Scotland has refused a licence for this year’s traditional gannet hunt on a remote island, citing bird flu deaths among the colony.

The decision

NatureScot, Scotland’s nature agency, denied a 2026 licence for hunting northern gannets on Sula Sgeir, citing possible harm to the local gannet population after recent bird flu deaths, according to AFP reporting via RFI.

The tradition behind the licence

Sula Sgeir is a small, uninhabited rock in the North Atlantic. Once a year, a licensed group of men from the Isle of Lewis has traditionally sailed out to harvest young gannets — a practice known locally as the guga hunt, going back centuries and closely tied to island identity. It is one of the very few hunts of its kind still permitted in Europe.

Why bird flu changes the calculation

Avian influenza has swept through seabird colonies across the North Atlantic in recent years, killing large numbers of gannets in particular. When a population has already taken heavy losses, a harvest that was sustainable before may no longer be — the same number of birds removed from a smaller, weakened colony is a much bigger bite.

This is a recurring theme in conservation decisions, and one worth understanding: the question is rarely whether a practice is harmful in principle, but whether the population can currently absorb it.

Why this matters beyond Scotland

Seabird colonies along the whole North Atlantic coastline — including Norway’s — have been affected by the same outbreaks. Decisions like this one are early indicators of how governments balance long-standing cultural rights against wildlife under pressure, a balance that will come up repeatedly as the disease persists.

Source: AFP via RFI, as collected by Wikipedia’s current events portal.