Sampling for disease surveillance: assessing effects on blue-winged teal survival and recovery

Outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus in wild animals highlight the need for disease surveillance in wild birds to improve our understanding of their role as reservoirs and dispersers, and potential threats to domestic poultry and wild bird populations. Surveillance for avian influenza varies in its approach, objectives, and coordination with other monitoring efforts. For waterfowl, a common host to avian influenza viruses, banding represents a concerted effort of capturing and marking thousands of individuals annually to estimate survival and harvest rates, but users of these data have generally taken a conservative approach to remove any banded birds from analyses that had a sample taken for disease surveillance during capture. We tested for differences in survival and encounter probabilities of blue-winged teal (Spatula discors) marked (n = 21,702 teal) and sampled for disease surveillance (n = 4,216) during the nonbreeding season in Louisiana, USA, from 2016 to 2023. Although we found no consistent effect of collecting biological samples on survival probability, including an additional test showing no detectable effects of sampling for disease surveillance with oropharyngeal and cloacal swabs versus sampling with swabs and a syringe-drawn blood sample, wide 95% credible intervals on the posterior survival estimates (mean 0.36 difference between upper and lower values across all year-sex-sampling groups; 0.44 for sampling type groups) indicated low statistical power to detect an effect. Seber recovery probability during the first interval following sampling was lower among birds sampled using swabs only, but we assume this stems from low sample sizes rather than an effect of collecting biological samples. Because recovery probabilities can vary as a function of individual covariates, we also examined direct recovery probabilities and observed no meaningful effect of disease surveillance sampling type but strong effects of capture date, suggesting the effect on Seber recovery probability may have been due to heterogeneity in exposure to natural and harvest mortality risks. Although we suggest that aligning disease surveillance sample collection efforts with landscape-scale waterfowl banding efforts may have little effect on observed demographic rates, additional studies with larger sample sizes are likely needed to provide the statistical power necessary to formally conclude no effect of biological sampling on survival probabilities.