Are migratory birds the carriers of India’s first bird flu outbreak? Here’s why we still don’t know—while bird trappers in Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh remain grounded courtesy government officials, the winged visitors are taking off on return flight from North India’s wetlands.

At the Pong Dam wetland in Himachal Pradesh—which has one of India’s largest congregation of bar-headed geese, many from China and Tibet—a six-member team of trappers and ornithologists sent by the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) is leaving tomorrow after a week-long wait for the forest department’s permission. And this, when the project is funded by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF).

‘‘We were very interested in sampling at Pong Dam,’’ says S Balachandran, senior scientist, BNHS. ‘‘There were about 13,000 bar-headed geese there till February. Now there are less than 300. The birds fly away from March-end to early April.’’

Internationally, bar-headed geese are being studied as potential carriers of the virus, since many died in a bird flu outbreak at Qinghai Lake, China, last May.

At Aligarh wetlands in UP, the team trapped about 30 birds which migrate from the Arctic, but released them without drawing blood samples because the Animal Husbandry Department did not depute vets to do the sampling.

Professional trappers trap the birds so government vets can collect 1 ml blood per bird. The samples are sent to the High Security Animal Diseases Laboratory in Bhopal to test for avian flu.

‘‘This should be a priority project to understand the role of migratory birds in bird flu,’’ fumes BNHS Director Asad Rahmani, who has been making repeated calls to officials for permission. ‘‘In Europe, about 100,000 wild birds have been sampled.’’

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