Across Connecticut, researchers, farmers, and environmentalists grapple with the uncertainty of bird flu.
On a chilly day in January, Jay Joseph stepped outside his backyard in Stonington, Connecticut, to check on his four peacocks. At his feet, he found one of them dead with no sign of injury. He was mystified. Naturally, he turned to the internet. Someone suggested a duck could have broken the peacock’s neck, an explanation that seemed unlikely but plausible to Joseph.
The next day, he found three of his chickens dead. He sent his dead birds to a testing center at the University of Connecticut. The samples came back positive for bird flu.
Within forty-eight hours of the test result, Connecticut’s state veterinarian, Thamus Morgan, arrived at Joseph’s house with two Connecticut Department of Agriculture officials wearing hazmat suits. Within minutes, Joseph’s ducks, chickens, peahens, and peacocks, twenty-three birds in total, were put in gas chambers. “The ball just came down on us,” Joseph said.
He remained puzzled. Did they all need to die? Joseph, a hobby farmer who runs a contractor business, first brought home two peacocks six years ago after seeing the birds during a vacation in Puerto Rico. He grew fascinated by their intricate coloration and feather patterns. He’s had chickens for over twenty years, but has never seen any of them get sick.
Bird flu, otherwise known as H5N1, is a viral infection that can spread to animals, including birds, cows, rats, and cats. Humans can also become infected through contact with an infected animal. The virus spreads through saliva, nasal secretions, or feces of infected birds, and the symptoms in birds can include fever, coughing, nausea, muscle aches, and pink eye. Among poultry, H5N1 is fatal and highly pathogenic, spreading bird-to-bird, or through contaminated surfaces. According to Rebecca Eddy, Director of Communications for the Department of Agriculture, the mortality rate among domestic poultry is nearly 100 percent.
Given the high pathogenicity of the virus, the current response to a positive bird flu case in the United States and most countries, per standards from the World Organization for Animal Health, is to kill the entire flock. Although bird flu is most prevalent among wild birds in Connecticut, the birds that are euthanized to stop the spread of bird flu are usually domesticated, like Joseph’s.
“There are a handful of exceptions, but with regard to public health, de-populating free-ranging wild birds is ineffective in addressing most public health issues and can have negative impacts on rare species,” Will Healey, communications director of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said. “Surveillance and biosecurity measures relative to domestic animals are the best ways to prevent the spread of the virus.”
While H5N1 was first identified in birds in China in 1996, an especially virulent subtype of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza called clade 2.3.4.4b emerged in North America in 2022 and began spreading rapidly. Since 2022, there have been seventy cases in humans. The risk of H5N1 spreading between humans remains low. Yet as the virus spreads, it can mutate into more contagious variants, infecting humans at higher rates. Such a mutation could pose major threats to farm workers and other animals.
The spread of HPAI—on farms and in the media—has thrust poultry farmers in the limelight, with stories about the closure of live bird markets and skyrocketing egg prices (Trader Joe’s and other grocery stores recently placed limits on egg purchases). On the national level, in late February 2025, the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, announced a $1 billion strategy to take on HPAI, including economic relief for farmers, investments in biosecurity, vaccine import, and support for temporary import of eggs to lower prices. A single bird flu case could wipe out an entire flock–an event which would be particularly detrimental on large poultry farms, like Hillandale Farms in Connecticut, which produces eggs for Eggland’s Best. Large farms disproportionately control egg production (in the US, the top five egg companies, which include Hillandale Farms, own about 46 percent of laying hens).
In Connecticut, there have been four confirmed cases of bird flu in backyard flocks: two in 2022 and two in 2025, as well as about eighty cases in wild birds since 2022, though none in livestock so far. In the United States, since 2022, there have been 12,706 wild birds that have tested positive for bird flu, and 168 million poultry affected. By population, the density of wild bird flu cases is roughly 75 percent greater across the country than in the state of Connecticut.
One case, though, can wipe out an entire farm. Bird flu is not preventable, and there is no current cure. While cases in Connecticut are still low, if the virus spreads, more farms run the risk of seeing what happened to Joseph’s birds: mass selective slaughter.
***
Indu Upadhyaya, a food safety expert at the University of Connecticut, works to educate local residents on biosecurity recommendations for bird flu. As backyard flocks have shot up in popularity since COVID-19, perhaps in response to the ongoing egg shortage, Upadhyaya’s current recommendation to residents is to avoid contact with waterfowl, which can be breeding grounds for HPAI infection.
HPAI in birds can present with sudden death, like Joseph observed, as well as symptoms like swelling, respiratory problems, or uncontrollable diarrhea. If any of these symptoms are present, Upadhyaya recommends sending samples off to Connecticut Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory. But currently there is no cure or vaccine. According to Upadhyaya, if a positive result comes back, the only option is killing the entire flock, a practice known as culling.
