‘You might have seen that bird flu just arrived on Australian shores for the first time. And you’re thinking — what does this mean?
Well, it marks the final stage of a disturbing new environmental reality, one that goes well beyond egg shortages.’
Michael Dulaney takes us through his insights and research into bird flu, from his new book, Sentinels: when diseases spread between animals and humans.
‘You might have seen that bird flu just arrived on Australian shores for the first time. And you’re thinking — what does this mean?
Well, it marks the final stage of a disturbing new environmental reality, one that goes well beyond egg shortages.
I’m a journalist who writes about animals and climate change, and for the past few years I’ve been tracking bird flu as it becomes something very concerning for life on this planet.
So the latest strain is a variant called H5N1 that first emerged in 1996. Bird flu comes from industrial poultry farms, where the virus evolves to be so deadly that it can kill up to 100 per cent of the chickens in a cramped shed. This current outbreak began in 2021, when a new mutation allowed the virus to infect hundreds of new migratory bird species that were never previously susceptible. This is where it started to gain wings.
The virus spread across Europe and Asia, before being introduced into North America. Two years later it had traveled all the way down to the bottom of South America. It finally made it as far as Antarctica. The sick and dying birds spat out from there are now washing up in southern Australia.
What this all means is that in just five years this new strain of bird flu has crossed the entire planet – and been catastrophic for wildlife.
Everywhere it has landed it caused mass mortalities, because in addition to all of the birds, H5N1 has shown the ability to infect mammals from dozens of species. Foxes, raccoons, tigers, mink – the list goes on. It has killed polar bears in the Arctic. In Argentina it has decimated seal colonies. It’s a 'panzootic', meaning a global pandemic among animals.
For some species, it is a conservation crisis, stressing animals already facing severe population declines from climate change, habitat loss, food stress, chemical exposure, and other diseases. And this is where Australia comes in. Many of the animals here are found nowhere else on Earth.
The federal government has assessed that more than 150 of Australia’s native and unique bird species are at “very high risk” of extinction or major decline. Western Australia’s iconic black swans are especially vulnerable. The endangered Australian sea lion could be pushed to extinction. It is a genuine wildlife emergency.
I consider bird flu the archetypal disease of our new age, the one that represents all our failed efforts to address the growing threat of spillover. If you want to know more, I’ve got a whole chapter on bird flu in my book, Sentinels, which explores the growing threat of spillover worldwide, and what that means for us.’
—Michael Dulaney
Humans have long observed animals for advanced warnings of danger. What can they tell us about the growing threat of contagion in the age of climate change?
Diseases today reveal our close ties to animals. Viruses leap from bats to camels to humans. Cats catch the flu, and tourists pass tuberculosis to elephants. In recent years, however, something has changed. Exploitation of the environment is causing more diseases to jump species than ever before — a threat to life that rivals climate change. The science is clear: the cause of this great acceleration is us.
In Sentinels, Michael Dulaney takes readers from southern China to the Andes, from the Arctic to Australia, to tell the gripping stories of the people and animals at the forefront of this enormous change. Dulaney joins ecologists tracking flying foxes through Australia’s eastern forests, and frog hunters netting endangered species on Indonesian mountains. Along the way, we meet lemmings that resist global warming, coastal seals with bird flu, and genetically engineered disease-proof pigs.
Combining vivid field reporting with natural history, these stories move beyond the fear of contagion to explore the beauty and resilience of life, and the human capacity to regenerate as much as to destroy. Urgent, moving, and deeply informed, Sentinels is an essential reckoning with our intimate connection to nature, and a call to build a fairer world for all.
Michael Dulaney’s writing explores humanity’s links with the rest of non-human nature in the climate crisis. He was a reporter at the ABC for more than a decade, and his environment writing has been published by The Monthly, Literary Hub, The Big Issue, and the BBC, among others. He won the Overland Fair Australia Prize, and was a 2024 Climate Futures Fellow at the State Library Victoria.
