Avian Flu Ruffling Feathers at 4-H Clubs

A state ban on live poultry sales will prevent Caleb and Gabriella Tilton from taking their prize chickens to the Loudoun County Fair. (By Tracy A. Woodward -- The Washington Post)

The chickens will not be strutting their stuff in Virginia pageants starting today.

Seven hens and roosters gathered for a communal dust bath one recent morning in a Purcellville back yard, shaking and shimmying their feathers into a mound of dry mud, as six members of the Loudoun County 4-H poultry club, ages 4 to 19, sat slumped nearby. With the county fair opening Sunday, the birds should have been in their coops, bracing to have foot feathers fluffed with hair dryers, combs greased with baby oil, and beaks and unruly toenails snipped for inspection at the upcoming show.

But like their brethren that are absent from the Fauquier County Fair that opens today, the Loudoun fowl have been relegated to their back yards by state fiat after an avian influenza scare. The state's action has deflated piles of children in 4-H programs who had spent months of labor and much hard-earned pocket money to turn their charges from scrawny chicks into proud models of purebred excellence. Exhibits and auctions at the fairs were to be the culmination of all that effort.

On July 9, however, the state veterinarian canceled all poultry shows and public sales through July 31 after turkeys at a Shenandoah County commercial farm tested positive for antibodies of a low pathogenic strain of avian flu. Maryland has taken no similar measures.

"This is not a human health concern or a threat to human health at all," said Karen Eggert, a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman. The department confirmed that the turkeys had been exposed to a North American strain of H5N1 virus, a less-deadly strain than the one that since 2003 has caused the death worldwide of many millions of birds through culling or disease and has killed at least 191 people in Africa and Asia.

None of the turkeys died of the disease or showed any symptoms of illness. The antibodies, a natural resistance, indicate that the birds might have been exposed to the nonlethal North American strain in the past, said Elaine Lidholm of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. The Shenandoah farm is under quarantine, and 54,000 of its turkeys have been slaughtered. Tests on commercial and backyard flocks in a surrounding 6.2-mile radius have returned negative results, according to agriculture officials.

Japan, Russia, Cuba, Taiwan and Hong Kong have banned Virginia poultry imports, however. And until the state gives the all clear, 4-H members and younger Cloverbuds in Fauquier and Loudoun have opted to replace bird shows and live auctions at their fairs with, respectively, a showmanship contest featuring stuffed chickens and a rubber duck regatta.

"It pretty much stinks," said Caleb Tilton, 10, a new 4-H member who spent the year priming 10 birds for the Loudoun fair. "This was my first year, and now my hopes and dreams are shattered."

But Caleb, who had gathered with club mates at the Purcellville home of club president Carolyn Trent, 15, said he respected the intention behind the ban: to protect his chickens, including Monster Chicken, his beloved black-and-green rooster.

Added vice president Nathan Cironi, 14: "We respect the decision of our health officials; they are looking at what is best for the public. It is hard to understand. . . . But our club teaches us to act unselfishly and do what is best for all."

On a scale of low to high, the disappointment among club members registered as a unanimous "extreme."

It's not just about pageantry, they said. Carolyn said she just broke even last year after recouping $300 in the fair's live auction. Whatever earnings she would have made this year would have gone toward her college savings.