Credit U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
# 8191
Although it will hardly come as a surprise, today Korean media sources are reporting that the newly emerging H5N8 virus which has infected duck farms in Southwestern Korea (see Korea: HPAI Detected On Two More Farms) has now been detected in the remains of wild ducks found in a local reservoir. We also have the OIE notification, which indicates the virus is, indeed, HPAI H5N8.
First stop, the OIE report:
From the WSJ/Korea Times, we get the following report:
Migratory Birds Behind South Korea Bird Flu Outbreak
By Kwanwoo Jun
South Korea says migratory birds were the likely cause of the country’s first outbreak of bird flu in three years, and stepped up quarantine measures at domestic poultry farms to stop the spread of the disease.Tests showed the remains of 100 dead migratory wild ducks in a local reservoir contained H5N8 avian influenza virus, the same strain found at poultry farms in North Jeolla Province near the reservoir, the agriculture ministry said in a statement.
“The wild migratory birds were presumably the very likely source of the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus that had affected the duck farms in Gochang and Buan [in North Jeolla Province,]” about 300 kilometers (187 miles) and 280 kilometers southwest of Seoul respectively, the ministry said in a statement.
The ministry identified the migratory birds as the Baikal Teal (Anas formosa), a wild duck that breeds in eastern Russia and spends the winter in East Asia. They usually visit Korea from October through March.
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According to the University of Michigan’s Animal Diversity Web, while the Baikal Teal’s favorite overwintering spot is Southern Korea, it can also be found in Southern Japan, and Southeastern China.
Geographic Range
Baikal teals (Anas formosa) are seasonally migratory birds, typically travelling between north and east Siberia to southeast China. The birds travel to Siberia, Russia to breed in the summer, and migrate to southern Japan, southeastern China, and South Korea for the winter. In Siberia, these ducks can be found as far north as seventy degrees north latitude and west as far as eighty-five degrees east longitude. When wintering, the ducks can sometimes be found as far south as Myanmar and northeastern India. The wintering range may be growing in China, according to recent trends. However, the main concentration for wintering Baikal teals remains South Korea, with a population of over one million ducks in 2009. Vagrant ducks have been found in Alaska and the north-eastern coast of the United States, and occasionally in Europe.
