{"id":36,"date":"2005-10-04T20:59:00","date_gmt":"2005-10-04T20:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backyardbirdcam.com\/birdblog\/?p=36"},"modified":"2005-10-04T20:59:00","modified_gmt":"2005-10-04T20:59:00","slug":"house-finch-disease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.backyardbirdcam.com\/birdblog\/house-finch-disease\/","title":{"rendered":"House Finch Disease"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a onblur=\"try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}\" href=\"http:\/\/www.backyardbirdcam.com\/blog\/uploaded_images\/housefinch-eye10-2-05b-766785.jpg\"><img style=\"margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;\" src=\"http:\/\/www.backyardbirdcam.com\/blog\/uploaded_images\/housefinch-eye10-2-05b-762093.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><br \/>A House Finch sat at one of the backyard feeders on Sunday and didn&#8217;t spook when the Blue Jays came through sounding an alarm. I knew there must be something wrong&#8230; and my concerns were confirmed when I saw the bird&#8217;s eye (pictured right). This House Finch was a victim of House Finch Disease, also known as House Finch conjunctivitis (<span style=\"font-family:Geneva, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#000000;\"><i>Mycoplasma gallisepticum). <\/i><\/span>The disease is spread through contact at feeders so I took down all the feeders on Monday and gave them a thorough scrubbing with a 10% bleach solution (1 part bleach : 9 parts water) and allowed them to dry before rehanging them. Although the disease is actually a respiratory disease, it causes problems with the eye. From what I&#8217;ve read at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.birds.cornell.edu\/hofi\/abtdisease.html\">Cornell University Lab of Ornithology<\/a> site, the birds who do not survive usually die from not being able to feed, from losing sight, or from predation, but not from the disease itself. I found the finch again this afternoon and he was not in good shape; I don&#8217;t believe he survived the day. I suffer the loss of any animal to disease and want to take precautions to minimize the risk of this infection spreading to the other House Finches. This disease was first identified in 1994 in Maryland and it has spread across the country in a very short time. The Cornell site has excellent information about this disease as well as an ongoing citizen science project that is collecting data on reported cases. I&#8217;ll be submitting data and photos. <span style=\"font-family:Geneva, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#000000;\"><i> <\/i><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A House Finch sat at one of the backyard feeders on Sunday and didn&#8217;t spook when the Blue Jays came through sounding an alarm. I knew there must be something wrong&#8230; and my concerns were confirmed when I saw the bird&#8217;s eye (pictured right). This House Finch was a victim of House Finch Disease, also [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.backyardbirdcam.com\/birdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.backyardbirdcam.com\/birdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.backyardbirdcam.com\/birdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.backyardbirdcam.com\/birdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.backyardbirdcam.com\/birdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.backyardbirdcam.com\/birdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.backyardbirdcam.com\/birdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.backyardbirdcam.com\/birdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.backyardbirdcam.com\/birdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}