Some villagers suspect a government conspiracy, writes Dan McLaughlin in Lunca, Romania.
All anyone living in Lunca can do, says Rozica Stefan, is wait and hope.
Wait for the Romanian authorities to quarantine the village and take away all the poultry, and hope that they are not already carrying a bird flu virus that has killed dozens of people in south-east Asia.
A mile from Lunca, a fire engine and police car block the narrow country road and stop people entering or leaving the next village, Ceamurlia de Jos.
The red-and-white tape only lifts for the emergency services, army trucks bringing food and water, and cars carrying vets in masks and blue plastic smocks.
Men in boiler suits toting spray guns disinfect the few vehicles that pass through, and a police helicopter clatters low overhead.
Three ducks found in Ceamurlia de Jos died from the H5N1 strain of avian flu that scientists fear could kill millions of people if it acquires the ability to move easily from birds to humans, and then from person to person.
The virus is thought to have been carried to the lush Danube delta and Turkey by wild birds migrating from Siberia and the Ural mountains in Russia, where thousands were culled in recent months to try and quell the virus.
But that plan seems to have failed, and with millions of birds expected to stop in the delta - Europe's largest wetland - on their way south for the winter, experts fear Romania and its Black Sea neighbours are facing a torrid autumn.
Europe's potential health crisis is already gripping the Danube delta, the 3,500sq km (1,351sq miles) wilderness where the vast river merges with the Black Sea, beyond a rolling hinterland of cornfields, forested hills and tiny villages of fishermen and farmers.
Horses and carts outnumber cars, and most people survive by growing vegetables on little allotments and cramming their backyards with pigs, cows and motley flocks of ducks, chickens, geese and turkeys.
For them, with winter approaching, bird flu is already a very real nightmare.
"I'm scared to even touch my birds now," said Rozica Stefan (59) in her yard in Lunca, as chickens and turkeys pecked for corn in the dust. "At first I was worried about losing them and not getting much compensation. But now I'm more worried about this disease."
Across the fields, masked vets were moving from house to house in Ceamurlia de Jos, stuffing people's poultry into wheelie bins and taking them away to be gassed, burned and buried in a pit outside the village.
Men and women wept to see their livelihoods and their winter food, fattened on corn through the year, dragged flapping and squawking to their deaths.
Romanian authorities killed some 15,000 birds this way in three days, on the advice of experts from a fearful European Union, which has already banned imports of poultry products from Romania and Turkey.
"People were upset and angry at first," said Olga Andrei, who kept 170 chickens in her yard in Ceamurlia de Jos. "We wanted them to just take away the sick birds, but they said that was impossible. And they came with the police to take them all."
The government has promised compensation for the culled birds, but villagers complain that it is below the market price for their poultry, and will leave them struggling to replenish their stocks and feed their families through the months ahead.
"The village is in shock," said Ms Andrei (44). "The birds are all that many people had, and now they are being taken away."
Special police in black uniforms and ski masks are on standby to quell the kind of public protest that greeted mayor Mihai Carciumaru's announcement of the cull.
A battered red van brought him to the police cordon outside Ceamurlia de Jos, and he was unshaven and a little dishevelled after the most trying days of his political life.
"Things are calm in the village now, and people are co-operating," said the mayor with a tired sigh. "Though at the beginning there were some problems, of course."
Sixteen years after a revolution toppled communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, only to usher in a period of corruption and stagnation dominated by his former underlings, most Romanians view the authorities as incompetent and dishonest.
That feeling leaves many people in the Danube delta convinced that the bird flu scare is just another government error or scam, and steels their resolve to oppose the cull.
"If they come for my birds I'll kill them myself and put them in the fridge," said Elena Tatku, as some of her 140 geese, ducks and chickens whirled around her in the village of Agighiol, to the north of the quarantine zone.
"We worked all spring and used all our corn to feed them. This is food for us and our children. Twenty years ago all my birds died, and there wasn't this fuss."
For the government in Bucharest, an efficient response to the threat of bird flu would give its stuttering bid for EU accession in 2007 a timely boost.
For the people under quarantine in Ceamurlia de Jos, and those in Lunca who fear their birds will be the next to burn, there are more immediate matters to consider.
"Can you tell me something?" asked Ion Samuila (70), as he hobbled out of his yard in Lunca. "We are preparing to bury one of my relatives, but what about the funeral? Can we still put a chicken or goose on the table? I just don't know any more."