At the federal level, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, has emphasized biosecurity over culling, arguing birds should not be killed but rather given time to build up immunity. Immunity to bird flu, however, would require prior exposure to a mild strain or vaccination, Upadhaya said. In the United States, vaccination is not commonly used in backyard or commercial flocks, and birds, regardless of their lifespan, remain susceptible to new infections without controlled exposure or vaccination.
Even with testing centers, Upadhyaya worries that “viruses and bacteria are extremely smart.” There may be even more cases than reported, in animals or in humans. The virus can mutate and reorganize itself in many ways, and it may become more pathogenic in the future.
This uncertainty is making poultry farming, already a difficult profession, even more challenging. Extreme weather caused by climate change has made the job unpredictable. And while chickens are typically thought to be more controllable than crops, with bird flu, farmers could lose their flock any day. “It’s piling on,” Ella Kennen, coordinator at the New Connecticut Farmers Alliance, said. Bird flu, to Kennen, remains a looming fear—“the pendulum swinging over your head and you’re just waiting for it to drop that balance.”
At the New Connecticut Farmers Alliance, Kennen works primarily with new farmers in the first ten years of their careers. Though no case of bird flu has been reported in Connecticut livestock, the threat of H5N1 still hangs over farmers. One bird flu case could jeopardize an entire flock, and chickens take time to raise.
If an entire flock of chickens is killed, it could take weeks or months to recover a flock. “Birds get the short shift,” Kennen said. Chickens on farms are labeled as “broilers”—chickens raised for meat—and “layers” raised for eggs. Broilers take about six to ten weeks to mature, but layers need up to six months to reach reproductive maturity. Since the current outbreak began in 2022, 148 million birds in the United States have been ordered to be euthanized, collapsing farmers’ years of work.
It is more costly to buy flocks now, too. Farmers usually purchase pullets, birds almost at reproductive maturity, or day-old birds, and the prices of both are on the rise. Murray Gates, from Artza Mendi Farm in Baltic, Connecticut, recently bought five hundred chickens to raise for eggs, but said that due to the increasing risk of bird flu, the price was 50 percent more than it would have been last year.
Steadfast Farms in Bethlehem has Connecticut’s only USDA-approved poultry slaughter and processing facility, where they expect to slaughter 15,000 to 30,000 chickens this year for other farmers in the greater New England area. Despite national concerns about bird flu, starting this year, the farm is adding 3000 chickens and 350 turkeys. Aaron McCool, the farm’s director of operations and sales, said the farm has always practiced biosecurity. “Anyone who raises poultry commercially thinks about avian influenza in the same way that every human thinks about a cold sometime in their life,” McCool said.
For diverse and smaller farms, the economic risk of losing a flock is lower than for industrial poultry farms. For diverse and smaller farms, like most Connecticut farms, Gates explained, risk is spread out among revenue sources. “If you’re a large farm, all of your eggs are in a single basket.” Small farms, though, have less profit and less of a cushion for large losses if a single flock gets wiped out. Most farmers, including Gate, already work multiple jobs on top of farming.
Steadfast Farms is also a member of the National Poultry Improvement Plan, or NPIP, which is a program that regularly tests for illnesses such as bird flu and pullorum, diseases which could lead to the farm depopulating its birds. NPIP would provide economic support in case of depopulation.
In recent months, McCool told me that Steadfast Farms has increased their spending on biosecurity necessities by 15 percent. When they suspect a bird is sick, they isolate it from the others and change their boots and outfits between visiting different species.
Still, McCool explained that no matter how much Steadfast Farms spends on biosecurity, they cannot control bird flu outbreaks. “No matter what you do, avian flu is not a preventable disease. All it takes is one duck flying over with a dropping.”
***
The Connecticut Audubon Society has twenty-two sanctuaries stretching over 3,400 acres. Tom Anderson, the director of communications for the Connecticut Audubon Society, told me that H5N1 is not their biggest concern. In the last fifty years, the number of birds in North America has dropped by three billion, or 30 percent, due to construction and domestic cats, along with pesticide use and building collapses. “Avian flu is not even on the radar compared to those others,” Tom assured me. I wondered how he felt about the media attention bird flu gets over these other concerns. Tom defined it as an issue of attention. “Four billion birds dying every year because cats kill them is a big problem. But it’s hard to write or broadcast a news story about that,” he said.
Similarly, at Steadfast Farms, McCool says he is less concerned about bird flu than with feeding people. “Avian influenza is not new, but this national story is new. We always ask why the negative stories about what could happen become so popular, instead of the stories about what these local farms do for their communities, how they give back, and how they serve the people that they feed.”
While bird flu might not be the primary worry for Anderson and McCool, for Joseph, he cannot forget it.
After news coverage of his bird flu case, Joseph receives messages from across the country from people asking if he wants them to send him new birds. He appreciates the outreach, but is reminded of the loss of his birds whenever he looks out on his backyard. He took the pump out of the pond where his ducks used to swim and let the pond freeze over. “The backyard is dead now,” he said.
–Sarah Cook is a senior in Grace Hopper College.
Illustrations by Lu Arie.
