NORWAY – Phil Eliason of Packard Avenue believes he knows what’s killing finches. And his theory has been confirmed by a biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.

It’s salmonella poisoning.

Since Eliason’s observations were published in the Advertiser-Democrat on March 19, more than a dozen people in the area have called the newspaper or Eliason to say they, too, have seen dying birds.

Lorraine Lambert of Webber Farm Road in South Paris said she was seeing problems with pine siskins, which look a lot like gold finches.

“They arrive in huge flocks,” Lambert said, “50 to 100 at a time. They were eating at the feeders, but they were eating off the ground, as well.”

She found three in less than 10 days.

“You would see them puff up. One was on the window sill outside. I opened the blinds, and it didn’t even attempt to fly away.

“There was one near the garage, and I walked right up to it, and it didn’t fly away,” Lambert said.

“I’ve fed birds for a long time and have never seen anything like this,” Lambert said.

Fred and Colleen Hatch of Prentiss Fogg Road in Otisfield found two dead birds in their yard.

“One we found at the feeder and one near the feeder,” Fred said. “One was a yellow-tail finch and the other, a red poll.

“My daughter was just telling me the birds were very sick, almost like they were drunk. They couldn’t fly very well and they were wobbly.”

Larry Moore lives on Mckeen Street in South Paris, near the Gouin Athletic Complex. He’s been feeding birds for more than 20 years.

“I’ve never seen more than maybe one bird a season come in sick. Nothing like what I’m seeing this year,” Moore said.

“I had a flock of 50 or 60 common red polls. That was the biggest flock I’ve ever seen at my bird feeder. They came in January.

“Shortly after that, I started noticing there would be one or two that looked kind of sick. They’d be all fluffed up and their eyes would be squinted shut like their head hurt.

“Instead of staying by the feeder, they’d move over where the sun was shining on them and the wind wasn’t blowing on them, like they were trying to stay warm. A few days later they’d be dead. They’d just sit there until they keeled over.”

Eliason said a neighbor showed him a report on the Internet which blamed bird deaths in North Carolina on salmonella poisoning.

Tom Hadgman, a wildlife biologist with Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, who studies songbirds, said such poisoning is not uncommon for these birds.

“It’s the time of year when we get an outbreak of salmonella, which is a bacteria. It’s pretty common in feeder situations,” Hadgman said.

“Finches are particularly vulnerable to it.

“Some years are worse than others, and this would seem the makings of a pretty bad year, though it’s a little too early to tell.”

His description of afflicted birds matches what Eliason and others have described.

“[When infected,] birds typically exhibit no fear of humans. You can walk right up to them and almost catch them.

“They tend to be puffed out. A lot of times they look like they’ve been inflated with a little air compressor – they’ll have all their feathers standing on end.”

Hadgman explained that there are two reasons that salmonella hits finches so hard at this time of year.

“A lot of these birds are highly nomadic. The whole migratory population will move around the region in sort of a wave. Not every single one, but the bulk of them will move around the region in these huge flocks,” Hadgman said.

He gave as an example, the common red poll, which might be in Massachusetts for the month of December, in southern New Hampshire in January, then in Vermont for the next month to six weeks.

“Then when things start to warm up, they’re back in Maine a bit, then they are gone to the north. Red Polls breed far north of here, in Labrador and the northern half of Quebec, all around Hudson Bay. Yukon, Alaska. The Northwest Territory.

“These birds have come a long way. They have just experienced the stresses of winter. Now they have to go back north to the breeding grounds. It’s just too much cumulative stress on their bodies, and they get sick, just like we get sick.”

It’s during this time that finches and pine siskins arrive at feeders in peoples yards. If salmonella-infected birds have eaten at those feeders, the bacteria is picked up and spread by waves of new visitors.

“How do red polls feed? Where do they feed? When they come down, a hundred of them, they can’t all fit at the feeder. Boom, they are right on the ground. The ground is crawling with them, and they eat seed that has been knocked to the ground by birds at the feeders,” Hadgman says.

“It’s not just seed hulls, it’s the poop and everything else from the birds that have been feeding there. And that’s black and it’s warm, and the warm sun is shining, and that’s creating a real mess of salmonella,” he said.

Not only can the infected birds pass the bacteria on to other birds, they can pass it on to animals and humans as well.

Kathy Nearly, of Pleasant Street in Norway, said her cat ate a gold finch and almost died as the result.

Larry Moore said a neighbor’s cat brought one of the birds home to show its master – didn’t eat it, just brought it home to show off – and became so ill that a vet almost couldn’t save its life.

Hadgman pointed out an even greater concern: Small children.

“Kids tend to put everything in their mouth. All they have to do is handle one of these birds, get the salmonella on their hands, and then put their hands or something they’ve touched into their mouths,” he said.