Dr. Tiggy Grillo

don't tend to frequent Australian mainland.

Heard Island, for example, where we have confirmed this week the devastation that it's had, where it was detected last October, it's thousands of kilometres away.

So for those bird species to potentially be there, be infected and bring it towards Australia, it's quite a long distance.

So we thought it was still quite a long way for that to happen.

But weather is one thing that can...

change patterns of birds and can bring them closer to shore, perhaps where they wouldn't always go.

Look, potentially, there was some pretty serious weather around the western coast of Australia in the last weeks of May.

And so there could absolutely be a weather aspect to this.

And that's something that is being looked at.

Look, it's a very large coastline.

It's still early days.

The fact that this has been announced into the public domain, the suspect case was announced very early.

And the wording around all of the government communications is really to raise awareness about this disease.

So the more people are aware, the more likely we are to be able to detect some other cases that might be going on and really determine what does that mean for Australia.

Yeah, look, if they're coming into contact with wild birds and seeing unusual sickness or deaths in wildlife, we're advising them to not touch the birds.

So avoid the birds, record the birds, be it take a photograph or even a video, and then report it to the Emergency Animal Disease Hotline.

Yeah, so there are a lot of different signs.

Obviously, a bird's unable to move or they might move in an unusual way.

If you're not sure, it's best to take a video and report it anyway.

And obviously, some birds look sick.