As avian flu rises in Hula Valley cranes, authorities spar over who collects carcasses

The corpses of around 130 wild cranes infected with bird flu are rotting in the Hula Valley in northern Israel while the authorities argue over who should collect them, raising fears that the virus could spiral into an epidemic like the one that devastated the northern poultry industry and killed some 8,000 cranes at the end of 2021.

If the dead birds are not removed, they could infect some of the hundreds of thousands of wild birds due to pass over the country when the annual spring migration kicks off next month, according to Uri Naveh, deputy chief scientist of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA).

In 2021, an outbreak of the highly contagious H5N1 bird flu strain killed some 1.6 million chickens and turkeys in northern Israel, and almost 8,000 cranes, mainly in the Hula Valley, along with smaller numbers of ducks, great white pelicans, and birds of prey. The flu, which is fatal for birds, can also infect mammals, including humans.

On Wednesday, the INPA announced it was closing the Hula Nature Reserve to the public because of the new flu outbreak among birds.

Dana Sela-Klein, who is recording the numbers of infected birds received from various sources in part of the Hula Valley, estimated that more than 190 cranes had died so far, of which just around 60 had been collected. Those still lying around were mainly in the fields, with some still in the nature reserve run by the INPA, she said.

The problem is that authority for the Hula Valley is divided between several ministries and organizations, and that money to collect the corpses is reportedly lacking because of the expenses of the ongoing war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza. The farmers, prohibited from collecting carcasses because of the health risk to them, can only wait for the authorities to act.

On Monday, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel — which has no statutory involvement in the issue — appealed to Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter to intervene in this latest outbreak of H5N1.

Too many cooks in the kitchen

The main government ministries involved with bird flu are the Agriculture Ministry, which is responsible for the endangered poultry, and the Health Ministry, which is tasked with protecting the public from disease.

In the Hula Valley, the KKL-JNF Jewish National Fund heads the 5,000-dunam (1,240-acre) Hula Lake Park. Located just 5.7 kilometers (3.5 miles) from the Israel-Lebanon border, where the IDF is skirmishing daily with the Iran-backed terror organization Hezbollah, the facility has been closed to the public since October 7, when thousands of Hamas terrorists crossed the Gaza border and murdered some 1,200 people and kidnapped 253.

Those entering today are mainly farmers and soldiers. Efy Naim, who manages the KKL’s natural resources in the Hula Valley, quickly identified the disease, set up a WhatsApp group to bring the various stakeholders together, and instructed the park to disinfect the shoes of everyone entering and existing the facility, as well as the wheels of all vehicles. The daily count of bird flu victims has remained below 10 since February 2, when the outbreak at the park began.

Because the virus is known to thrive in cold water, the park has opened dams to release a constant supply of fresh water into the lake, where the birds like to spend the night.

Every day, according to Naim, teams scour the park for signs of bird flu and remove carcasses.

The INPA, an independent state organization responsible for wild animals, manages the Hula Nature Reserve, which is not the same as the Hula Lake Park. On Monday, it reported 21 crane carcasses infected with bird flu, compared with four on February 6, when it started to count. The numbers are growing every day.

Elsewhere in the valley, farmers cultivate field crops on some 60,000 dunams (just under 15,000 acres) of land. There, the number of carcasses is growing — 67 were counted on Monday — and nobody is collecting them.

Who’s responsible for the cranes in the fields?

After the 2021 outbreak, a forum was established under the Agriculture Ministry to coordinate requests for budgets and the response to future epidemics.

But in a statement issued to The Times of Israel on Monday, the Agriculture Ministry passed the buck to the INPA. It said the current outbreak was “minor and limited in the radius of the disease and the number of infected birds.”

It continued, “The avian flu treatment procedure clearly states that cases of avian flu in wild birds are treated by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and that the treatment of birds in the Hula Lake Park is handled by the KKL-JNF Jewish National Fund, in collaboration with the INPA.”

Everything had to be carried out according to the professional guidelines of the Agriculture Ministry’s veterinary services, the statement added.

But the INPA says it is not responsible for collecting all the infected birds in the country.

On a practical level, the authority has been hit hard by the war against Hamas. It has a NIS 150 million ($41 million) deficit, according to CEO Raya Shourky. It has had to lay off some 500 seasonal workers, and many of its employees are currently fighting in Gaza.

“It’s not written in the law that we [at the INPA] are responsible for collecting all carcasses,” said Naveh, who is heading up the bird flu issue at the nature organization. “Those who think that way do not understand what it means to work together.”

He continued, “Because of the war, there is no budget for gathering infected birds. Saying somebody else is responsible isn’t going to solve the problem. The approach has to be prevention.”

Naveh argued that the state had to provide funds for a contractor who would work under the Agriculture Ministry’s Veterinary Services to collect and dispose of the dead birds.

In a statement, the Health Ministry also fingered the Veterinary Services as responsible for collecting infected birds and animals.

On Monday, officials from the INPA, the Veterinary Services, and the Health and Environmental Protection Ministries met to discuss the slowly rising tally of dead cranes recorded since the end of January. They decided to ask their respective directors general to step in.

The farmers are the main losers

Ofer Barnea, who has represented northern farmers for 15 years on the issue of the cranes, said that the authorities that were supposed to deal with bird flu were not stepping up to the plate.

“We’re waiting for a solution, while the authorities throw responsibility from one to the other,” he said. “It’s crazy. We’re seeing dozens of dead cranes in agricultural areas, birds of prey are eating them, and nothing [happens]. We can only imagine where the chain of infection can go.”

While isolated reports of bird flu among turkeys have been reported since September, the first wild birds identified with avian flu were a bird of prey at the Hula Valley’s Kibbutz Hulata on January 9 and a crane found at Kibbutz Lahavot Habashan on January 31. Two days later, three dead cranes were found in the KKL park. Laboratory tests found two of them had died of bird flu.

Last week, in a move criticized by both the KKL and the farmers, the INPA ordered a halt to the feeding of cranes, which it has sanctioned for years in a field within the Hula Lake Park.

The aim of the feeding was to keep the birds away from farmers’ fields. The result was that tens of thousands of cranes began overwintering in the park rather than flying onto Africa. This created a great tourist attraction. However, one of the conclusions of the 2021 bird flu outbreak was that this concentration of birds helped the virus to spread rapidly.

Without the food, the cranes have now flown to other parts of the Hula Valley in search of food, making it harder to supervise the spread of the virus, according to the KKL’s Naim.

Farmer Barnea said the birds would damage crops and that money now had to be invested in hiring guards to scare the birds away from the fields.