Rangers found pelicans on January 23 in the Djoudj bird sanctuary, a remote wetland pocket near the Mauritanian border and a resting place for birds crossing the Sahara desert in West Africa each year.
An unconfirmed video posted on local media showed hundreds of pelican carcasses scattered on a beach, muddy and darker than their usual white.
“We have taken some samples for screening and we hope in the near future to know what caused the death of the pelicans,” Bocar Thiam, the park director in Senegal, 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 minors and 10 were adults.
Authorities closed the park and ordered the incineration of dead birds as a precaution.
This month, Senegal reported an outbreak of highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu on a poultry farm in the Thies region, about 120 miles south, resulting in the slaughter of about 100,000 chickens.