For sure. But unless someone can get there to verify it, who knows whether it's say, 1 bird or 10 or 100 in the area? And no-one knows whether HPAI is responsible for the death unless and until they're tested in the lab, so mere dead bird reports can't count.
You have to give a number when you submit the report, so it should be easy enough to record how many reports didn't meet the threshold for collection or were disqualified for other reasons (you're also asked about the physical state of the bird, i.e. how badly decomposed it is) vs reports that did meet the criteria for collection and then how many of these were actually collected.
I was surprised by the numbers too - I imagined that given all the attention and controls, there would be more in the wild populations.
Aye it's been mostly gulls that I reported (only when they were very fresh and there had been quite a lot of dead ones around recently; most of the time I don't bother reporting) plus a cormorant that might not've met the threshold depending on how it got classified (the advice given in different places is confusing and not entirely consistent on this).
Maybe they're just not vulnerable to it, like most birds.
