Blood-sucking parasites killed thousands of pigeons at Singtam (2009)

It was on the 20^th of May, 2009, I first published the news of the mysterious death of pigeons all over Singtambazaar on my blog. The pigeons were found dead on roads, house stairs drains, house roofs, and everywhere it was found. People denied any sort of Bird Flu but talked about some sort of disease in their head and die within a day.

The death of pigeons did not stop for the next one and half months and on average 30 to 40 deaths were reported. The strange death of this avian creature was published in the newspapers and one of the national newspapers went on to say more than 10,000 deaths had occurred. It was false news but to my research, the death case had been around 2000.  

I was too curious to know about its death and I closely held one dead bird from the nearby bazaar food go-down premises and found a small fly-like insect with a pointed antenna. These pigeons are being preyed to these small blood-sucking flies. Those flies carry infectious diseases that resulted in the loss of feathers on the neck and rest of the body; skin inflammation was also found. These parasitic flies could be seen through the naked eye hiding behind the feathered wings and around the neck.

On June 25^th, the press release from KC Bhutia, Joint Director, Disease Investigation Cell, State Animal Husbandry Department said “The birds getting wet during the rains created conditions conducive for the parasites to breed,” As per the official records, 56 cases of unnatural pigeon deaths over the past two months have been reported from a particular region of the state. 

This apart, a de-contamination campaign at the pigeonholes at residences has also been launched. These measures have yielded positive results and no fresh case of pigeon death has been reported from anywhere in the state over the past two weeks,” said Mr Bhutia. The report was based on the first batch of samples sent to the Regional Disease Diagnostics Laboratory of Guwahati.