It’s a fowl day on the East End.
An outbreak of H5N1 bird flu has struck Long Island’s last remaining duck farm and forced the operators to put down 99,000 birds, according to reports.
Farm’s operator Doug Corwin broke down in tears as he said that the disease has been the worst disaster to hit the location since it opened in 1908.
“It was like Covid for ducks. Everything ended,” Corwin, who is the president of the Crescent Duck Farm in Aqueboge told Riverhead Local.
The sudden outbreak of the flu –which was first spotted in New York in 2022 — may mean the end of the business, as it will be forced to lay off many of its 75 staff, Corwin said.
A quarantine has been created in the facility as the nearly 100,000 birds are being euthanized, he added.
However, officials have reassured people that there is little threat to humans at the time.
“The risk to public health is minimal as the virus at this point is not transmissible among humans,” said Suffolk’s Health Commissioner Dr. Gregson Pigott.
Still, Corwin faces the “huge, huge task” of having his facilities undergo deep scrubdowns and inspections by the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. He expects this to take between two and three months.
“I’ve got a lot of hurdles to overcome to start up again,” Corwin said. He hopes that the 7,000 duck eggs he acquired before the outbreak can be hatched off-site.
“That might be the basis of being able to start up again — might, might,” he added. Still, that won’t be known for at least “a year or two down the road.”
Fourth-generation owner Corwin said his farm’s selective breeding resulting in a “meatier bird that has enough skin fat to make it really, really succulent” has been their key to success for over a century.
By the late 1980s, duck farms became few and far between on the island as the industry failed.
However, Crescent wasn’t threatened thanks to Corwin’s savvy business choice to invest in his own industrial feeder rather than rely on a supplier, according to NorthForker.
“It was probably the smartest thing we ever did,” Corwin, who runs the business with his two millennial-aged sons Blake and Pierce, told the outlet in 2021.
Even when Covid ravaged the economy and Crescent’s sales plummeted to only 10% of their usual number, they endured.
New York’s first case of the bird flu from three years ago was also found in Suffolk County, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Convservation.
Effecting related poultry such as chickens, turkeys, and geese, H5N1 is particularly known to “spread quickly in affected flocks,” the agency warned.
Now, Corwin fears losing the “iconic” business for reasons beyond his family’s welfare. A local legacy may fly away for good.
“I don’t really want the only Long Island ducks to be baseball players,” Corwin said of the Islip ball club.
