Viral clouds, corporeal concerns: Emotion, vulnerability and care amidst deathly circulations of avian influenza

Deathly circulations of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) stemming originally from the industrial poultry complex are causing mass mortality events in wild bird populations worldwide. In this article I explore what occurs as these drifting viral clouds envelop place. Focused on the islands of Orkney, Scotland, I describe my encounters with HPAI, and its effects on Papay's breeding seabirds—particularly its populations of solan geese (northern gannets), and bonxies (great skuas). Outlining the concept of viral atmospheres, which I condense from my experiences of mass avian mortality, as well as prior articulations of viruses as multispecies clouds, geographical understandings of atmospheres, and theories on the sociality of emotions, I use descriptions of these deathly encounters amidst the pervasive (and enveloping) meteorological phenomenon of Orkney to give emphasis to their various corporeal effects. These bodily consequences manifest not only in the tragic demise of many birds, but also the witnessing of this death, which shapes emotional response. Articulating how the practice of birdwatching forms an empathic relation with birds that reaches across the divide between two different embodied experiences’ of HPAI, I explore how the emotions engendered by such a connection form new ways of engaging with more-than-human worlds scarred by unruly capitalist impacts. In this instance, small, localised practices of care—such as collecting corpses to try and prevent the immediate spread of the virus—provide a way of navigating these novel realities, with personal and communal emotional experience of mass mortality producing currents of empathy that gather to alter the local trajectories of the outbreak.