Dead Birds

The shores of Silver Lake attract joggers and strollers to the path that surrounds its murky, shallow waters. It's a place where people toss crusts of bread to the many pigeons, ducks and geese who gather there. Some birds are tame enough to be fed by hand. But the peaceful setting, in the Paint Works Corporate Center, is now at the heart of an investigation by federal and state wildlife agencies, following the discovery last weekend of at least 12 dead pigeons and waterfowl. The discovery coincided with a pigeon-extermination effort implemented for the last month by the office park's management firm, Paint Works Management Co., which placed poisonous corn kernels on the roof of one building to rid the area of a problematic pigeon flock.

OCEAN CITY, N.J. - The $400 million Ninth Street Bridge opened to much acclaim in May but has since taken a deadly toll on a familiar Shore citizen: The seagull. The birds are dying by the dozen on the bridge after perching on a railing near a new fishing pier, likely because of winds that draw them crashing down into traffic after they take off for the pier, according to the Ocean City Humane Society. Since July 1, 38 herring gulls have been removed from the shoulder of the northbound lanes headed out of Ocean City on the Route 52 Causeway, said Bill Hollingsworth, executive director of the society.

For the first time, several hospital patients in Philadelphia are being tested for the deadly virus that has killed seven people in New York. Five people hospitalized with encephalitis have been tested for the West Nile form of the disease, said Robert Levenson, the city Health Department's director of disease control. Results are expected in two to three weeks. The step - like the ongoing tests on 10 dead birds across Southeast Pennsylvania - followed the widening realization that the area will probably be fighting the virus next spring.

For the first time, dead birds infected with the West Nile virus have been found in Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Department of Health confirmed yesterday that four dead crows and a dead warbler from Philadelphia and four dead crows from Chester and Delaware Counties had tested positive. That brings the number of infected dead birds in the state to 13. Robert Muscalus, state physician general, stressed that no people or mosquitoes had been found to have West Nile in Pennsylvania.

Mosquitoes are like death and taxes: They seem destined to always be with us. Still, with the 1999 arrival of the West Nile virus in the Northeastern part of the country and the subsequent death of nine people from West Nile encephalitis, there has been a concerted effort to reduce the number of the critters and monitor the spread of the virus, which is transmitted by mosquitoes that bite infected birds, then bite people or animals. Ben Snyder is part of that effort. He works for Clarke Mosquito Control, an Illinois-based company hired by Delaware County to run its West Nile virus program.

A 77-year-old Burlington County man is the first New Jersey resident to die this year from the mosquito-borne West Nile virus, authorities said Friday. The death was reported as state and local agencies ramped up efforts to combat the virus, and New Jersey health officials announced that the number of confirmed virus cases had jumped from eight last week to 15. In Pennsylvania, 16 residents have tested positive for the virus; one, an elderly Luzerne County man, died, officials said.

The deadly West Nile virus has finally invaded Pennsylvania. Two infected crows have been found in the Philadelphia suburbs, state medical officials said yesterday - one in Levittown, Bucks County, and another in Tredyffrin Township, Chester County. The dead birds, discovered earlier this month by local residents, marked the first advance of the mosquito-borne disease into Pennsylvania. No humans in the state have been found to be infected with West Nile, said Robert S. Zimmerman Jr., Pennsylvania's secretary of health.

They've got us surrounded. Crows infected with the deadly West Nile virus have turned up in six more communities near Philadelphia, including Lansdowne, in Delaware County, on the city's southwest flank. The six dead crows were reported yesterday by Pennsylvania and New Jersey health departments, one day after New Jersey confirmed the first human death from West Nile in the country this year. No human cases of the mosquito-borne disease have been found in Pennsylvania or South Jersey.

