have a complex nervous system and excellent sight, and are among the most intelligent and behaviorally diverse of all invertebrates.

Octopuses inhabit various regions of the ocean, including coral reefs, pelagic waters, and the seabed; some live in the intertidal zone and others at abyssal depths. Most species grow quickly, mature early, and are short-lived. In most species, the male uses a specially adapted arm to deliver a bundle of sperm directly into the female’s mantle cavity, after which he becomes senescent and dies, while the female deposits fertilized eggs in a den and cares for them until they hatch, after which she also dies. Strategies to defend themselves against predators include the expulsion of ink, the use of camouflage and threat displays, the ability to jet quickly through the water and hide, and even deceit. All octopuses are venomous, but only the blue-ringed octopuses are known to be deadly to humans.

The giant Pacific octopus is often cited as the largest known octopus species. Adults usually weigh around 33 pounds, with an arm span of up to 14 feet.

The skin consists of a thin outer epidermis with mucous cells and sensory cells, and a connective tissue dermis consisting largely of collagen fibers and various cells allowing color change. Most of the body is made of soft tissue allowing it to lengthen, contract, and contort itself. The octopus can squeeze through tiny gaps. Lacking skeletal support, the arms work as muscular hydrostats and contain longitudinal, transverse and circular muscles around a central axial nerve. They can extend and contract, twist to left or right, bend at any place in any direction or be held rigid.

The ink sac of an octopus is located under the digestive gland. A gland attached to the sac produces the ink, and the sac stores it. The sac is close enough to the funnel for the octopus to shoot out the ink with a water jet. Before it leaves the funnel, the ink passes through glands which mix it with mucus, creating a thick, dark blob which allows the animal to escape from a predator.[61] The main pigment in the ink is melanin, which gives it its black color. Cirrate octopuses usually lack the ink sac.

The reproduction of octopuses has been studied in only a few species. One such species is the giant Pacific octopus, in which courtship is accompanied, especially in the male, by changes in skin texture and color. About 40 days after mating, the female giant Pacific octopus attaches strings of small fertilized eggs (10,000 to 70,000 in total) to rocks in a crevice or under an overhang. Here she guards and cares for them for about five months (160 days) until they hatch. In colder waters, such as those off Alaska, it may take up to ten months for the eggs to completely develop.

Octopuses have a relatively short lifespan; some species live for as little as six months. The Giant Pacific Octopus, one of the two largest species of octopus, may live for as much as five years. Octopus lifespan is limited by reproduction. For most octopuses the last stage of their life is called senescence. It is the breakdown of cellular function without repair or replacement. For males, this typically begins after mating. Senescence may last from weeks to a few months, at most. For females, it begins when they lay a clutch of eggs. Females will spend all their time aerating and protecting their eggs until they are ready to hatch. During senescence, an octopus does not feed and quickly weakens. Lesions begin to form and the octopus literally degenerates. Unable to defend themselves, octopuses often fall prey to predators. The larger Pacific striped octopus (LPSO) is an exception, as it can reproduce multiple times over a life of around two years.

Most species are solitary when not mating, though a few are known to occur in high densities and with frequent interactions, signaling, mate defending and eviction of individuals from dens. This is likely the result of abundant food supplies combined with limited den sites.

Nearly all octopuses are predatory; bottom-dwelling octopuses eat mainly crustaceans, worms, and other molluscs such as whelks and clams; open-ocean octopuses eat mainly prawns, fish and other cephalopods.

The octopuses evolved from the Muensterelloidea (fossil pictured) in the Jurassic period.

They evolved in the Cambrian some 530 million years ago. The earliest octopus likely lived near the sea floor in shallow marine environments. Since octopuses consist mostly of soft tissue, fossils are relatively rare. As soft-bodied cephalopods, they lack the external shell of most molluscs.

Octopuses appear in mythology as sea monsters like the Kraken, of Norway, and the Akkorokamui, of the Ainu, and probably the Gorgon, of ancient Greece. A battle with an octopus appears in Victor Hugo’s book Toilers of the Sea, inspiring other works such as Ian Fleming’s (creator of James Bond) Octopussy. Octopuses appear in Japanese erotic art, shunga. They are eaten and considered a delicacy by humans in many parts of the world, especially the Mediterranean and the Asian seas.

I once tasted calamari while in Vietnam, mostly as jerky – it was a little salty.

