Part One: The Bird
Birds know no national borders, just like viruses. And when birds are the known carriers of potentially species-crossing viruses, panic can set in very quickly. ‘Bird Flu’, so-called, is a regularly occurring disease and has frequently caused alarm for it pandemic potential – as when, living in Hong Kong, people began to talk about migrating birds as mortal threats. Hong Kong’s favourite birding hotspot, the Mai Po marshes, was shut during one such scare, much to the chagrin of local bird lovers, who pointed out in vain that none of the Bird Flu outbreaks was reliably attributable to migrating wild birds. The chicken industry was the culprit.
Regulating border-crossings is a fundamental part of what national governments do. It’s not easy. With migrating birds, it’s pretty much impossible, but in other circumstances when birds cross borders, such as the wild bird trade, such regulation is common, albeit often unsuccessful, particularly in poor countries. And biosecurity and immigration bureaucracies alike are notoriously draconian and intrusive. They are notorious also for creating Kafkaesque tales of frustration and tragedy, for both non-human and human travellers. Our Kiwi Fruit-Dove is one such tragic case.
Actually, the species in question ending up on New Zealand’s shores was the Rose-crowned Fruit-Dove, normally found in forest and mangrove habitats in northern and eastern Australia, as well as further north on islands in the Lesser Sundas and the Moluccas. This one was a ‘vagrant’, a young bird not yet with full adult plumage, blown off-course or otherwise wandering across the ocean, and turning up for the very first time in New Zealand in April 2020 (coincidentally, during the time of the pandemic). When it arrived, it became entangled in a biosecurity bureaucratic nightmare probably without parallel.
Biosecurity in Australia and New Zealand is something of a national religion. It is a matter of pride to claim the ‘strictest biosecurity laws in the world’. Most citizens congratulate ourselves on being responsible travellers when we return home, depositing our uneaten foreign apples in bins on the way from the plane to the taxi; declaring our bamboo souvenirs to the customs; submitting to taking our boots off to be sanitised in case they carry foreign dirt; and tut-tutting when we see intercepted transgressors standing beside open suitcases jammed with dried mushrooms and ginseng. We submit to the almost impossibly complex measures to bring pets across the border, mostly with patience and understanding, and we are outraged when we see celebrities with private jets evading the rules with their pet designer puppies.
In the name of biosecurity, no expense has been spared in providing quarantine facilities for imported plants, bees, birds and horses – indeed for any foreign living body (other than a person) that might convey invasive species of any kind, including pathogens. In 2016, a spanking new, $380 million quarantine facility was opened within a few minutes’ drive of Tullamarine International Airport in Melbourne. The project sailed through the national Parliament and the Treasury with hardly a quibble. The only quibble was abut denying the request from the racing industry to include an equine training track in the complex.
Separate from most of this, what to do about wild animals that make cross-border journeys autonomously – like our vagrant Fruit-Dove – raises some special problems. The New Zealand laws do make an allowance for migrating and free-flying vagrant birds. They are protected under the Wildlife Act so, normally, they fly through the border unmolested.
But not, alas, this wandering Fruit-Dove. Its first landing was on a ship out at sea. This particular ship was at permanent anchorage as a storage and processing vessel in an oil field. The bird was found exhausted and huddled on deck by a crew member, who put it in a box out of sympathy for its plight.
A supply helicopter due the next morning was commandeered to fly the bird to shore. That was when Biosecurity New Zealand got their hands on it. As a non-native bird arriving in a box by helicopter, it was treated the same as if it were a smuggled parrot – as an illegal entry and a danger to security.
Unexpected arrivals of vagrant birds from other parts of the planet are special for birders and ornithologists. The arrival of the Rose-crowned Fruit-Dove, as a ‘first’ for New Zealand, was an ornithological event. But in order for it to be added to the New Zealand bird list, the rules say it must be clear that the bird in question landed on its own accord – as one ornithological authority puts it: ‘…unassisted by man (sic)’. The rules also say it’s OK if a wild bird takes shelter on a ship of its own volition and flies off when the ship docks – this is considered to be ‘unassisted’. The thinking is that, so far as the bird knows, the ship might just as well have been a floating platform of vegetation. Hmm….
Cleary, arriving ashore by helicopter in a box means that our Fruit-Dove was unequivocally ‘assisted by man’ – yet it was in fact accepted on the New Zealand bird list by ornithologists and birders. Here’s where it all gets a bit daft. Under the Wildlife Act, New Zealand’s Territory is deemed to extend 200 nautical miles out to sea. The ship where it alighted is moored 73 miles offshore. Ornithologists and birders also adopt the 200 mile limit so, for their purposes, the Fruit Dove really did ‘land’ in New Zealand as a wild bird.
But the Biosecurity Act fixes the border at the 12 mile limit, where international waters for shipping purposes end. When the Fruit Dove crossed that line, it was in a box on board a helicopter. Its fate was sealed. Biosecurity trumped wildlife preservation. The bird was euthanised and is now a skin in a drawer in the New Zealand National Museum collection of bird specimens.
