What’s killing our birds?

If you are a bird, any kind of bird, the current pandemic of avian influenza rampaging through your kind is far more terrifying than anything the hairless apes on the ground below experienced in 2020 and 2021. Britain’s seabirds – guillemots, gannets, gulls, kittiwakes and skuas – have been hardest hit because they breed in dense colonies, facilitating infection. The death toll this summer among 2,600 sandwich tern chicks on Coquet island, off the Northumberland coast, approached 100 per cent.

The worst may be only just beginning for the many thousands of geese, ducks and waders. They scatter across the Arctic tundra in summer and gather in dense flocks on estuaries and salt marshes around our shores in winter. Last winter barnacle geese died in their thousands on the Solway Firth – and many buzzards and crows perished from eating their corpses.

This vicious version of bird flu reached Europe from Asia last year, spread to North America this summer and will be carried to the Pacific coast and South America by migrating birds this winter.