BIrds with Deformed Beaks

This seems so outrageous one might wonder if it were an April fools joke - but the story was in yesterday's edition of the seattlepi.com and it seems to be legit.

In his back yard in Fremont, Nikos Anton spotted a house sparrow that seemed to be toting a twig in its beak.

But when he looked a little closer, Anton saw the "stick" was actually the grotesquely misshapen and overgrown top half of the bird's beak.

"Look at that!" he said, pointing to his pictures of the bird. "It's like an elephant trunk. ... It's a very odd thing happening here in Seattle."

This photo show the beaks of a red-tailed hawk - normal on left, long-billed deformity in the photo on the right.

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This "long-billed syndrome" has been recorded in about 160 birds by a Skagit County researcher, mostly in Western Washington and southern British Columbia and mostly since 2000. It's also documented in more than 2,100 birds in Alaska, where the phenomenon seems to have started affecting lots of birds in the early 1990s.

Researchers say the weird beaks appear to be concentrated in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, although reports are coming in from farther south -- from Southern California in one case earlier this month.

What's the cause? That remains a mystery. A small band of puzzled, poorly funded scientists is scrambling to find answers. Could it be chemicals? Something genetic? A disease? Maybe a combination? Could it affect humans?

Whatever the cause, researchers are left profoundly unsettled by the mysterious "long-billed syndrome."

"It's really tragic," said Bud Anderson of the Falcon Research Group, based in Skagit County. "It's grotesque. It's horrible. It makes me want to puke."

When affected birds are brought into wildlife-rehabilitation centers, their feathers often are dirty and matted, because a misshapen beak inhibits preening. For the same reason, they often are infested with feather lice.

And sometimes they're starving. Birds need to eat a lot every day, and they use their beaks much as we would use our hands. So what rehab centers are often left with is a dirty, cold, hungry and miserable bird. Many die...

Most affected birds in Western Washington are red-tailed hawks. Second on the list are crows. Others include the sparrow in Fremont, black-capped chickadees, Steller's jays, northern flickers and a raven. Also involved are a variety of songbirds, as well as woodpeckers and seabirds, including gulls and one common murre.

In Alaska, by far the majority are black-capped chickadees. ................................
But the syndrome has been seen in at least 28 other species there, including starlings, Steller's jays, magpies, robins and sparrows......