If you have bird feeders that routinely attract House finches, you may have been disturbed to notice that some of the birds appear to have something wrong with their eyes. They may look swollen, ringed in red, watery or crusted over . Like me, you may even have found you can approach to within inches of the affected animals, as if they’re blind to your presence.
If you’ve made these troubling observations and wondered if it’s just a fluke, it’s not: it’s Mycoplasmal conjunctivitis, an contagious eye disease first observed among House finches in the Wash., D.C. suburban area in 1994.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology enlists the aid of ordinary citizens in gathering data to investigate the nature and scope of the disease. You can learn more about it and join in the effort at http://www.birds.cornell.edu/hofi/index.html.
