What the Sea Brings In: Bird Flu and Bicheno's Penguins
It began, as these things do, with a story I could not stop reading. It was about Phillip Island, about penguins caught in the dark by gloved hands and given a needle in the breast, twice over, so that something in their small bodies might learn to recognise a war before it arrived. Then, yesterday, a second story, still unfinished: twenty-eight fairy penguins found dead on a beach on King Island, gathered up before the gulls could get to them, sent away in bags to be told, cell by cell, what had killed them. I read both in the shack, looking out towards Peggy's Point, the last light going out of the sky over water I have watched my whole life without ever quite finishing the watching, and found that what stayed with me was Bicheno, its rookeries, its two hundred pairs, a number small and fragile enough to hold entire in the mind.
I should say, before I go further, why I have called them fairy penguins throughout rather than reaching for the tidier, official name. Most of what I read called them little penguins, the name ornithologists prefer, the name on the department's own test results. It is the more accurate name, in the narrow sense that accuracy means. But it is not Bicheno's name for them, and this is a piece about Bicheno, so I have kept the older, softer word the town itself still uses on its brochures and its tour vans and the mouths of the people who have watched this colony come ashore their whole lives.
This is not, in the end, a story about Phillip Island or King Island, though both run through it like tributaries feeding a river I am more concerned with. It is a story about what a virus moving down this coast might mean for Bicheno's own rookery: small, historically fragile, already once nearly lost to predation and once nearly starved by warm water before this new thing ever arrived, and about what it means for a town to sit in the space between two facts: that the disease has not yet reached its dunes, and that there is no longer any good reason to believe it never will.
I am not a virologist, and everything gathered here has been pieced together over the last week, rather than discovered, drawn from people whose job it is to hold suffering at arm's length long enough to describe it accurately. I have tried to honour that discipline even where the material resists it, and to say plainly, wherever the evidence runs out, that it has run out, rather than filling the silence with the shape of my own dread.
Two hundred pairs. I want to sit with that number before I go near the virus itself, because it is the number everything else here must be weighed against. It is not nothing: Bicheno has built decades of sensitive and well managed tourism around its rookeries, but set beside the tens of thousands of birds at Phillip Island, or the sixteen thousand pairs scattered across the state's remote south-west, it is a population with almost no room in it for loss. A single bad season can be the difference between a rookery and a memory of one.
It has come close before. In the early nineteen-nineties, uncontrolled domestic animals reduced Bicheno's colony to somewhere around forty birds: forty, a number so small it could have been the whole of the story, had two wonderful locals not decided, more or less on instinct, that the only way to save the rookery was to protect it by making people care about it, guiding countless visitors and locals down to the dunes at dusk.
Then, in the summer of 2024 into 2025, the sea itself turned against Bicheno. A marine heatwave settled over the state's east coast, pushing the small schooling fish these penguins depend on beyond the range that exhausted adults, swimming out and back each day to feed their chicks, could reasonably reach. For more than a month, the parents simply stopped coming home. Chicks starved in their burrows waiting for parents who were themselves, presumably, starving somewhere out past the horizon in water gone strangely warm. The town felt the emptiness of that beach the way a house feels the absence of someone who has always, until now, come home. Then the water cooled, the birds came back, and there was relief, and also a clear warning that the state still had no proper, funded way of monitoring rookeries like Bicheno's, that what data existed came largely from volunteers with binoculars rather than any coordinated survey.
I set this history down at length because it is not background, it is the whole shape of the argument. A rookery twice (likely more) already brought to the edge, once by predation and once by warm water, carries into any new trial less resilience than one never tested, and a rookery watched this lightly may find real trouble recognised only after it has already done its worst. That is the position Bicheno was standing in on the day the virus finally reached the Australian mainland.
But before the virus, I want to go back much further than the nineteen-nineties, further than the town itself, further than any of us, because a bird does not simply arrive somewhere and decide to stay. It arrives because forty million years of ocean and cold and hunger have shaped it, by increments too small to see, into a creature that fits the particular door this coastline happens to hold open.
