“UNPRECEDENTED”<\/p>\n
In response, wildlife teams started to vaccinate birds in the colony this week, said James Todd, chief biodiversity officer for the state of Victoria in which the island lies.<\/p>\n
“This is unprecedented. There has been no vaccination of this scale in a wild population anywhere in the world,” Todd said.<\/p>\n
The H5N1 vaccination program, which also covers a popular little penguin population at a breakwater in the Melbourne beach suburb of St Kilda, is a challenge, he said.<\/p>\n
“Trying to vaccinate wild populations is almost impossible, partly because you need two doses of the vaccine,” Todd told AFP.<\/p>\n
But wildlife experts are very familiar with the little penguins’ burrows at Phillip Island and St Kilda, he said.<\/p>\n
The birds, in turn, are accustomed to floodlights for the “penguin parade” tourist attraction, as well as being periodically handled by veterinarian scientists for monitoring of their health.<\/p>\n
Vaccination teams aim to inoculate about 5,000 little penguins closest to the visitor areas, the state official said, in a program that is likely to last weeks and months, not days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“UNPRECEDENTED” In response, wildlife teams started to vaccinate birds in the colony this week, said James Todd, chief…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":743878,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[428,245964,104569,90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-743877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-australia","tag-h5n1","tag-penguins","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=743877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/743878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=743877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=743877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=743877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}