Money no comfort for bird owner

Monday, Feb. 3, 2003 | 9:54 a.m.

In a month or so, Jill Duncan will receive from the federal government checks of $1,785 for her destroyed poultry and $400 for the lumber and other materials of her aviary that was taken down Saturday.

She says it will not come anywhere close to compensating her for the loss of her feathered friends, some of which she has had for 20 years.

They were killed in an effort to eradicate a deadly avian disease that has forced poultry quarantines locally and in California.

"My birds were healthy -- I'll never accept that what happened was right," Duncan, 56, said today in the wake of federal officials serving her Saturday with a court order signed by a U.S. magistrate to enter to her property off Lamb Boulevard and Lake Mead Drive and destroy her birds.

"I will continue writing letters and I will demand the (postmortem) test results that will prove my birds were not sick."

The eradication of exotic Newcastle disease from a one-kilometer area in northeast Las Vegas has resulted in more than nearly 1,650 fowl being destroyed and has cost the federal government $1.2 million in fair-market compensations.

Duncan's compensation was for three pet geese, 17 ducks and 40 chickens plus several pigeons that years ago flew into the coup and decided to make it their home.

"They gave me $10 apiece for the pigeons," she said.

To date, seven sites in the local eradication zone have been found to be infected. But federal officials maintain that the entire area has to be depopulated of birds, cleaned and disinfected in an effort to save the rest of the valley's domesticated outdoor bird population.

"We cannot say when the eradication will be complete, but we have covered a majority of the zone," said Nolan Lemon, spokesman for the Exotic Newcastle Disease Task Force. "On Sunday we continued going door-to-door, knocking on 1,439 doors and contacting 934 residents."