Speaker 5
Skoma is actually maximum seabird, a massive seabird colony, really important. The biggest, actually, what's commonly in the world,
Speaker 1
350,000 pairs. Are they the ones that borrow, making souls all
Speaker 9
over this sort of here? The
Speaker 5
whole island is just honeycomb with burrows. So on the coastal strip here you've got puffins, as a puffins just poking out of a burrow here. But there's sea waters right across the island. They
Speaker 1
were the birds that were still on Skoma. The birds that had brought me and Lisa Morgan of the South and West Wales Wildlife Trust to the island. The Gillamots had already departed. Their nesting season over and a new generation of chicks fledged. But this year, their corpses started washing up on nearby beaches, and bird flu has been confirmed as the killer. Living Skoma Warden late in Newton said nothing had hinted at their impending deaths. So Gillamot's a bit of a funny one really. They have this sort of peak and trough in attendance on the cliffs. And you have thousands of birds here? Yes, yeah, 32,000 Gillamots roughly. I suppose what I'm wondering is that they're not here now. So yeah, they're literally their eggs in late April. So they start fledging late June roughly, some of those lines. They jump off the cliffs when they're less than 20 days old, some of them landing in the water blow. Swimming out to sea. They're over me. Yeah, absolutely, it's incredible. And that all went fine. Yes. And how far do they go? I mean, are they going to be in the water round here or? No, they're head out to sea. Basically off to the coast where there's easier to find food. And when they left, they looked fine with those here. Yeah, absolutely. We didn't see any real sign. So we spend three weeks in June going around the island and we count all of the colonies twice. But yeah,
Speaker 5
we didn't know if there was anything that we would need them. It's a lot, I think it was quite surprising. And all the Gillamots, a week after they'd all fledged from here and gone, they all started washing in dead on our mainland beaches. So we started off with just a few birds and then over the last three weeks, local agencies have collected. It's probably close
Speaker 1
to a thousand birds now. But your presumption is that these are the ones which have taken their chicks out to see when something's
Speaker 5
happened. Yeah, we don't really know the origin of these birds. They're probably our local birds. We haven't seen any signs of sick birds or dead or dying birds. We've been in the colony itself or on the cliffs. So the timing is very odd. But at the moment you have a natural history
Speaker 1
puzzle that they look apparently healthy when they're leaving. Yeah.
Speaker 5
They're somehow getting infected and you presume it's C. Yeah, so this is the big question and I've been asking lots of experts that we work with here. There is some thought that they're catching it at sea in these big feeding allegations. So you've got lots of birds feeding in hot spots, feeding frenzies and it could be transmitting through the water there or feces in the water. In a
Speaker 1
sense it seems strange because the way that they congregate in these type colonies and so on, this is just exactly the kind of conditions of virus or a bacterium needs to get from bird to
Speaker 5
bird. Yeah, absolutely. They survive for very long periods in the soil, in water, even in saltwater, in feathers and birds could be picking up in the season when they come back.
Speaker 1
Highly pathogenic avian flu has been spreading through birds and mammals across the world from the northern shores of Europe to the southern tip of Chile. And where it strikes him is almost random. Justin is an ornithologist who's been working for Pembrokesha Council, organizing the clean up of Gilamot corpses on the beaches. And last year it was Gannets who'd succumbed as he'd witnessed around nearby grass home. This Gannet
Speaker 3
came in and it was just sitting by the boat Black Eyes, it just really ghostly, but we used to sit in Gannets, the eyes like yours. The pale blue with tiny dark iris, this bird's just looking totally disorientated and it's trying to dive like without even taking off. But lots of birds were surviving initially but managing to fly to the mainland, getting totally disorientated and sitting in roads, in fields, in play parks. People saw it was seeing ill
Speaker 1
birds. So this one was seen ill
Speaker 3
birds here on the Pembrokesha coast, as well as dead birds washing up on the beaches as we're seeing this year. So we're at Westdale Bay, we're looking out to the west, we can see to our northwest is Skoma. But this
Speaker 1
is one of the places you've been seeing birds washing up.
