Advances in Bacterial Pathogen Surveillance of Migratory and Wild Birds: From Culture to Genomics

Migratory and wild birds link geographically and ecologically distinct environments and may disseminate bacterial pathogens and antimicrobial resistance determinants among wildlife, livestock, humans, and environmental reservoirs. Advances in microbiological and genomic technologies have progressively expanded avian bacterial surveillance from the recovery of viable isolates to community-level, genome-resolved, and strain-level characterization. This review traces these developments and examines how culture-dependent and culture-independent approaches provide complementary evidence at different levels of resolution. We discuss the persistent limitations in sensitivity and taxonomic and functional resolution, alongside the constraints each method places on interpretation. Within a One Health framework, we then consider how microbiological and genomic findings can be interpreted alongside ecological, temporal, and epidemiological evidence to investigate potential bacterial dissemination across connected hosts and environments.