An Avian-Aquapelagic Heritage at “the Edge of the World” Reflections on Humans and Seabirds on St Kilda and the Arrival of HPAIV
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of the aquapelago was introduced into Island Studies in 2012 to identify the close integration of aquatic and terrestrial realms that can arise from human livelihood activities conducted within them. While many aspects of aquapelagos have subsequently been described and analysed, little attention has been extended to their interface with aerial and, particularly, avian domains. This article attempts to redress this through a consideration of human livelihood activities involving seabirds in St Kilda, an isolated group of islands to the west of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. Using the concept of the aquapelago as a starting point, the article considers various aspects of human-avian relations occurring on St Kilda, and UNESCO’s subsequent designation of the islands as a World Heritage site and intersperses this with the author’s personal experiences of and affective engagements with the islands. In particular, the latter part of the article develops the author’s field notes from a visit in Summer 2022 into a consideration of the limits of isolation occasioned by the presence of the H5N1 strain of HPAIV (Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Virus) on St Kilda at that time. The viral colonisation of the bird colonies undermined any sense of St Kilda and similar remote locations being safely isolated refugia and, indeed, signalled a particularly precarious moment of Anthropocene connectivity between mainlands and islands.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".