Along the untamed coast of southern Victoria, where thyme rice-flower and coast daisy hustle for space and mud flats melt into aqua ocean, a team of birdwatchers is searching for an invisible enemy.
For almost 45 years, Rosalind Jessop has tracked the health of communities of wild birds, gathering data on flock sizes and numbers of young, to draw conclusions about species health and breeding patterns.
But three summers ago, the focus of her volunteer work shifted.
It is on beaches just like these that scientists and nature lovers including Jessop now fear Australia’s next pandemic will be born, flown in on board one of these migrating birds, or carried into local waters inside a seal or sea lion.
The virus causing most concern right now is not a coronavirus like COVID-19′s SARS-Cov-2 that emerged in bats. This time biosecurity experts have their eye on H5N1, a strain of the many influenza “A” viruses that can cause the flu in humans and often originate in birds.