VIENNA — Year after year, undaunted by winter ice or the weak sun of Central Europe's spring, elderly Viennese have flocked to the water park on the Danube with bags of stale bread crumbs.
They came to feed the wild swans, the ducks and geese, migratory stragglers that alight on the river in Vienna's outskirts. They came to feel needed and to find a little companionship on a solitary city afternoon.
This year, Johanna Lehmann, an 85-year-old widow who used to feed the birds, could not have reached the water -- she did not even try.
An 8-foot-high fence of closely woven wire net barred her way, a response to the bird flu spreading across Europe.
"You hear it all the time, on the radio, on television, and you know you should not feed the birds, but, you know, I feel so sorry for the birds -- it's not their fault, and they also have to live on something," Lehmann said.
A well-dressed woman with light brown hair and a quiet voice, Lehmann takes her walks now along a small brook near her home, but because of the warnings no longer feeds the birds. A group of ladies used to meet here to feed the waterfowl, she said, but she doesn't see them anymore.
Like other Viennese pensioners, Lehmann stopped bringing crumbs after the city got serious about the bird crackdown. It had put up a low wire fence to prevent people from handling dead birds, the main cause of human infection from the H5N1 virus, the strain that causes avian flu. But after health authorities found that some pensioners had cut holes in the fence and climbed through, they built the barrier higher and issued stronger warnings, though they instituted no penalties.
Discouraged, the bird lovers drifted away.
"It was so nice when the birds came and were happy if you fed them. It's nice to care for somebody," Lehmann said. She looked with hope at a reporter. "Do you have anything to feed them with?"
The effect of bird flu policies on the elderly, many of whom, like Lehmann, live alone, is one of many unexpected consequences of the disease in Austria. The flu, which has killed 124 birds here -- most of them swans, ducks and geese -- and hundreds in the rest of Europe, has rippled through society, making its presence felt in ways large and small.
Sociologists point to it as a modern-day example of how diseases, such as the Black Death plague in the 14th century, touch all of society, changing politics, medicine, art and social life.
