Wildlife Health Talks

For most of this week at the WDA conference in Chicago, Dr. Randy Zarnke has been the one holding the microphone. He is the reason the WDA History Project exists, having had the idea of recording the association's long-timers before their stories are lost. So in this episode we turn it around, and Randy answers the questions.
Randy spent 24 years as the wildlife disease guy at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and has recorded 202 oral history interviews with veteran Alaskan hunters, trappers and bush pilots. He shares what makes someone open up on tape, what surprised him about the careers of WDA's most successful members, and what he would tell a student who feels too intimidated to approach the group of longtime WDA members standing in the corner. Spoiler: they will almost always turn around and ask your name.
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The term One Health didn't come out of a strategy meeting or a peer-reviewed paper. It came out of an interview with a journalist who wouldn't drop a question. Dr. Billy Karesh was explaining why Ebola killing gorillas mattered, and the reporter kept pushing: is this a human disease or an animal one? Eventually Billy said there's just one health, the pathogens don't care about our categories.

Recorded in Chicago for the WDA History project, Billy looks back on building WCS's field veterinary program from nothing in 1989, the first WDA meeting he actually remembers, and what it means to hand the next generation a rapidly evolving organisation in a rapidly evolving world filled with wildlife health challenges. Plus the direction he's quietly moving in after 40 years with animals. It involves plants.

Link
Billy Karesh's LinkedIn profile
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Who could believe a blue-tongued lizard can teach you how to be a good human being? Professor Anne Poelina can, and by the end of this episode you might too.
For International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, we're re-playing Anne's Carlton Herman Memorial Lecture from the 2024 WDA conference in Canberra. A Nyikina Warrwa woman, scientist, filmmaker and poet, Anne is the inaugural chair of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council in Western Australia's Kimberley, and she has spent decades arguing that you cannot separate land, water, people and non-human kin.
Her talk, "Waking Up the Snake", is about waking up consciousness: why the Whanganui's legal personhood puzzled her elders, why the destruction of habitat to create a "nature repair market" makes no sense, and why the wildlife health community, already practised at caring for things that can't speak for themselves, might be exactly the audience she needs. Ancient wisdom, hard politics, and a stubborn coalition of hope.
Links
Check out Anne Poelina's website.
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What if the birds you walked past this morning were quietly fighting off bacteria that have been devastating poultry farms for decades, and you'd never know, because they show absolutely no signs of being sick?
That's what Dr. Maria Teresa Reinoso Perez discovered when she started looking inside seemingly healthy house finches in Mexico. More than 70% of the birds she sampled were carrying Mycoplasma gallisepticum - a pathogen that causes severe disease in US bird populations, yet not one of them looked ill. The infections were invisible from the outside, but their immune systems told a very different story. In this episode,  Maria Teresa takes us from her hometown of San Luis Potosí, where she handled her very first finch as an undergraduate, to Cornell and back - explaining why finding a poultry pathogen quietly circulating through wild ecosystems matters for all of us, what won her the 2026 BioOne Ambassador Award, and what she's chasing next in the Galápagos.
Links
Read Maria Teresa's essay on her research on finch leukocytes that won her the BioOne Ambassador Award!
 Maria Teresa's website and social media:
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In Iran, there is no established path for a veterinary student who wants to work with wildlife. So Arman Nourishirazi and his teammates built one.

Based in Ahvaz, in the province of Khuzestan, Arman is a final year vet student in one of the richest bird regions in the Middle East, where the Persian Gulf coast, vast wetlands and the Eurasian African Flyway all converge. Working with his university's veterinary hospital and the local Department of Environment, he helped create a system that treats injured wild birds and gives other students a way into a field that was effectively closed to them.

The patients range from eagles and barn owls to white storks and great white pelicans. Arman also talks us through the first documented case of avian malaria in a cattle egret in Iran, and the creative fix he and his team came up with when two juvenile barn owls refused to eat and human imprinting was the last thing they could risk.

Links

Check out Arman's LinkedIn and Instagram profiles.
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