The great news about manatees is getting harder to avoid, though some press accounts still seem to cloud things up just a bit with suggestions that things might not be as good as they look.

Reporters aren’t trying to fool anyone. But they are long accustomed to reading and writing about manatees massacred by boats and about annual death counts that have just recently set various records. Sometimes the record is for overall number of deaths, or maybe just the much smaller number killed by boats.

Every year now has the real possibility of a bad-sounding new record, and the stories about those records always sound, naturally, like grim news. How could it be otherwise when the topic is manatees dying?

As a manatee lover, I get it. But actually, it can be otherwise, and though I catch flak for saying so, here I go again: The biggest underlying cause of the high death counts of late is the now amazingly high manatee population. Manatees are thriving! Rejoice!

The newest evidence is in: This year’s living manatee count just set a record, for the third year in a row. By a lot.

That is no fluke. The population trend has been going right for a couple of decades. That’s obvious from stats compiled by state wildlife biologists. After weeding out years when bad weather hampered the counting, you can’t miss it.

In the early 1990s, statewide counts were always well below 2,000, sometimes closer to 1,000. That news was always accompanied by boat-strike stories, and I’m so glad the state started creating low-speed zones to curb the carnage.

Those save-the-manatee efforts worked, and are working still. It has become obvious that new death records, whether about deaths caused by boats or more natural causes, are being set now mainly because there are so many more manatees.

Counting techniques have improved, too. But as I’ve said before, seeing lots of roadkill on a highway is not a sign that raccoons and armadillos are going extinct there. It usually means those critters are thriving in that area.

By the late ’90s, biologists on good-weather count days were spotting more than 2,000 manatees. The count first topped 3,000 in 2001.

It was a lasting trend. In 2010, there was a nice milestone: 5,077 living manatees.

Two years ago, biologists spotted more than 6,000 for the first time. Last year’s count was even higher.

But hey, 2016 news accounts told us that — partially due to a mild winter and improving economy that brought out more boaters than usual — sea cows took a record hit. Boats killed 104.

Gruesome? You bet. But no matter how much I wish we could prevent every boat-related death and injury, that number was one-fourth of the 520 deaths. And how did the population do, generally?

You already know. It was a record year for good news, too. Biologists and their spotters counted 6,620 of the lumbering beauties.

But some news accounts seemed to offer a caveat based on Florida Wildlife Commission biologist Holly Edwards comment that the count could be high in part because of warmish weather on the count day.

Well, first of all, so what? Good conditions make for good counts. It is the misleading bad count years you have to ignore.

But I was a bit baffled as I have frequently been told biologists like cold but clear and calm weather for counts, both for good visibility and so manatees are bunched up at warm water sources and easy to find.

When I asked Edwards about that, she said I was right but with an asterisk: If the air is too cold that one day, manatees avoid the surface and some are missed.

Still, she said she had worried that the mild winter, though good for manatees, could reduce this year’s count if the animals were more scattered.

Turned out that wasn’t a problem, she said. Or, I would add, if it was a factor, it wasn’t enough of one to prevent breaking the record anyway with so many manatees now lolling in our waters.

Whether biologists pretty much found them all or missed quite a few, they again revealed the good news that explains the death records: There are more manatees sharing our waters now than was once thought imaginable.

— Tom Lyons can be reached at tom.lyons@heraldtribune.com