Rangers found the pelicans on January 23 in the Djoudj Bird Sanctuary, a remote bag of wetland near the border with Mauritania and a resting place for birds that cross the Sahara Desert in West Africa annually.
An unverified video published in local media showed hundreds of pelican carcasses scattered on a beach, muddy and darker than their normally conspicuous white.
“We have taken some samples for selection and we hope to know in the near future what caused the deaths of the pelicans,” Bocar Thiam, director of Senegal’s parks, said in an interview.
The sanctuary is a transit site for about 350 species of birds, but only pelicans have been found dead, he said. Of those killed, 740 were youths and ten adults.
Authorities closed the park and burned the dead birds as a precaution.
Senegal reported an outbreak of the highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu on a poultry farm in the Thies region, about 20 km south, this month, killing about 100,000 chickens.