The story, as best the fossil record and the genome can tell it, begins in the waters off what is now New Zealand, somewhere close to sixty-six million years ago, with a bird called Waimanu that still had something like flight in its bones but had already begun trading the sky for the sea. What followed was one of the stranger reversals in the whole history of vertebrate life: a lineage of flying seabirds slowly surrendering the air, wing by wing, until the wing itself became something closer to a paddle, stiff and dense with muscle, built for pushing water rather than catching it. By the early Miocene, something close to twenty-two million years ago, the crown group of modern penguins had emerged, and in the deep cooling of the mid-Miocene climate transition, some fourteen million years ago, as the Southern Ocean dropped six or seven degrees and the currents that still gird Antarctica tightened their grip, the lineage that would become Eudyptula split away from its cousins, favouring smaller bodies, shallower dives, and warmer water than the emperor and king penguins that stayed behind in the deep cold. The genus, smallest of all the world's penguins, took its modern shape in the seas around Zealandia, dispersing into Australia during the Pleistocene ice ages, and more recently still drifting back the other way into New Zealand, leaving the two populations measurably distinct, divided by something like two and a half million years of separate evolution, a divergence some biologists now argue is wide enough to call two species rather than one. What it tells me, whatever the final word on that argument, is that the bird coming ashore at Bicheno tonight is not a fixed thing. It is a moving average, still being drawn, by exactly the kind of pressure now bearing down on it again.
Everything about the animal, once you know to look, reads as an answer to an ancient problem: how to be warm-blooded in cold water, how to be a bird that cannot fly and is therefore, on land, nearly defenceless. The feathers alone are an engineering marvel disguised as decoration: close to ten thousand of them on a single bird, three or four times the density of any bird that still takes to the air, downy at the base to trap a cushion of air that does most of the work of keeping the animal warm. The blue-grey back and white belly are camouflage worked out over millions of years of being hunted from both directions at once, dark above, to vanish into the sea as a gull looks down; pale below, to vanish into the sunlit surface as a fish looks up. The flippers, once wings, are stiffened almost into oars, and the muscles that drive them are dense with myoglobin, a protein that lets tissue hoard oxygen the way a cellar hoards food, so the heart can slow deliberately at the start of a dive, blood drawing back toward the organs that matter most, buying the bird another twenty or thirty seconds fifty or sixty metres down. And then there is the strangest adaptation of all, which has nothing to do with muscle or feather and everything to do with time: the choice, inherited rather than reasoned, to come ashore only at dusk, gathering offshore in loose rafts until the light has gone soft enough to hide them, then rushing the beach together in short, comic, utterly serious sprints, because on land this bird cannot outrun anything, and darkness has always been the only armour it could afford. It is a species built almost entirely out of vulnerability, made survivable only by cleverness, cover, and each other. I think of this every time I have stood at the Gulch and watched them come in.
None of this evolution had Bicheno in mind, of course. But a rookery like this one is not simply penguins that happen to be here; it is fourteen million years of cold-water specialisation meeting a stretch of granite and sand that offers soft dune for burrowing, shelter, and a productive sea within easy range of a bird that can only carry so much fuel. Add to that ancient bargain a threat it never had to price in, and the fit between animal and place becomes suddenly, uncomfortably provisional.
Longer still than the penguins' tenure here, on a different order of time entirely, is the human one. This stretch of coast lies within the country of the Paredarerme people, whose territory ran the length of Tasmania's eastern seaboard. Tasmania's Aboriginal people, the palawa, are understood to have occupied this island for more than thirty-five thousand years, since well before rising seas cut lutruwita off from the mainland roughly ten thousand years ago and left its people to develop one of the longest continuous relationships with a single landscape anywhere on earth. Along this coast that relationship left physical evidence in shell middens and stone scatter, seasonal movement between coast and highland, and a body of ecological knowledge: tide, swell, the behaviour of seabirds read as a single continuous text.
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There is a word for a thing before there is an explanation for it, and this has always been the way of plagues. Influenza is Italian, born of a belief, half meteorology, half astrology, that sickness arrived on the influenza di freddo, the influence of the cold, or of the stars themselves, wheeling indifferently overhead while men and birds sickened below. "Bird flu" is the word's plainer grandchild, a compression of avian influenza, from avis, Latin for bird. H5N1 itself is not poetry but inventory: H for haemagglutinin, a protein bristling across the virus's skin like a coat of small grappling hooks, by which it takes hold of a cell and lets itself in; N for neuraminidase, which later cuts the new virus free to go looking for the next. Sixteen haemagglutinins and nine neuraminidases circulate among the world's wild birds, and the number after each letter is simply which one a given virus happens to be wearing.