Historically, the first plural to commonly appear in English language sources, in the early 19th century, is the Latinate form “octopi”, followed by the English form “octopuses” in the latter half of the same century. The Hellenic plural is roughly contemporary in usage, although it is also the rarest. Oxford American Dictionary (3rd Edition, 2010) lists “octopuses” as the only acceptable pluralization, and indicates that “octopodes” is still occasionally used, but that “octopi” is incorrect.

Well, I hope we now know a little more about these creatures.

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

How many Boston Red Sox players have been named World Series MVP?

Answer can be found here.

by Roland D. Hallee

During the blizzard that swept through our area a little while back, I was standing at my kitchen window, watching the bird feeders. To my surprise, even during the peak of the storm, with heavy snowfall and howling winds, the birds kept coming to the feeding stations.

“Tough little buggers,” I thought while watching.

That got me to thinking. How do these animals and birds survive these harsh winters?

So, I decided to do some research on the white-tailed deer. I had recently read an article that said the “mild” winter so far made it easier for the deer to move in search of food. That all changed that weekend. Now that there was a significant amount of additional snow on the ground, how will they survive the remainder of this season?

White-tailed deer have developed a set of adaptations that enable them to survive the deep snow and cold temperatures that occur in Maine. Maine is the northern-most point of their range and there are very few of them north of the St. Lawrence River. Also, the further north you go in their range, the larger the body size, as compared to their counterparts in the south.

According to Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife biologists, deer shed their hair in the spring and fall. The summer hair has solid shafts and lacks the undercoat, but the winter hair has hollow hair shafts, and dense, wool-like under fur, providing effective insulation.

Also, deer will alter their diet to accumulate and retain more fat under their skin and around organs, providing them with insulation and energy reserves for the months that lie ahead. The winter diet is lower in protein and less digestible than the summer diet, requiring more energy to digest and resulting in fewer calories. The stored fat is burned during winter to partially compensate for the lack of energy in the winter diet. Deer will lose weight during the winter. If winters become too long (early start and late finish) deer could run out of stored energy and die.

Fat reserves in adult does can account for up to 30 percent of their body mass in the fall.

Their winter habitat is also important. Dense softwood canopies intercept more snow, resulting in reduced snow depths. Gathering in these areas also allow many deer to share the energy cost of maintaining a trail network to access food and to escape predators.

As you would suspect, the greatest mortality in the winter is found among fawns, followed by adult bucks and then does. Severe winters can drastically deplete the fawn population, resulting in fewer young to mature into adulthood. Consecutive severe winters can have a devastating effect, by as much as 90 percent, of young maturing, depleting the adult herd.

So, should you try to help out these critters?

Although supplemental feeding of deer is usually well-intentioned, it could have some severe adverse effects. Just to touch on a few of the reasons to leave the deer to Mother Nature’s natural course:

• Supple­mental feeding may actually increase predation. Providing supplemental food sources crowds deer into a smaller area than their usual range, making it easier for coyotes and bobcats to hunt down the deer, by limiting their escape routes;
• Feeding sites near homes may place deer in danger of free-roaming dogs;
• Deer feeding stations may increase deer/vehicle collisions. Feeding stations near homes also place the deer in close proximity to well-traveled highways;
• Deer could actually starve when fed supplemental foods during winter. It takes deer two weeks to adjust to new foods, and could starve in that time period;
• Deer compete aggressively for scarce, high-quality feeds;
• They could die from eating too much at one time;
• Deer concentrations at feeding sites may increase the vulnerability of deer to disease. MDIFW has documented deer concentrations equal to 350 deer per square mile at some feeding sites can cause an outbreak of infectious diseases, such as the bovine tuberculosis in 1994, and more recently, the fear of introduction of Chronic Wasting Disease, which, by 2016, had only been found in deer and moose. Although CWD, a disease that causes weight loss leading to death, has not been detected in Maine, the disease, which originated in the midwest, seems to be making its way east. It is now found in 23 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces.

Finally, predation and vehicle collisions claim more deer during the winter than starvation. Mother Nature has provided well for her creatures, so just sit back and watch them go about their daily routine.

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

Which NFL quarterback has the fewest Super Bowl rings, Peyton Manning, Eli Manning, Ben Roethlisberger, John Elway or Jimmy Garoppolo?

Answer can be found here.