I can’t say that I was unhappy to see it sprawled in the gravel.

If it was the crow that had spent the previous two evenings cawing at the top of its little crow lungs, I wasn’t gonna shed any tears.

Bird people – and even just nice people – might think less of me for that. But crows make too much noise, chase away decent birds and leave no garbage can unmolested. The only job they do in my neighborhood is dive-bombing the raccoons.

Anyway, as I was scooping up the late crow with a shovel, I had a vague memory that I was supposed to tell someone. I recalled that dead birds are evidence of something – something bad – and someone wanted to know.

I found it under the Pierce County Health Department’s phone book listing, between “Waste Management” and “Zoonotics.”

“West Nile Virus – animal testing.”

I called and reported my dead crow: where I found it, how long it had been dead, whether it appeared to have died from natural causes, and a daytime phone number.

My civic/public-health duty completed, I put my deceased – and possibly diseased – crow out of mind. But when I got a voice message back from the Health Department, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. It’s not that health professionals didn’t care about my bird. They were logging it and plotting it on a map.

But they didn’t want to test it for West Nile virus. Double-bag it, they advised, and toss it in the trash.

I tried not to take it personally. Still, I wanted to know why me and my bird hadn’t made the cut, testingwise.

Nedda Turner is the environmental health liaison with the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department. She explained that the county wants all of us to report dead crows. Really. But the agency has only enough money from the state to test 40 birds this season, so it has to be selective. Cases tend to become more numerous later in the summer.

So far, just two birds have been accepted for testing at a lab in Pullman – one found in South Tacoma, the other in Edgewood.

The state has found no cases of infection this year. Last year there were nine cases found in horses and one in a bird, all in Yakima County. But in 2006 there were three human infections, six cases found in horses and 13 in birds. And two of the three human cases were in Pierce County.

West Nile virus is a disease that can lead to a dangerous infection that begins with flulike symptoms but leads to disorientation, coma, tremors, convulsions and paralysis. While the worst symptoms may last only a few weeks, the neurological effects can be permanent.

It is more common in California and the South but moves here via migrating birds. Crows are especially susceptible, which is why they’re tested.

“They don’t survive it well and are a good indicator,” Turner said.

But don’t treat crows like pariahs – not because of West Nile virus, anyway – because they don’t spread the disease on their own.

“Crows act as reservoirs for the virus, but it is spread by mosquitoes,” Turner said. Mosquitoes bite infected birds and then bite horses or humans. Eighty percent of humans exposed to the virus show no symptoms, and most of the rest have mild cases.

Only one out of every 150 exposed people suffers severe symptoms. Monitoring and public awareness are the only means of battling the disease.

So I bagged my bird and sent it off with the solid waste management folks with a bit of regret.

Perhaps my bird was electrocuted. The power line next to a transformer was its favorite perch – the better to survey the alley and disturb several neighbors at once. Maybe it died by suicide.

But maybe, just maybe, it was a carrier of West Nile virus – a Trojan crow.

And now we’ll never know.

Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657

peter.callaghan@thenewstribune.com

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