Speaker 3
Yeah, they've sort of left the island after they've fledged their chick and then they're just dying out of sea and washing in. And boy, what are
Speaker 1
you doing with them?
Speaker 3
The council and other partner agencies have got people out finding corpses using appropriate PPE. And then the birds, once they've been bagged, have been sent off for incineration, they have to be incinerated. I'm a bird watcher at my spare time. It's hard to deal with. I feel further, everyone who's on the ground dealing with this and picking up birds, it's not an easy thing to do.
Speaker 1
There are thousands and thousands of pairs that breed on these islands. But on the other hand, if you're seeing a few hundred here, I don't know what that's telling you about how many might be actually dying out in the sea. You're quite right, there could be lots of birds just floating around and being
Speaker 3
scavenged that we're just never seeing. So we'll find out a bit more next year when the birds are counted when they come back to the sea bird colonies. That's quite a weight,
Speaker 1
isn't it? That's science, isn't it? You
Speaker 3
need the evidence, you need the hard facts. The hard facts we have at the moment are the numbers of what you're in, which are completely unprecedented. The
Speaker 1
scariest thing about bird flu is how far it moves with migrating birds, and how mobile it is moving between different species of birds and mammals. It seems
Speaker 5
to be moving through species and maybe sites as well. You know, the birds are on their feet, you hear these chicks when they fledge their first flight from the burrow here, is to South America. But completely on their own. That's totally
Speaker 1
breathtaking. Yeah,
Speaker 5
so birds from here, yeah, in terms of bird flu, they're going to go and they're going to travel a long way. You know, whether a man actually would have come here could be carrying bird flu, take it down to those feeding aggregations off South America, I don't know, posit to another species, but yeah, it's a bit of an unknown.
Speaker 1
The other one you have is seals here, is that right? We do. And I can't remember, are they another vulnerable species? They have tested positive for bird flu on the other
Speaker 5
side of the Atlantic. And actually last year we were really concerned because as the seal popping season started and we had gannets washing in on beaches and onto seal popping beaches as well. We had mothers nursing pups with a dead gannet literally lying alongside their pup, and we were really concerned about that. Yeah, I'm really worried about that at the moment. There's some chuffs going over making lots of noise. Oh, they're beautiful. Family's out and about on the wind. I want to just go
Speaker 1
big picture. You know, so Scoma as I understand it has been a fantastic success store in terms of conservation. Are infectious diseases like this generally a problem? Is this something quite new? I think it's very
Speaker 5
new for the sea birds in particular. This, I've
Speaker 1
never known anything like this. I mean, it seems to me from the comfort of my BBC desk, there's quite a sense for me, a urgency
Speaker 1
to get a lot of information. The urgency of trying to understand why it is, why it's affecting these birds, why it's moving around so much.
Speaker 5
Yeah, I think there is and there'll be people working on this every sea bocollany in Europe and across the globe. You know, everyone will be trying to find out what's happening. But it's going to be veterinary leads, it's going to be microbiologists, virologists in laboratories, it's going to be everyone that's going to need to feed into that. It's got to be a quick learning curve and we've got to find out what's going on. But it's a team effort, really.
Speaker 2
That was Lisa Morgan from the Wildlife Trust for South and West Wales, speaking to our own Roland Pease. And to finish this week's show on a lighter floral note, Dr Stuart Farrimand is back for the final instalment of the Science of Gardening. This time he tells us why basil plants are superheroes in disguise.
Speaker 9
I'm sick of this, these superhero
Speaker 3
movies are absolutely rubbish. All these things like Wolverine's self-healing sounds great, but nature is so much better than that. And I'm going to go outside and show you just how incredible it is. There's a bench here and I've got all my apparatus laid out, so I'm just going to have a sit down, I'm going to tell you all about the powers of regeneration in plants. So I've got this basil plant here and I'm just going to snip off a couple of