"Bird Flu"

March 17, 2006

Part of Chalkwell beach next to the train station is cordoned-off with people in protective clothing looking at it; presumably because a bird corpse had been stranded there in the same spot as the pheasant wing in January. It is just as well that I made my bird feather collection before this bird influenza scare got properly started. It is not a new phenomenon. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 671 C.E. reports "here was a great mortality of birds (producing) a foul stench over both land and sea from the corpses of small and large birds." That was five years after 'a great plague of men' caused the Essex missionary Cedd to die at Lastingham Abbey and the East Saxons to revert to paganism until reconverted by Wilfred. Perhaps the disease had mutated from us to birds in a reversal of the pattern feared at present.(I read later in the paper that they were actually removing graffiti.)