This is the Guardian.

Today, avian flu is decimating our wild bird population.

How dangerous could it be for humans too?

It feels great to be on the islands.

It's often quite quiet in certain places, often quite noisy in other places.

You can't really escape from the noise of the birds. It's constant.

There's puffins, gulls nesting, and on the cliff edges gilly mocks and the oaks and the shag

and the kitty wakes. And they all have different noises, different behaviors. It's fascinating.

I always think it's full of birds like really majestic flying a pass the sea.

And then I always think puffins. When you see them landing, it was like, oh that was a bit clumsy.

But then when you see them diving in the water, they look so streamlined and professional

between the bird breeding season and the seal season. It can be very quiet and very peaceful and

you just feel connected to the island.

Harriet Reed works as a ranger for the National Trust on the Far Nylons,

which are just off the coast of Northumberland. Depending on the whim of the tide,

these craggy islands can appear and disappear from view. It's a part of the world that has been

largely left to nature, where Atlantic grey seals bask on the slippery rocks,

and where more than 40,000 pairs of puffins, turns, gilly mocks and idoducks meet and mate.

Harriet's job is to protect these birds, but in recent months that's become much harder to do,

because a very contagious strain of avian flu has been spreading among them.

None of the islands escaped the effects of bird flu. At first it was kind of trickles,

there were odd dead birds, and then we were just seeing more and more gilly mocks in the water,

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