It matters to say plainly that H5N1 is a genealogy, not a single character, and that wearing the same surname tells you almost nothing about temperament. What separates the dangerous branch from the harmless one is a single mutation at a junction of the haemagglutinin protein. In ordinary flu, that junction can only be unlocked by enzymes in a bird's gut, keeping infection local and mild, the kind of thing a wild duck carries without feeling it. In the branch now moving toward Tasmania, the lock has changed. Enzymes found throughout the body, liver, heart, brain, can turn the key, and a minor intestinal complaint becomes a virus capable of setting up anywhere it likes. This is the only fact Bicheno's own risk truly turns on: whether, once it enters a burrow on Diamond Island, it stays contained, or goes everywhere at once.
The bird's own name has nothing to do with any of this. Eudyptula minor, Greek for "good little diver," was given by Johann Reinhold Forster in 1781, and "fairy penguin," the name Bicheno's own brochures still use, is said to come from settlers who watched the birds rise out of the surf at dusk and thought, in the failing light, they looked like something out of folklore. It is a small, accidental irony that the gentlest name we have for this bird belongs to an entirely different history than the grim, bureaucratic one now bearing down on its rookery.
The virus's journey to this coastline is worth telling briefly, because Bicheno's risk cannot be understood except against what has already happened elsewhere. It began with a single goose in Guangdong province in 1996, a genetic accident that let disease loose from the gut into the whole body. For two decades it remained mostly a story of poultry sheds and contained regional outbreaks. Then, from around 2020, the branch called clade 2.3.4.4b stopped confining itself to farmed birds and began travelling with wild ones, migratory birds, riding routes older than any human border, carrying the virus the way they carry seeds and salt and the memory of every coastline they have touched. By 2021 it had reached North America; by 2022, South America, killing sea lions in numbers that startled people who thought they had seen the worst of it; by October 2023, Antarctica, the last continent anyone had hoped it might never find.
What happened there matters to what might happen at Bicheno. On Beak Island, in March 2024, scientists confirmed the virus as the cause of death in more than fifty south polar skuas at a single breeding site, birds found with their necks twisted backward, walking in circles, falling out of the air mid-flight. And yet, at those same sites, in that same season, the penguins examined nearby did not die in comparable numbers, even where the virus was present in their tissue. Nobody fully understands why. It may be behaviour: skuas scavenge on carrion and gather more densely, or something in penguin biology the virus has not yet found its way around. Whatever the reason, this asymmetry, skuas dying while penguins are mostly spared, has held, imperfectly but consistently, across most of the Southern Ocean, and it is the single fact I return to more than any other while weighing what any of this means for the rookery at Bicheno.
Australia held out longer than anywhere else, and then it did not. On 14 July 2026 a brown skua near Esperance, in Western Australia, became the first confirmed mainland case. A month later, on 13 August, the same species was confirmed in Tasmania. By the twentieth of the month, eleven cases had been confirmed across the state's north-west and King Island, two hundred and fifty kilometres and more from Bicheno's own dunes, which is a real distance, and not nothing, though I have learned enough now about how this virus travels to know it is not a wall. A brown skua does not consult a map before it flies.
I want to describe, plainly, what this disease does inside a bird, because there is a dishonesty in writing about risk only in the abstract when the thing itself, should it ever reach Diamond Island, would be intimate and total. Once the mutated protein has unlocked every door in the body, the virus moves through liver, spleen, pancreas, heart, leaving small dead patches of tissue behind it. It reaches, often, the brain, and there the disease becomes almost unbearable to read about: birds with necks contorted backward, unable to hold their heads the way a bird has held its head since before there were mammals; birds walking or swimming in slow, senseless circles; birds stumbling into things they would once have avoided by instinct. Breathing becomes laboured. Sometimes, cruellest of all, there is nothing visible, a bird found dead in good condition, the virus having moved too fast for the body to visibly waste.
It travels between birds through direct contact, droppings, secretions, shared sand and water, the small intimacies of colonial life, and it is worth being specific about whose intimacies these are. The fairy penguins are not the only rookery Bicheno keeps. A short way east of town, two small granite islands make up the Governor Island Marine Nature Reserve, home to one of the largest crested tern colonies in the state, close to two thousand pairs, alongside silver gulls, fairy penguins of their own, and the sooty oystercatcher, black as a struck match, known locally by the older, blunter name of Redbill for the orange chisel of its beak. Along the ordinary beaches, hooded plovers pick at the tideline, kelp and Pacific gulls squabble over scraps at the jetty, and further out, in the long grey months, a river of short-tailed shearwaters streams past on its way to somewhere else. It is precisely the crested tern and the silver gull, of all these, that have already returned positive results elsewhere. A rookery's risk is never only a function of its own species' resilience. It is a function of who else shares its address, and a penguin burrow dug within metres of a tern's nesting scrape, drinking from the same rock pools, is a shared neighbourhood the virus will not much distinguish between.
