Hello, happy spring. Welcome to the American Birding podcast from the American Birding Association. I am your host, Nate Swick.

Birding has once again broken containment and is a topic of discussion among the wider world, though unfortunately it is not in the

life-affirming, wholly positive way that we have become so familiar with over the last

few years.

Now, a birding in nature tour ship is ground zero for a recent hantavirus infection that has

sadly led to the deaths of three people traveling on that ship.

The boat, the M.V. Hondias, disembarked from Ushuaya in southern Argentina and early April.

It was scheduled to make landfall at several isolated islands in the Atlantic islands that feature

endemic bird species that are obviously otherwise very, very difficult to

encounter, stopping at places like St. Helena, sandwich islands, and the appropriately named

Inaccessible Island, which is home to the delightfully named Inaccessible Island Rail, which is surprisingly

accessible, as it were, provided you have access to the island, which is, well, the name says it.

Many of these islands feature large seabird colonies, and because of that, biological protocols on the MV.

Hondias are extremely, extremely strict.

So the question became, how did the people on this boat come in contact with this virus that is primarily associated

with exposure to infected rodents? But one of the early rumors propagated by the Argentinian

government, no less, had to do with a side trip by the patient's zero to a local landfill in

Ushawa to seek out white-throated Karakara, among other species.

And this is how the general public learned that landfills can occasionally be really great

birding sites and that we, as a community, will occasionally take advantage of them.

And here we were getting all this good press.

Thankfully, local birders and frankly, birders from all over the world pretty quickly

...