Every spring, more than 200,000 northern gannets — stocky seabirds with dazzling white feathers — journey to the coast of eastern Canada. There, they blanket oceanside cliffs and rocky outcroppings, breeding in enormous colonies before flying back south for the winter.

But in May 2022, as many females were getting ready to lay their eggs, the birds began dying in droves. “Thousands of northern gannets started to wash up on our shores,” said Stephanie Avery-Gomm, a seabird biologist and research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada.

The culprit: a bird flu virus, known as H5N1, that had recently arrived in North America. Over the months that followed, the virus raced through the region, killing tens of thousands of northern gannets.

The carnage was “devastating,” Dr. Avery-Gomm said. “You have to harden your heart to work on this kind of scale of mortality.”

Since a new version of H5N1 emerged in 2020, scientists have become increasingly concerned that the virus might set off the next pandemic, infecting people around the globe. But for the world’s wild birds, the prospect of a deadly, uncontained outbreak is not theoretical. The virus has already decimated avian populations around the globe, with body counts that can sometimes be staggering: an estimated 24,000 Cape cormorants killed in South Africa, more than 57,000 pelicans reported dead in Peru.

“The scale of the mortalities is truly unprecedented,” said Johanna Harvey, an avian disease ecologist at the University of Maryland. “There’s nothing comparable historically.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Robinson’s history of comments that have been widely criticized as antisemitic and anti-gay made him a deeply polarizing figure in North Carolina long before his bid for governor was upended last week by a CNN report that he had called himself a “Black NAZI” and praised slavery while posting on a pornographic website between 2008 and 2012. Now, some of his allies are abandoning him. Most of his senior campaign staff members have resigned. The Republican Governors Association said that its pro-Robinson ads would expire tomorrow and that no new ones had been placed. And former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Robinson in the spring, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” did not mention him once during his rally in the state over the weekend.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.lucky cola

• The
• For
• lucky cola
• Wild
• animals