Confirmed detections remain concentrated in the state's north-west and King Island, the twenty-eight dead fairy penguins and three crested terns found at the Port of Grassy, samples sent away, results not yet returned. A researcher with the Australasian Seabird Group described the prospect of that result coming back positive as a worrying trend, a possible major escalation, while in the same breath noting that everything known so far about how this virus moves through penguin species suggested fairy penguins might not prove among its most vulnerable victims. I can hold both sentences in mind without either cancelling the other, and that, I think, is simply what it means to sit with real uncertainty rather than pretend we already know how Bicheno's story ends.
Across the strait, in Victoria, the virus had already done its work: a single penguin at Phillip Island confirmed dead, and in response an extraordinary undertaking, more than five thousand birds caught by hand in the dark, twice each, and vaccinated. No comparable program has yet reached Bicheno. A former federal parliamentarian turned conservationist has called publicly for the same protection to be extended to Tasmania's smaller mainland rookeries, naming Bicheno specifically among several others, while the state's environment department has indicated that Tasmania's fairy penguins, more numerous overall and not formally listed as threatened, may not clear the regulatory bar vaccination requires.
I do not know how to feel about that omission. There is a version of this in which caution looks like neglect of Bicheno's smaller, less-monitored rookery, and a version in which it looks like the ordinary discipline of not promising more than can be delivered. Both are, I suspect, partly true, and Bicheno is left, for now, protected only by distance and by whatever it is in the fairy penguin's own biology that has so far, elsewhere, kept it from the skua's fate.
So: what, honestly, is the risk to Bicheno's rookery? I think it must be held in tension rather than resolved, because the evidence itself refuses resolution. On one side: a small population with little room to absorb loss; a rookery already twice brought to the edge, which may carry less resilience into a third trial than one never tested; dense burrow nesting alongside gulls and terns already confirmed positive elsewhere; and a monitoring regime built on volunteer devotion rather than funded survey.
On the other: fairy penguins are not skuas, not the scavenging, densely aggregating species that have borne the outbreak's heaviest cost everywhere it has gone. The pattern holding, imperfectly, across a hemisphere of penguin colonies already exposed, that the divers have so far been spared something close to the fate of the circling birds beside them, is not nothing, even if nobody can yet explain why it holds. And the fact that authorities are already watching, already testing, already prepared to move if King Island's results demand it, is itself a form of protection the skuas of the Antarctic Peninsula did not have when this began.
The King Island result, whenever it comes, is the single most important fact not yet known to anyone writing or reading this. If it comes back positive, it will be the first confirmed mass mortality of fairy penguins from this virus anywhere on earth, and every calculation here about distance and resilience will need remaking, urgently, for Bicheno in particular. If it does not, it will lend some further, though not conclusive, weight to the hope that this rookery's own particular biology, forged over fourteen million years of exactly this kind of pressure, might yet see it through what predation and warm water did not manage to end.
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I will go down to the Gulch, as I often do, and stand while the light goes out of the sky over water that has, this last year, been too warm and then, mercifully, not, and watch for the small dark shapes rising out of the surf at the edge of the dark, dragging the whole enormous, indifferent sea in behind them on their backs like something they have decided, against all evidence, to forgive.
There is no way to know, standing there, whether what I am watching is a rookery beginning an ordinary evening or one living through the last untouched season it will ever have. That not-knowing is, I have come to think, simply what it means to love this stretch of coast in this particular year: to go on counting the birds as they come ashore, not because counting will save them, but because it is what love does in the presence of something it cannot control.
This is not, in the end, a story with a shape yet. It has no third act I can offer honestly, because the laboratory results that would give it one have not, as I write this, come back. What I have instead is Bicheno, a habit, and a small rookery that has already outlived introduced predators and a summer of warm water it had no right to survive, going about the only business its ancestors worked out, wing by wing, over fourteen million years of cold Southern Ocean: swimming out at first light, swimming home at dusk, trusting, the way every living thing must trust something, that the sea it returns to will still be the sea it left. Whether that trust holds is not a question this article can answer. It belongs, for now, to the laboratories, and the weather, and whatever it is, luck, biology, the same indifferent influence of the stars that gave this whole family of diseases its name, that has so far let the divers live while the circling birds beside them fell.
AM —
References
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