I once saw a question on the popular gameshow Pointless where the contestants had to identify a seabird with four letters, _ k_ _. It’s not a common bird so I wasn’t surprised that no-one got it, but the answer was skua, or to be more precise the great skua, Stercorarius skua.
They are large and rather thuggish seabirds which breed mostly on Scotland’s coasts and islands. In fact, Scotland is home to more than half their world population.
Yet a hidden killer has been devastating the skua population, along with other seabirds; so much so that some scientists fear that it will become locally extinct. That killer is bird flu, specifically a virulent strain known as H5N1, Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza. In these times of Covid 19 we are all too familiar with viral diseases, but people aren’t the only ones to suffer.
