BY ROBERT McCLURE
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
April 7, 2008

SEATTLE -- In his backyard in Seattle, Nikos Anton spotted a house sparrow that seemed to be toting a twig in its beak.

But when he looked a little closer, Anton saw the "stick" was actually the grotesquely misshapen and overgrown top half of the bird's beak.

But when he looked a little closer, Anton saw the "stick" was actually the grotesquely misshapen and overgrown top half of the bird's beak.

"It's like an elephant trunk.," he said, pointing to his pictures of the bird. "It's a very odd thing happening here in Seattle."

But it's not just here.

This "long-billed syndrome" has been recorded in about 160 birds, mostly in western Washington and southern British Columbia and mostly since 2000. It's also documented in more than 2,100 birds in Alaska, where the deformity seems to have started affecting lots of birds in the early 1990s.

Researchers say the weird beaks appear to be concentrated in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, although reports are coming in from farther south -- from Southern California in one recent case.

The cause remains a mystery. A small band of puzzled, poorly funded scientists is scrambling to find answers. Could it be chemicals? Something genetic? A disease? Maybe a combination?

Could it affect humans?

Whatever the cause, researchers are left profoundly unsettled by the mysterious "long-billed syndrome."

"It's really tragic," said Bud Anderson of the Falcon Research Group, based in Skagit County, Wash. "It's grotesque. It's horrible. It makes me want to puke."

BAD BEAKS LEAD TO HUNGER, DEATH

Researchers are asking the public to report sightings of any such birds so they can get a better feel for the extent of the phenomenon.

When affected birds are brought into wildlife-rehabilitation centers, their feathers often are dirty and matted, because a misshapen beak inhibits preening. For the same reason, they often are infested with feather lice.

And sometimes they're starving. Birds need to eat a lot every day, and they use their beaks much as we would use our hands. So what rehab centers are often left with is a dirty, cold, hungry and miserable bird. Many die.

"Who knows how many have died out in the field?" Anderson said. When Anderson first noticed long-billed birds in Western Washington in the late 1990s, the deformities were more pronounced, he said. Now, it looks like more birds are affected, but not quite as badly.

In Alaska, the majority of birds affected are black-capped chickadees. But the syndrome has been seen in at least 28 other species there, including starlings, Steller's jays, magpies, robins and sparrows.

Most affected birds in western Washington are red-tailed hawks. Second on the list are crows. Others include the sparrow, black-capped chickadees, Steller jays, northern flickers and a raven. Also involved are a variety of songbirds, including woodpeckers, wrens and seabirds, including gulls and one common murre.

Birds' beaks are made of keratin, similar to human fingernails and hair. Normally, beaks wear down with use, continuing to grow at the same time. There's a balance. But something is causing this super-fast growth -- and it doesn't get turned off.

EXPLORING THE CHEMICAL LINK

In Alaska, where the phenomenon is best studied, birds can go from normal to long-beaked in as little as a month. Sometimes the misshapen beaks break off, but they grow back right away.

Researchers wonder: Why just the beaks? Why not the birds' toenails, which also are made of keratin?

So far, there is no evidence the deformities are caused by disease -- including infections, bacteria and viruses -- or parasites. But researchers are pursuing those ideas, as well as chemicals.

Beak deformities have been seen in individual birds here and there for a long time. In fact, Anderson found an ivory-billed woodpecker shot and stuffed in Cuba in 1843, now residing in an Atlanta museum, that had the longest such beak ever seen -- about 18 inches long, the "first and the worst" case, Anderson said.

And when researchers last year asked bird watchers to keep an eye out across North America, they got a handful of reports.

"We are picking up birds across the rest of the continent, but nothing like the magnitude we've seen here," said Colleen Handel, a U.S. Geological Survey biologist heading up the studies in Alaska. Now, "It looks like the entire (Northwest) Pacific Coast is being affected."

Research has shown scientists that:

• A study of black-capped chickadees in Alaska showed "significantly higher" concentrations of a pesticide breakdown product, heptachlor epoxide, in adults with beak deformities than in normal adults. The same goes for a form of polychlorinated biphenyl, PCB, an industrial chemical.

• Baby birds from deformed parents in Alaska had higher concentrations of two of the most toxic forms of PCBs.

• Beak deformities were a feature of a syndrome that affected birds in the Great Lakes area in the 1970s that was associated with exposure to contaminants, including PCBs, dioxins and dibenzofurans. The same thing happened to birds exposed to high concentrations of selenium in California in the 1980s.

• However, unlike the previous outbreaks, the birds in Alaska, at least, do not seem to be passing the deformity from parents to children. But that hasn't been determined conclusively.

• The Alaska chickadees with the deformity had a "highly significant" amount of damage to their DNA.

NO RECOGNIZABLE PATTERN

Scientists know that a vitamin D deficiency has caused beak overgrowth in domestic parrots. Maybe birds in the Northwest and Alaska don't get enough vitamin D from sunlight? But that's something that's been going on forever.

"Why suddenly now, here?" Handel said.

Likewise, there are reasons to think this isn't a simple case of chemicals causing the defects, said Chuck Henny, a wildlife ecologist with the Geological Survey in Corvallis, Ore.

"In general, these pesticides, their residues have been going down over time," Henny said.

Plus, the fact that pesticides were used everywhere "argues against that being a major factor. (This) seems like it's something that's local or regional," Henny said.

When the defects first came to light in an Anchorage neighborhood where pesticides had been sprayed to kill an outbreak of spruce beetles, scientists focused on the poisons. But these birds have turned up far from any obvious human influence. Even chickadees, which generally live all their lives in a single contained area, have been discovered with the weird beaks way out in the wilderness.

One class of chemicals that researchers know has been accumulating in increasing amounts in humans in North America at the same time the beaks phenomenon appeared is polybrominated diphenyl ethers, PBDEs. But again, what explains the concentration in Alaska and the Northwest? PBDEs are used everywhere.

Researchers are still trying to make sure they understand the extent of the problem. That's why they are asking the public to notify them about any long-billed birds.

"They see it and think, 'Oh, how unusual,' not realizing it's part of a much bigger problem," Anderson said. Invariably, when he gives talks on this, a number of people in the audience tell him they've seen such birds.

"People see this and they say 'How odd,' and they tell a few people and forget about it," Anderson said.