But why the final solution? Why not put the bird in quarantine, give it a few pathogen tests and then let it through, like you would a racehorse? Sadly for the unfortunate Fruit-Dove, the mere fact of arrival was enough to condemn it to death. Testing procedures have to be proven and documented for each different species if they are to be given the chance to quarantine. This has been done for sheep and horses, but not for live birds, as the New Zealand officials explained:
Biosecurity NZ does not have an Import Health Standard for live birds, which means we do not have a benchmark to undertake the tests required to clear the bird of any biosecurity risks.
In fact, no deliberately imported live birds of any kind are allowed into New Zealand under the existing biosecurity regime, so it is not surprising they haven’t gone to the trouble to work out a reliable testing regime for bird-borne pathogens.
As tragic as this outcome may seem, it had an inexorable logic. Some of the face-value absurdity of the case is embedded in the need for consistency and probity – no exceptions, even for a very special Fruit-Dove! On such foundations are public institutions, like an effective biosecurity regime, built. A well-oiled bureaucratic machine moved decisively and inexorably towards a sad but justified conclusion, founded on public support for a universal good – biosecurity – and backed by law, science and precedent.
Part 2: The Pandemic
This incident happened just as a global pandemic was getting under way. Both Australia and New Zealand found themselves scrambling to get things right, holding emergency cabinets, facing considerable community alarm and dealing with highly conflicting views in the community. Thankfully, they quite quickly came to the view that if they viewed every border-crossing person as if it were a Fruit-Dove, they’d get on top of the problem (this happened more swiftly and more effectively in New Zealand than in Australia).
Of course, the parallel is not exact: people are different from Fruit-Doves and euthanasia is not an option. Maybe the more relevant case is the quarantined racehorse: it can be let through after quarantine, if it is scientifically tested under legally approved protocols to determine the absence of pathogens, after a suitable period of quarantine.
In other words, our governments know all about how to manage biosecurity, including the arrival of dangerous pathogens at our borders, but they were unable to transfer that knowledge promptly and effectively to the management of a human pandemic. And as well as some early fumbling and hesitation, in both countries some fatal flaws emerged in the human biosecurity regime that came to be adopted, of the kind that were long ago confronted and largely overcome for animal and plant biosecurity.
Quarantine facilities in the COVID-19 pandemic had to be jerry-built, frantically and on the run. In Australia, there were no parallel facilities for humans to the one for horses, pets and plants which had opened in Melbourne in 2016. For incoming travellers landing at airports, the solution was to urgently grab the most convenient accommodation available, namely, beds in city hotels left empty by the absence of foreign tourists, and turn them into temporary quarantine facilities. New Zealand euphemistically referred to this as ‘managed isolation’. The Australian Government, faced with repeated demands from State Governments to build fit-for-purpose facilities, stubbornly refused.
Perhaps ‘managed isolation’ in a tourist hotel is more tolerable to the general public than ‘quarantine’ in a high-security compound housing a purpose-built, medically supervised isolation facility (were such a thing to exist). But the quarantine hotels were a weak link and were the source of a number of community outbreaks. Many were staffed mostly by gig-workers, some of whom were poorly trained by the contractors that supplied them; protective equipment for staff was provided only haphazardly; ventilation in the hotels was not up to the job of preventing air-borne transmission of the virus; protocols for delivering meals and for moving through the corridors were not strict enough; transport to and from the hotels was left to standard commercial operators rather than specialised providers; and so on.
Quarantine has a long history as a public health strategy. It’s not as if public health experts aren’t aware of this history – it’s told in Public Health 101 – but nearly everyone else seems to have forgotten it. Until the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of us thought that ‘quarantine’ was something that should happen only to pets and racehorses. Applied to humans, it was a 19th Century relic, reeking of stigma, prejudice and cruelty and harking back to an era of long-conquered, nasty medieval diseases such as leprosy and smallpox. Surely, plagues were a thing of the past …?
Today, any surviving quarantine stations are heritage buildings given over to other uses, like the one surrounded by bushland overlooking the Harbour on Sydney’s North Heads. If you were on the top floor of the one of the city’s quarantine hotels, maybe you could catch a glimpse of it in its forbidding – but eminently sensible – isolation (just by-the-by, the Quarantine Station is an eBird hotspot and, with the surrounding National Park, has a decent list of nice birds). New Zealand decommissioned its last quarantine island, in Otago Harbour, in 1940. The facility is now a religious retreat.
But maybe there is a bit of good news in all of this. Perhaps our familiarity with and our broad consensus on the need for tough biosecurity measures at our national borders were among the reasons we in Australia and New Zealand mostly accepted the inconveniences of travel restrictions, quarantine for incoming travellers and the occasional lockdown. And by and large we also went along with mask-wearing and other inconvenient measures. The return for this has been that life went on pretty much as normal for most of the time, and we had two of the lowest infection and death rates in the world.
Hopefully, now that we have experienced first-hand a pandemic, maybe in future our governments will apply the same degree of care and preparation to dealing with arriving pathogens in humans as they already apply to the case of the health risks posed by a border-crossing Fruit-Dove. OK, it’s going to be a lot tougher because we are dealing with people, not wild birds, pets or farm animals, but next time we face a novel coronavirus arriving from overseas, that’s not going to be an acceptable excuse.
