A Sky Full of Birds

by Matt Merritt

  Almost as soon as I walked onto the Quayside, I was aware of dozens of gulls swirling and scything through the air in front of me. There was nothing especially startling about that – Black-headeds were a familiar sight pretty much everywhere in the city – but it was immediately clear that these were something else. Their ink-dipped wingtips rang a bell, but before I had a chance to ransack my brain for the contents of umpteen half-remembered field guides, the birds themselves considerately provided a huge clue with their calls, a sound straight out of the wild, open spaces of the ocean if ever I’d heard one. Transcriptions of bird songs and calls are notoriously prone to personal interpretations – I’ve never been able to hear the yellowhammer’s ‘little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese’, for example – but it didn’t take any great effort to stretch the noise they were making into ‘kittiwake’.

  I didn’t have any binoculars with me – the people in Newcastle were friendly enough, and admirably tolerant of students, but I thought wearing a pair through town would have been testing their acceptance a bit too much. Even with the naked eye, however, I was able to appreciate the kittiwakes’ quiet, understated beauty, and to realise that they were all moving to and from the Baltic Flour Mills. Now and then, one or two would land on the water for a few moments, before taking off again and joining the others in their circling flights.

  This monolithic reminder of the Tyne’s commercial past, built in the 1930s by Hovis, had effectively become a vast kittiwake apartment block, with their nests lining the ledges and alcoves of the towering frontage. The birds wheeled and dipped above the Tyne, and maybe one or two plucked a morsel or two from the surface of the water, but for the most part they must have been arriving from the North Sea with beaks crammed with fish and invertebrates for their endlessly hungry and vocal young. Once their load was delivered, they were off again, back to North Shields and beyond.

  In the weeks that followed, I tried to find out more. That meant rooting through books in the city library, and I eventually found that the Baltic Flour Mills building was host to the largest inland kittiwake colony in the world, with hundreds of pairs using it. In fact, they rarely nest anywhere away from the coast, and although they have readily adapted to man-made nest sites such as building ledges elsewhere, these are almost invariably on seafronts and harbours.

  Now, I’ve mentioned before that once you’ve become a birdwatcher you never quite un-become one, and after several years of my obsession being turned down to a very low heat, this was one of those events that kept it at least simmering away on a back-burner. Why, I wondered, had this particular group of kittiwakes decided to embrace the joys of urban life, especially when it entailed a lengthy commute to their main feeding areas every day? If they could, why couldn’t kittiwakes everywhere? And why weren’t the city fathers making a bigger deal of it?

  I’d seen plenty of kittiwakes before, and I saw plenty of others during my university years while on field trips up the Northumberland coast to Holy Island, where I also added species like purple sandpiper and eider to my life-list, the tally that every birder keeps of every bird they’ve ever seen; but I remember arriving back at my room that day and realising that the pleasure of birdwatching, for me, wasn’t about seeing more and more species, but in being constantly surprised by bird behaviour.

  That, and the way that the experience could instantly transport you hundreds of miles from where you were standing. Hearing those kittiwake calls, I’d felt myself simultaneously in the midst of one of the country’s largest cities, and completely alone amidst the salt spray and howling winds of some northern clifftop. Birds as travellers in time and space: a concept that takes some getting your head around when you’re nineteen years old.

  I made a point, in the following two springs, of going down to watch the kittiwakes at their city centre colony, but after I’d finished university they quickly slipped my mind. I tried to find jobs in or near Newcastle, failed and moved back to the Midlands, and despite our little circle of friends’ constant promises to keep in touch and organise regular reunions, we drifted apart the way university friends do, sending Christmas cards and seeing each other at increasing numbers of weddings, and one heartbreaking funeral.

  We managed to meet up in Newcastle a couple of times, I think, but they were alcohol-soaked affairs that allowed no time for surreptitious gull-watching. I passed through the city twice on the train, on both occasions in autumn, and I was sent there on a training course one February. If I’d given them a thought, I’d have imagined the kittiwakes still gliding to and from the Baltic on some easy, endless circle; but life was getting in the way and my mind turned to other things.

  Today, I’m driving up to Edinburgh for the Scottish Birdfair, and the Angel of the North has announced that Newcastle lies just over the next hill. In the old days you had to go across one of its city-centre bridges, but now the A1 passes well to the west in a great sweeping curve, and there’s no need to come within sight of the iconic ‘coathanger’ perched between Newcastle and Gateshead. I’m hungry, though, and the attractions of a saveloy and pease pudding stotty cake quite get the better of any desire to push on to my destination.

  My progress through town on foot is slow, thanks to frequent stops to survey sites of former glories and embarrassments, so by the time I reach the Quayside I’m starting to think that I really ought to be on my way again. I know to expect a much-changed scene, the result of regeneration of the waterfront, but I’m still not quite prepared for what meets my eyes.

  There’s the millennium footbridge, for a start, with its ‘blinking eye’ design. If it doesn’t have the historic appeal of Stephenson’s double-decker road and rail bridge, or the instantly iconic looks of the Tyne Bridge, it’s still – if you’ll excuse the pun – as eye-catching as they come.

  The old Victorian buildings on the Newcastle side have either gone, replaced by luxury apartment blocks, or been renovated to within an inch of their lives, and are now home to legal and property development firms, as well as more bars and restaurants than even a legendarily convivial city like Newcastle could possibly need.

