A lethal bird flu outbreak that has been circling the globe since 2021 peaked in Japan this week, as an agriculture ministry official said on Tuesday the country plans to cull more than 10 million chickens at risk of exposure to the virus.Meanwhile, Europe is in the midst of its worst-ever spate of bird flu infections with 2,500 outbreaks on farms stretching across 37 countries from October 2021-September 2022.“In terms of the numbers of birds, farms, and countries affected, the number of birds that have been killed and the duration of the outbreak, the current epidemic is truly the largest we've seen in history,” says Ian Brown, chair of the joint World Organisation for Animal Health and Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN's Scientific Network on Animal Influenza.Great skuas currently have a total population of just 16,000, more than half of which inhabit the northwest coast.“The theory," Smith says, "is that lots of big poultry operations have rodents, and the rodents aren't necessarily dying of bird flu but are carrying the virus on their fur, then those barn owls and kestrels are catching them.” There are few instances of the current bird flu epidemic spreading to mammals, although examples do exist including cats, pigs and tigers."