It was a bad year, the worst. On Westport beach in Argyll, there were 200 at least. It was bad in Orkney and Shetland too, and East Lothian, and on St Kilda and Bass Rock, and in other places. In all, there were thousands, then hundreds of thousands, some washed up on the shore, some not, struck down but uncounted. I asked the woman from the RSPB for her reaction. “Terrifying,” she said.

The final total of the dead in that outbreak of bird flu in 2022 is impossible to know, but from the end of 2021 to the end of 2023, more than 100,000 bodies were reported, mostly seabirds. Four years on, the emergency response is over, the outbreak officially ended, but bird flu will still be affecting some bird populations because that’s how it works. It doesn’t go away; it crouches and hides, ready for the next time.

One of the worst affected birds has been the great skua, whose total populations dropped by two-thirds. On St Kilda for example, the census in 2019 counted 183 breeding pairs, but the census in 2024 counted 50. There will be some who struggle to love the great skua and I get it: they’re big bullies in a way, preying on smaller, more documentary-friendly birds like puffins. And they don’t take any nonsense from humans either – get too close and they’ll divebomb you like a squadron of Stukas. But that’s nature: beautiful, brutal, and defensive because it has to be.

You see more of the same with gulls: the reputational problem. You may remember last year, for example, when some politicians – mainly Douglas The Gulls! Ross – were calling for something to be done. Mr Ross said some people were living in constant fear of being attacked by gulls. His colleague Rachael Hamilton said the birds were now a serious growing health issue. And Fergus Ewing said gulls were like “young thugs who smash you in the head”. You may also remember that it led to the rammy in the corridor at........

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