If animals were experiencing a global outbreak of a deadly disease, we would know, right?

Well, we do. We’re just not talking about it.

Avian influenza-better known as bird flu-killed over 300 million birds worldwide by December 2024, and the disease keeps spreading. Since the current outbreak began in central Europe in 2020, the disease has reached some of the most remote and vulnerable bird populations around the world, from the red-footed booby in the Galapagos Islands to the giant petrel-an aggressive seabird with a penchant for projectile-vomiting its enemies-in Antarctica.

Now, the disease has reached Australia, where it is spreading among crested terns and other native species. Many of these animals belong to small or vulnerable populations found nowhere else in the world.

We know there’s a problem. The challenge is, wildlife outbreaks are uniquely difficult to see. If we want to protect animals-and ourselves-we first have to make the invisible visible.

We Can’t Protect What We Can’t Count

We know over 300 million birds have died, but that (outdated) estimate captures only part of the virus’s true toll on wildlife. It doesn’t include the many non-bird species that have experienced massive die-offs, such as sea lions and seals in South America (and another seal die-off is anticipated in Australia).

Before anything else, we need to understand the problem. And that requires data.

But the thing is, we don’t have much data on bird flu in wildlife. Although the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center has detected over 10,000 cases of bird flu in animals across the nation, it is hard to catch every case.

Can We Vaccinate Wildlife Against Bird Flu?

There’s a vaccine for seasonal influenza. So what if we could vaccinate wild birds?

In some cases, scientists can. Scientists have successfully developed a vaccine to protect the endangered California condor and deployed it to over 200 individuals. But developing and testing a vaccine for every species would be a difficult undertaking, and vaccinating billions of wild birds around the globe would be a logistical nightmare.

Instead, scientists are focusing vaccination efforts on strategically chosen species. For example, the Australian government is vaccinating 5,000 little penguins, which are relatively simple to capture and vaccinate during their nightly waddle. It still isn’t easy though-each penguin requires two separate doses, so they need to be caught twice.

Vaccination won’t eliminate bird flu from the wild, but it could help protect vulnerable populations from its worst effects.

Improving Resiliency

One effective approach could be conserving more wild spaces. In the face of human encroachment, many birds are being cramped into smaller areas that they share with other species. Not only does this put stress on the birds’ immune system, but it also creates ripe grounds for the spread of disease. Protecting habitat won’t stop bird flu on its own, but it can reduce some of the pressures that make wildlife more vulnerable to disease.

Make Wildlife Disease Visible

But what can an average person do to protect wildlife from bird flu? You probably can’t vaccinate a penguin or collect blood samples from a duck. But you can help keep wildlife disease on the public agenda.

The first step is to stay informed. (You can start by reading my full Spring 2026 article on the topic, “ Bird Flu in the Wild.”)

The next step is to share this knowledge with others. Greater public awareness can also build support for surveillance, vaccination, and conservation efforts.

And of course, take these concerns to your local representatives.

It all comes down to visibility. Because we’d know if animals really were experiencing a global outbreak of a deadly disease, right?

We would. But only if we’re looking.

Related: Bird Flu: What You Should Know

Originally published at https://deannaaltomara.com on November 3, 2026.

Bird Flu Goes Global Among Wildlife…Is Anyone Watching? was originally published in The Environment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This year, the Colorado River is on track to deliver just 3.5 million acre-feet of water past Lee’s Ferry, the dividing line between the river’s Upper and Lower Basins. That is the lowest flow since records began in 1906, and less than a quarter of the 15 million acre-feet promised to the basin’s seven states in the 1922 Colorado River Compact. (An acre-foot is approximately the amount two to three households would use in a year.) The causes of such low flow started with the lowest snowpack on record followed by a March heatwave and unusually early spring runoff. The snowpack never recovered, leaving rivers across the Colorado River Basin at less than half their normal flow. The largest river in the Southwest is so dammed and diverted that very little (if any) flow remains by the time it reaches the Gulf of California.

This isn’t just a one-year blip in water supply. Since the early 2000s, water use in the Colorado River Basin (CRB) has outpaced supply. Much of that water is used in places far away from the climate and landscapes that produce the river flow. Some of the hottest and driest parts of the basin in southern California and southern Arizona support the largest agricultural operations and metropolitan areas. The Colorado River supplies one-third of all water for Southern California cities and suburbs and supports the farming industries of Imperial and Riverside Counties, all areas that are outside the boundaries of the CRB (4).

