When bird flu hit the UK, suffering seabirds died in their thousands. Australia’s wild flocks will soon do the same

Australia’s bird population will experience ‘large mortalities’ and risk species loss, modelling based on global outbreaks shows Sign up for climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s free Clear Air newsletter here Sandwich terns are a graceful seabird known for their committed, forceful and spectacular plunging dives into the ocean to catch fish. Thousands of the species started to fall sick across Europe in 2022 with tens of thousands dying as a lineage of the H5N1 bird flu – 2.3.4.4b – spread through the continent’s wild flocks. The effects of the virus on the brain cause the terns to flounder on the ground, craning and straining their necks in a suffering behaviour known as star-gazing. It is difficult to watch. “I remember a colony at Scolt Head Island in Norfolk,” says Prof James Pearce-Higgins, the director of science at the British Trust for Ornithology. “You had adult terns trying to mate with dead terns and chicks begging for food from their dying parents. “It was a real sense of a colony collapse as you watched this transfer of the virus between birds.” Sandwich terns are close relatives of greater crested terns, which are seen all around Austra