Australia's Oldest Bird Observatory Remains Closed Amid Avian Flu Crisis

A key bird observatory and research station along the remote coast where Australia's first bird flu cases were detected has been closed for months. The Eyre Bird Observatory, established in 1977 and located about 300 kilometres east of Esperance, is the nation's oldest and most remote bird observatory. With two confirmed and one suspected case, along with a number of other sick birds found in the surrounding region, advocates are pushing for the facility to quickly reopen.

The site is owned by WA's Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA) and managed by not-for-profit BirdLife Australia. Despite the potential importance of this facility for monitoring hundreds of kilometres of shoreline, it has been closed since February. The closure was prompted by a medical emergency, which left a volunteer vulnerable due to the site's remote location.

BirdLife chief executive Kate Miller said the group was working to reopen the site, but the isolation made the job complex. "We had a very serious safety issue with a volunteer caretaker earlier this year, and it was a very complicated extraction process," Dr Miller said. "It took a long time for that injured volunteer to get help. So we conducted an investigation, and that investigation showed that, in fact, there was more work we needed to do. We're undertaking all of that work at the moment and are working with DBCA and the shire and many of our partners to really look for a pathway forward."

Volunteers critical to bird flu response

With cases detected along more than 2,700km of coastline between WA's South West and South Australia's east, volunteer reporting is proving critical to ongoing monitoring of the outbreak. Environmental advocate Mike Bamford said volunteer-run sites like Eyre could play an important part in the bird flu response, with the role of citizen scientists often overlooked. "They're a massive, very cheap workforce to keep watch on events like this," Dr Bamford said. "Increasingly, I think volunteers are watching out for dead birds and getting into the whole reporting system so we can pick up more of these birds, hopefully."

Dr Bamford said many researchers had long suspected bird flu would arrive from the south. "We knew it was coming and we weren't all that surprised it came on the south coast," Dr Bamford said. "Once there was news of infections on Heard Island, then to the south, and we know about movements of seabirds in the sub-Atlantic and Southern Ocean, then it was almost inevitable that they were coming that way."

Observatory a 'special' place

BirdLife board member and former president Mandy Bamford has been going to Eyre for decades. Ms Bamford said the station provided invaluable data, and could be an important piece of national monitoring for H5N1 once reactivated. "It's really important to have every asset available, and obviously we'd be very keen to get Eyre open as soon as possible," she said. "Australia has huge areas of coastline and many remote areas. The authorities do their best to monitor everywhere, but of course, as we've seen in this case, it's often members of the public or volunteer birdwatchers and people walking along beaches who find. They're the initial frontline contact. BirdLife Australia has 400,000 supporters, so that's the sort of people power that we're able to harness to help with on-ground actions."

Isolation a challenge

Maintaining the isolated property is a major challenge for the organisation. The office is 50km south of Cocklebiddy, which sits 1,060km east of Perth and 1,500km west of Adelaide. An unsealed road provides the only access from the Eyre Highway. "It is outstanding, but yes, it's not for the faint-hearted; there's an amazing descent down the scarp," Ms Bamford said. She said the safety of volunteer staff had to come first. "We do have a safety review that we need to conduct to make sure that both our volunteers and visitors are adequately supported and that we have a really good emergency response for our people," Ms Bamford said. "There's a long history of bird data collection there, so there's a really valuable data set. The more places that BirdLife and our team can be, the better we can record and potentially manage the worst aspects of this outbreak."

BirdLife Australia cannot confirm a timeline for reopening, but said it was establishing a steering committee and would be working to reactivate the site as soon as possible.