A century of dams and diversions has left us with an engineered river that moves the water to places it would never have reached on its own. The water pathways that once followed the topographic contours of the land have been replaced by a water-storage and hydropower complex. Behind this transformation was the belief that human ingenuity could overcome the limits of the natural river. But the engineered river was built on assumptions about hydrologic conditions that are no longer reliable. The past is becoming a poor guide to the future: as warming and drier conditions shrink the river’s flow, the reality of the geographic river is colliding with the promises of the engineered one. How did we get here, and can we build a system that lives within the river’s means?

The engineered river

The engineered river grew out of western water law, specifically the doctrine of prior appropriation. Borrowed from the mining camps of the arid West, where the first person to stake a claim owned what lay beneath it, the rule for water was the same: first in time, first in right. Whoever first diverted water and put it to “beneficial use” held a senior right; later users held junior rights and were the first to be cut off in a shortage. Crucially, prior appropriation separated the right to water from the place it came from, so water could be moved far from its source.

Each western state adopted its own version of this law, but the river basin doesn’t conform to state boundaries. It’s not possible for all states individually to use as much water as they want. In the early 1900s, as California began to divert and use more water, other states started to become concerned that they would lose their ability to use water in the future. This concern led to negotiation of the 1922 Colorado River Compact split the river’s water evenly between the Upper Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico) and the Lower Basin (California, Arizona, and Nevada). The compact enabled the Upper Basin to protect its future share of water from fast-growing California. Mexico and the basin’s 30 Tribal Nations were not part of the negotiations, though both hold water rights today. A century later, the Compact’s numbers look naïve, built on flow estimates that ignored much of the hydrologic evidence available even then.

At the time of the Compact, some infrastructure was already in place to move water out of the river, and after the Compact, even more infrastructure was added to enable users to access their water rights. In Colorado, tunnels and canals carry water from the river’s headwaters over or through the Rocky Mountains to large cities on the eastern slopes. The Central Utah Project brings CRB water over to the Wasatch Front, where much of Utah’s population resides, while the San Juan Chama project moves CRB water into central New Mexico. In the Lower Basin, the Central Arizona Project pumps water hundreds of miles across the desert to Phoenix and Tucson. The Colorado River Aqueduct delivers Colorado River water to cities in Southern California, while the All-American Canal supplies California farms.

This vast network of tunnels, canals, and aqueducts is supported by large reservoirs throughout the basin, reservoirs that have made it possible for water use to outpace supply. Although water use exceeded the river’s flow in 16 of the 21 years from 2000 to 2020, the water stored in reservoirs met that extra demand. Yet even giant reservoirs don’t have infinite storage. By August 2026, Lake Mead and Lake Powell had fallen to their lowest levels since they first filled, each less than 30% full, despite extra releases from Upper Basin reservoirs to keep Glen Canyon Dam running.

As the reservoirs drain, partly through evaporation off their surfaces, the seven states have repeatedly failed to agree on how to share the shortfall. That is hardly surprising: the river is over-promised, divided among many authorities and stuck in institutional gridlock. In August 2026, the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that runs the major dams, stepped in with a Record of Decision setting operating rules through 2036. Its first priority is protecting the infrastructure: keeping water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead high enough to generate hydropower. If water levels drop too low, Lower Basin users must cut back, and cuts fall hardest on Arizona, whose Central Arizona Project has junior water rights.

Facing limitations — using less water

The engineered river system has reached its limit: supply coming through the river can no longer meet the demand, and the reservoirs no longer have enough water to buffer this imbalance. Part of the reason is that western water law has long rewarded using water rather than saving it. The western water adage, “use it or lose it,” captures the tension between the legal system organized around water use and the contemporary need for demand reduction. Few places have unlimited water supply, so such a system was bound to reach a limit.

Farms offer the best option to reduce water demand. Agriculture uses approximately 74% of water of the basin’s water, and half of that grows hay, alfalfa, and grains to feed cattle for beef or dairy. The products are sold on global markets, so the basin effectively exports its water in the form of food eaten across North America and around the world. Farmers grow value-added crops, not necessarily those the use the least water. However, two decades of drought-caused shortages have pushed Lower Basin farmers to conserve, with more efficient sprinklers and less thirsty crops. Further steps could include farmers to rest alfalfa fields, switching from flood to drip irrigation, and other paid conservation programs. These measures cost less per acre-foot of water saved than building new infrastructure.

Cities use about a quarter of the basin’s water for homes, businesses, and industry, and they too can reduce their water use. A study of 28 urban water utilities in the CRB serving 23 million people found that total water deliveries declined 18% between 2000 and 2020 even while their combined populations increased 24%. Cities can adopt alternative water sources such as recycling wastewater, desalinating water, and capturing storm water. Cities have demonstrated that they can de-couple population growth from water demand.

