In the past year, avian flu has ravaged colonies of seabirds in the UK. Gwen Potter, a National Trust countryside manager working on the Farne Islands off the coast of north-east England, was among those on the frontline
n May last year, our seabirds were starting to settle, having flown here from all over the world. It is an explosion of life, sound and smell – and it looked as if it was going to be a really good year., the most numerous bird is probably the puffin, we’ve also got a lot of guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes, arctic terns, sandwich terns, common terns, loads of other fantastic seabirds. It’s such a spectacle seeing all these birds fly in.
The first bird flu reports came in from north Scotland in May. It did make our ears prick up because it is not something we’ve seen before in our seabird colonies.tends to thrive in cooler temperatures and isn’t generally a problem during the summer – at least not in this country. Then it just started moving down the coast. We started to get really worried, as it got closer and closer.
Initially, it was a couple of birds, and then a couple of days later, it was a lot. I went to the outer islands and saw an area of cliff usually covered in guillemots. There was one sitting there in the middle of it, and then just dead birds and rock. Some adults died where they were nesting, and there were lots of dead chicks, too. Whether they died of the disease or their parents died and they starved as a result, we don’t know.
Going out to areas that we would never normally go to during the breeding season was shocking, too. I knew cliff nesters would be badly affected but I thought other birds such as fulmars and puffins might be OK because they tend to give themselves a bit more space, but they weren’t. We found quite a few dead puffins – both adults and pufflings. The ones we found were those which were outside the burrow where they nest, we don’t know how many were dead inside the burrow.
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