Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Swans Felled by Bird Flu in Croatia

Do swans migrate from China to Croatia? At the rate they're destroying domestic poultry every time they find influenza-infected dead wild fowl, there won't be many agircultural birds left in Eurasia. I suppose all that feed corn and soy could probably be more efficiently used to feed people directly--but I hope they don't start slaughtering the wild birds. There's something spooky about imagining a swan carrying an illness from the Middle Kingdom to the Illyrian coast--like a Han folktale Brothers Grimm mashup. It would be heartbreakingly tragic if our disease cycles finished off the world's wild flocks.