HYDERABAD: With the fear of the spread of bird flu across zoological parks following death of birds at Delhi and Gwalior zoo parks, staff of Nehru Zoological Park in Hyderabad have jumped into preventive measures.
Besides bird flu incidents in other cities, the presence of large number of poultry farms around Hyderabad zoological park is also seen as a potential threat by zoologists. To avoid any untoward incident, already prophylactic antibiotics are being administered to birds, sanitation at birds enclosures has been stepped up and officials are monitoring the situation at birds enclosures round the clock, as part of precautionary and preventive measures at Zoo Park in Hyderabad.
“Bird flu is caused mostly by migratory birds like storks and flemingos. Therefore, we are especially focusing on storks and flemingos in the zoo. Besides taking bio-security measures like administering Prophylactic antibiotics through feed to the birds, we have also stopped feeding egg and chicken to all animals in the zoo. We have decided to feed only mutton for a period of one month to all animals,” said Dr MA Hakeem, assistant director at Nehru Zoological Park.
It was storks and ducks which died of bird flu in Gwalior and Delhi. Besides keeping eye on migratory birds, zoo park staff are keeping a watchful eye on the duck pond. Preventive measures have started at zoo from Saturday and higher officials have instructed zoo staff to be on alert round the clock for next month. Antibiotics will be administered for a week.
According to Nehru Zoo Park officials, there are total of 1,500 animals and 600 of them are birds. So officials do not want to take any risk, though they express confidence that Hyderabad might not witness a bird flu.
“Virus is the cause of bird flu and the danger is it is highly contagious. But now we are seeing bird flu only in far off northern regions like Delhi which are more than 1,000 kms away from Hyderabad. The chances of Hyderabad witnessing bird flu are very bleak. Also even when there was bird flu in Telangana two years ago, birds in the zoo were unaffected,” added Hakeem.
There are more than 30 species of birds in categories like exotic, migratory, nocturnal and others at bthe zoo. Though officials are taking preventive measures in birds enclosures, they are allowing visitors into bird enclosures as they do not see any real threat to visitors.