California IN BRIEF : SANTA CRUZ : Illness Killing Birds Stumps Vets

Veterinarians and others looking for the cause of a sickness that has killed thousands of birds along the California coast in recent months have little good news to report. “We don’t know what to try next,” Karen Jones, a technician with the state Wildlife Investigation Service, admitted Friday. Wildlife officials have been concerned about the problem since summer, when sick and dead birds, mostly sea gulls, began turning up. The stricken birds have been found from Point Reyes to Monterey, with the largest concentrations along the shores in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties. “People are not going to miss a few gulls,” said Don Starks of the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory in Alviso. “But when you get birds dying like they never did before, you have a problem like we do now.” The illness, believed to be caused by a virus, weakens the birds severely.