Rebuilding a geographic river system

Current strategies for managing the Colorado River crisis are short-term adjustments on the existing system, a system that arguably was destined to collapse. Built on foundations of prior appropriation water law, this system enabled the decisions of early ditch-digging settlers and canal-building cities to dictate future trajectories of water use in the basin. It created competition between states that could only be resolved by federal decrees. The growing water uses in the basin led to building massive dams in the desert, where hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water evaporate before the water can be used by water rights holders downstream.

Climate change raises the stakes. A water-management system organized around historical hydrology becomes progressively less dependable as conditions change. The challenge is not just divvying up a shrinking supply; it is building a system that can adjust to how much water we use as conditions continue to change.

One path forward is to reconnect where people live, farm and work with the water their own landscapes renews and supports. A movement toward locally sourced water would gradually reduce the dependence of Colorado River Basin cities on the complex legal morass that has embroiled states in perpetual conflict for more than a century. It would change how people relate and understand water. Instead of assuming that engineering and law can deliver water upon demand, communities would be tied more closely to the watershed that sustain them.

What would it look like to bring water use back in line with place? We see four starting points:

Know how much water is available in local watersheds

Every city and farming region that depends on the Colorado River should have a water budget, like a household budget for water. How much rain, snow, river flow, and groundwater does the local landscape reliably provide? How much do people, farms, industry, and ecosystems need now and in the future? Some of this work is already underway and should be a priority. These budgets cannot rely on past averages, though. They need to be updated as snowpack shrinks, runoff comes earlier and droughts deepen.

Live within that budget

Once a community knows its supply, it can set targets to match. Cities can recycle wastewater, capture stormwater, replace thirsty lawns with native plants and build in ways that need less outdoor watering. Farms can switch to more efficient irrigation, get paid to fallow fields in dry years, and grow less water-hungry crops. Much of this is already happening in scattered places. The difference would be pursuing it together with one shared goal: matching demand to what the land provides.

Stop penalizing people for saving water

Under western water law, rights holders who do not use their full share risk losing it, a rule known as “use it or lose it.” That gives farmers and cities little reason to conserve. The law can adapt, and some programs already show how. Water rights holders, senior and junior alike, need to be able to save water without losing their rights, and they can be rewarded for their contributions.

Share information and decisions

Good water budgets depend on open, connected data about supply, use, water rights and changing conditions, data that today is scattered across agencies and states. Efforts like the Internet of Water show how this information can be pulled together into one platform. But data alone is not enough. Decisions about the river must include everyone with a stake in it: states, federal agencies, Mexico, local communities, farmers, and the Tribal Nations whose rights and knowledge are central to caring for the river.

The twentieth-century Colorado River system was designed to determine how much water could be captured, stored, transported, and allocated to support human demand. A place-based system would begin with the water that landscapes can sustainably provide and use engineering, law, and infrastructure to build resilience within those hydrologic limits.

This idea is not entirely new. Indigenous water-management practices have long emphasized stewardship, reciprocity, responsibility, and relationships among water, people, and place. The concept of “Water Back” rejects treating water as a commodity owned by individuals and instead emphasizes justice, responsibility, and health. From this perspective, reconnecting water to place means restoring relationships that western water development ignored. Traditional water-harvesting systems put the principle into practice: developed in dry places, they start with the water a landscape receives and find ways to capture, conserve, and share it. Indigenous approaches developed in water-scarce environments begin with the water a landscape receives and develop systems for capturing, conserving, and sharing it. Combining that knowledge with contemporary technologies can make communities more water-secure and resilient and resilience.

The Colorado River crisis is more than a water shortage; it reveals the consequence of a geography built on the assumption that rivers exist solely to satisfy human demands. For more than a century, western water policy has celebrated the ability to move water wherever economic opportunity emerged, separating people from the watersheds that sustain them. Climate change is exposing the limits of that geography by altering the hydrologic conditions in which its infrastructure, allocations, and expectations were built. A more resilient future may depend less on finding new water than on rebuilding a culture that understands where its water comes from, how much nature can provide, and how communities can live within those limits. The challenge is not simply managing the Colorado River differently; it is reimagining our relationship with water and adapting our water use to the climate that exists today.

Melinda Laituri and Stephanie Kampf are researchers at Colorado State University.

The Colorado River Needs Help: Reconnecting Water Use to Place was originally published in The Environment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.