Stop with the dead birds, already. Health officials in Pennsylvania are inundated with the things, most of them crows, as responsible citizens try to help wage war on West Nile virus by bagging carcasses so they can be tested for the bug. "I think we know where every bird is that's died in the state in the last month or so," said Richard McGarvey of the state Health Department, which uses the testing to track the virus. Both Pennsylvania and New Jersey hold that once a municipality has five virus-positive birds, no more testing is needed in that municipality.

Nearly a third of the state's West Nile Virus Control grants are coming to southeastern Pennsylvania, where last year 26 people got sick with the virus and two died. Philadelphia, Montgomery, Delaware, Chester and Bucks counties will receive $727,010 for West Nile surveillance and prevention in 2013, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection announced Wednesday. Counties begin monitoring for West Nile in early April, but infections in mosquitoes and birds usually aren't detected until mid-June.

A 77-year-old Burlington County man is the first New Jersey resident to die this year from the mosquito-borne West Nile virus, authorities said Friday. The death was reported as state and local agencies ramped up efforts to combat the virus, and New Jersey health officials announced that the number of confirmed virus cases had jumped from eight last week to 15. In Pennsylvania, 16 residents have tested positive for the virus; one, an elderly Luzerne County man, died, officials said.

It's a grand plan for public art - 24 searchlights along the Ben Franklin Parkway, aimed into the night sky and moving in response to the sound of human voices. It would form a canopy of light, visible for 10 miles. But when they scheduled it, city officials had no idea that the dates - Sept. 20 to Oct. 14 - coincided with the peak of the fall bird migration. Or that as people gaped at the show, songbirds winging overhead might become disoriented by the lights and start dropping from the sky, as has happened before.

OCEAN CITY, N.J. - The $400 million Ninth Street Bridge opened to much acclaim in May but has since taken a deadly toll on a familiar Shore citizen: The seagull. The birds are dying by the dozen on the bridge after perching on a railing near a new fishing pier, likely because of winds that draw them crashing down into traffic after they take off for the pier, according to the Ocean City Humane Society. Since July 1, 38 herring gulls have been removed from the shoulder of the northbound lanes headed out of Ocean City on the Route 52 Causeway, said Bill Hollingsworth, executive director of the society.

OCEAN CITY, N.J. - The $400 million Ninth Street Bridge opened to much acclaim in May but has since taken a deadly toll on a familiar Shore citizen: The seagull. The birds are dying by the dozen on the bridge after perching on a railing near a new fishing pier, likely because of winds that draw them crashing down into traffic after they take off for the pier, according to the Ocean City Humane Society. Since July 1, 38 herring gulls have been removed from the shoulder of the northbound lanes headed out of Ocean City on the Route 52 Causeway, said Bill Hollingsworth, executive director of the society.

Live chickens sharing cages with mummified remains of dead birds. Thousands of chickens dead of dehydration thanks to a water source malfunctioning. A carpet of dead flies so dark that workers in a poultry house needed headlamps to see. Those were some of the things the Humane Society of the United States says its undercover investigation found at a large Lancaster County farm that supplies eggs to ShopRite and other stores. The Humane Society said the conditions its investigator found and videotaped at Kreider Farms in Manheim evidenced the need for a federal law governing treatment of hens in commercial farms.

Panel: Redesign blowout preventers NEW YORK - Blowout preventers, which are supposed to seal off an oil well in an emergency, must be redesigned to prevent failures like the one last year at BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, a technical panel said in its final report. The U.S. government and the energy industry had "misplaced trust" in the ability of blowout preventers to act as fail-safe mechanisms, a committee of the National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council said.

Experimentation is essential for artists, Josephine L. Winsor once said, so maybe that explains why the 74-year-old painter from Wayne was drunk in a national park after dark with a dead woodpecker in her car. Winsor, whose oil and acrylic paintings focus on real-life settings, was involved in the surreal situation on Dec. 11 inside Valley Forge National Park. According to documents obtained by the Daily News , officers at Valley Forge found Winsor's 2001 Ford Focus inside the park around 11 p.m., after it was closed.