‘The equivalent to our Covid pandemic’: bird flu hasn’t gone away and is still spreading

Wild bird populations have been decimated across the UK and scientists fear there is more to come in 2023

It is more than a year since avian flu began to devastate wild birds in large numbers, and conservationists are fearful of what 2023 will hold. The highly infectious variant of H5N1 has caused Europe’s worst bird flu season and has spread across the globe with little sign of slowing.

In the UK, there were reports of some great skua dying from the H5N1 variant in the summer of 2021 but the mass die-offs started in the autumn and winter. More than a third of Svalbard barnacle geese in the Solway Firth, on the border of England and Scotland, – 16,500 out of 43,000 – died last winter.