Hi Peggi:

The past couple of years I have stopped feeding birds because I have had
dying pine siskins and diseased house finches. I decided that I was
probably adding to the problem by feeding these birds so I stopped. I
started noticing the growths in the facial area of the house finches and
also bulging eyes probably in 1994. The growths looked kind of crusty to me
and several house finches that came together to my feeder had them. I
reported this finding to a friend at the Cornell Lab of O because they had
been finding what seemed like a similar problem with house finches in the
east. He said that the abnormalities I was observing were different than
those they were finding. As I said this conversation occurred a while ago,
and I don't remember the names of the different diseases he described -
probably avian pox in the west and Mycoplasma gallisepticum in the east.
I'll be interested if there are two different diseases or if my friend was
incorrect.


Janet Carroll
Everett WA
jrc at jrc.seanet.com

"The frog never drinks up the pond in which it lives."