Hi, this is Nikki Belmontie, Executive Director of the American Birding Association. I want to thank all of you who have supported this year's nesting season appeal. If you haven't had a chance to support our campaign, I'm asking you for your support now. Visit us online at aBA.org slash appeal or call us at 800 850 2473. Our work is made possible by the generosity of donors like you. Thanks and enjoy this

week's podcast. Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American

Birding Association. I am your host, Nate Swick. We at the ABA have been fielding a lot of questions about avian flu

in the last few months.

And for the most part, we've been sending people to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's

excellent suggestions that they posted on the Living Bird website.

I'll put a link to that in the show notes if you're curious.

In short, you probably don't need to do anything too different unless you keep chickens in your

yard farm. I don't know, secretly in your apartment. Whatever, no judging here.

Avian flu is primarily passed by birds in very close proximity to each other. And murmurations

aside, that is not a thing that you need to worry about for songbirds and other feeder visitors.

And so I guess because of this, I was somewhat naive, I suppose, of what this means for birds that

were not songbirds or feeder visitors.

Maybe birds that I imagine live in places where they are unlikely to encounter avian flu,

say sea birds.

So I was removed of this guileless existence by two independent reports of wild birds that have

been hit rather hard by the

recent bird flu epidemic, I came across on my bird-heavy Twitter feed post from a UK birder,

noting that the Bass Rock Northern Gannet colony had been decimated, perhaps even using the

actual legitimate definition of the word,

this summer by avian flu.

Bass Rock, for those perhaps unfamiliar, is the largest northern Gannet colony in the world.

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