Avian Keratin Disorder...A Flicker's Tale

Photo by Kelly Wohlwend

Tip #12: Never Stop Learning!  When you see something you don't know the answer to, look it up!

Photo by Kelly Wohlwend

It's been a while since I've written a post but with a brand new job and having recently moved back to the beautiful Pacific Northwest, I have had less time to write.  But a new post is long overdue and I find this topic fascinating (and I hope you do too!).  When my mom first saw this bird in our backyard I was still down in California.  She tried to describe it to me over the phone and being someone who is rather familiar with my NW birds, I was stumped.  It looked like a woodpecker but had a bill like a curlew is the description I got.  "I've never seen anything like it," she said.  I was intrigued!  Was this a new bird in our backyard that has never visited before?!  We did live near the lake but why would a shorebird venture into our grassy backyard?  I had to see it and of course try to get its picture!  Fortunately, when I moved back a month or so later, the bird was still gracing our backyard (and our suet feeder) with its unusual presence.  When I saw it for the first time the words that first came to mind were, "wow, I've never seen anything like it!" 

This Northern Flicker affectionately became known as "Mr. Bill."  (This Northern Flicker is actually a girl.  Notice the lack of red on the face.  The Northern Flicker pictured below with a normal beak is a male).  Despite the gender, the name stuck but I'll go ahead and refer to her as Mrs. Bill for consistency's sake.  I noticed that Mrs. Bill had no trouble getting into our suet feeder.  In fact, the elongated bill worked to her advantage.  She was able to easily poke her bill through the bars and pluck out large, fatty morsels.  Normally, Northern Flickers are foraging for food (mostly small invertebrates) on the ground, so an overly long beak may not cause as big of a problem for a flicker as it may for a Pileated Woodpecker, which relies on drumming holes in dead trees for food.  It would be interesting to see how this flicker would manage drilling a hole a tree with such a long, curved beak.  Needless to say, I have never seen anything like this in all my years of birding, so I made sure to get some pictures and then went on the internet.  It turns out this is rather common and even more common in certain areas of the country (more on this later).

This is called Avian Keratin Disorder.  I will summarize a description by audubon.org here (all my sources are listed below).  It is a disorder that results in the elongation of keratin in the beak of adult birds and is more common in the top bill than the bottom but can appear in both (Audubon.org 2014).  This deformity may be the result of environmental pollutants and can also affect a birds claws and feathers (Audubon.org 2014).  Two pollutants listed by Audubon were organochlorines found in the Great Lakes region and selenium, found in California from agricultural runoff (Audubon.org 2014).

Courtesy of the USGS (found in link listed in Resources Cited)

One study looked at Avian Keratin Disorder in Black-capped Chickadees in Alaska and found that birds with this disorder had accelerated keratin production (Hemert et al 2012).  (Black-capped Chickadee with Avian Kertain Disorder pictured to the right.  Photo from the USGS and can be found in the link listed below).  More specifically, it is the outer keratin layer of the beak called the rhamphotheca (Hemert et al 2012).  Chickadee's were also more affected than other species and had just over a 50% mortality rate from this disease (Hemert et al 2012).  It was also stated in Hemert et al 2012 and Hemert and Handel 2010 that the exact cause of this disorder is relatively unknown but it appears to be most common in the Pacific Northwest (Hemert and Handel 2010).  This disease has also been recorded in other species, such as crows, nuthatches and magpies in Alaska (Audubon.org 2014).  In a similar study by Hemert and Handel in 2010, they looked at the rates of beak deformities in Northwestern Crows in Alaska and found that rates were as high as 16% give or take 5% and escalated to almost 40% in certain areas in Alaska (Hemert and Handel 2010). Colleen Handel with the USGS stated that these deformities are 10 times greater than what is expected in wild bird populations (USGS 2010). 

These two studies are summarized well in a few different places, including the Huffington Post (cited below) and the USGS (cited below).  News of this also made it into the Anchorage Daily News (cited below).  In my research I didn't see Northern Flickers listed as a commonly affected species.  I'm still wondering if I can/should report this siting to Audubon or even the USGS.

Northern Flicker (male) with normal beak

Hopefully we can start to understand some of the causes of this disease and if it is the result of a human generated problem, find a solution!


Resources Cited:

Audubon.org: http://birds.audubon.org/faq/what-would-cause-deformed-beak 4 January 2014.

Hemert, Caroline Van; Handel, Colleen M and O'Hara, Todd M.  "Evidence of Accelerated Beak Growth Associated with Avian Keratin Disorder in Black-capped Chickadees (Poecile atrcapillus)."  Journal of Wildlife Diseases.  48(3):686-94, July 2012.  A full publication of this article can be found at: http://www.jwildlifedis.org/doi/pdf/10.7589/0090-3558-48.3.686


Hemert, Caroline Van and Handel, Colleen M.  "Beak Deformities in Northwest Crows: Evidence of  Multispecies Epizootic."  The Auk.  127(4): 746-751, 2010. 
http://alaska.usgs.gov/science/biology/landbirds/beak_deformity/pdfs/Auk_VanHemert_crow_beak_deformities.pdf

Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/09/bird-beak-deformities-avian-keratin-disorder-_n_780809.html 4 January 2014.

U.S. Geological Survey. "Deformed Beaks May Signal A Greater Environmental Problem." 8 November 2010.  http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2633&from=rss_home#.UshqXrSUO3o  Visited: 4 January 2014. 

Anchorage Daily News. "More Deformed Beaks Seen On Birds In Alaska, Northwest." Written by Dan Joling.  http://www.adn.com/2010/11/08/1543506/scientists-see-higher-incidence.html  Visited 4 January 2014.