Problem with interfaces and routes on _one_ Debian sid system

I have bird installed on 7 Debian Sid systems with 3.16.0-4 kernel. On 6 of these systems it works fine. On the last, running bird -d shows every non-kernel route with a message that looks like: bird: KRT: Receive route ... with unknown ifindex ... When I go into birdc and do show interfaces, I receive an empty list. ip link and ip route show the expected interfaces and routes. So, can you give me any hints on how to debug this? Where does bird get its interfaces and routes from on linux? Thanks jim