  On the far side of the river, the new Sage Conference Centre is undeniably impressive, with its glittering, mirrored exterior, although its curious shape does give it the unfortunate appearance (from some angles) of a monstrous chrome woodlouse. But just downstream, what’s happened to the Baltic Flour Mills building?

  The size and shape is the same as ever, give or take a few air-con vents and external elevator shafts, but the lines of its exterior look cleaner and smoother, and indeed large parts of the brickwork have been totally replaced with glass. This is all entirely in keeping with its new role as the Baltic Centre for the Contemporary Arts, of course, but even without any closer inspection it’s obvious that it’s no longer a des res for a kittiwake. My heart sinks.

  Only for a moment, though, and then it’s soaring skywards faster than the snow-white spectre that floats past not ten feet ahead of me. Followed by another, and another, and another, all unmistakable with those black wingtips, and all utterly unconcerned by the dozens of people enjoying the sunshine or the cars humming up and down the road. They don’t need to announce themselves for my benefit this time, but they do, again and again.

  When the Baltic got its facelift, plenty of thought was given to providing an alternative site for the kittiwakes to nest on, with a special tower being built at a nearby nature reserve on the south bank. It’s been well used in recent years, with hundreds of ‘tarrocks’ (the old fisherman’s name for a young kittiwake) being raised there, but the great bulk of the Baltic colony, as many as five hundred pairs, simply moved to the many old stone buildings along the Newcastle Quayside, and to the Tyne Bridge itself. Not only does the great metal arch itself provide numerous nooks and crannies into which a bird can cram a nest, but the two stone towers rearing up at either end of its span offer dozens more.

  All of which means that these extraordinary birds are city-centre gulls more than they ever we
re. Rush-hour traffic passes by nose to tail just a few feet from where the kittiwakes huddle on their nests; and students and other revellers heading for whatever’s replaced The Boat stagger past without realising that a quick look over the parapet would bring them face to face with truly wild creatures that might have spent the winter somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland.

  In one sense it’s a missed opportunity for all those passers-by, because nowhere in these islands is it easier to see a seabird colony at close quarters, but in another it’s a relief, because the bridge does at least belong to the council, who can be persuaded (albeit sometimes with extreme difficulty) by the lobbying power and potential electoral might of hundreds of wildlife-lovers not to move the birds on. Private landlords, it’s safe to say, generally take a much less lenient view of the birds because of the noise they make, and the inevitable evidence of their presence that they leave streaked all over their chosen home – and the gentrification of this part of the city has only served to increase pressure from this quarter.

  But this time, maybe, the birds might just have found somewhere to stay. Information boards now tell their story to visitors, with the hope that they’ll eventually become as much an icon of the city as the bridge itself, and slowly but surely Geordies are coming to realise just what a unique natural phenomenon they have in their midst, and what might be lost all too easily. There are even children’s picture books celebrating them – give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the birdwatcher, as an ornithologically inclined version of Ignatius Loyola might have said.

  Kittiwakes everywhere are under threat, however; their numbers much reduced by a lack of natural food, caused by overfishing and perhaps the effects of climate change, and even at the best of times the vast colonies that make them Britain’s most numerous gull tend to be in places that aren’t easily reached.

  So next time you’re passing through Newcastle in spring or summer, take half an hour to park and walk along the waterfront, look up, and appreciate a unique spectacle, while perhaps reminding the great and good of the city that regeneration and new beginnings don’t start and end with humankind. Nowhere, and I mean nowhere, else in the world is all the hi-tech glitter, glamour and grime of the modern urban world carried away quite so effortlessly on the wings of the humble seagull.

  6 Living in the City

  There’s nothing in the world quite so simultaneously disorientating and yet exhilarating as losing all sense of scale and place, of forgetting your own size and shape within the universe. Everything, for a few short seconds at least, becomes unknown and conditional; yet everything also becomes ready to be learned afresh. Everything becomes possible.

  I experience it today for a split-second upon waking in a strange hotel bedroom, until the complimentary tea-making facilities come into focus, and the day takes shape before me.

  There was also the time when, as a student, I joined the university parachuting club, because I thought its social evenings would be a chance to spend time with a girl with whom I was besotted, and who was also a member. That plan failed dismally, but I stuck at it long enough to make my first jump, at RAF Topcliffe in North Yorkshire, on a gloriously sunny Sunday in early March. I surprised myself by coping well with actually leaving the plane – the jolt and whoosh of air as the static line pulled me upright and opened my chute were similar to the experience of being pushed in at the deep end of a swimming pool when you don’t expect it, and certainly no worse.

  But what followed remains seared on my memory. First, there was the sensation of standing in mid-air, seeing what felt like the whole of God’s Own County flattening out below me, just like smoothing a map on a table. Looking around, I could see the White Horse on the Hambleton Hills, and the North York Moors beyond, the green, garrison-studded flatlands of the Vale of York, the towers of York Minster to the south, and somewhere behind them the cooling towers at Ferrybridge, the great sprawl of Leeds and Bradford. All of this felt close enough to reach out and touch, as though a step or two in any direction would take me to the edge of the known world. I remember thinking that this is how an eagle must feel.

  For the jump we’d been fitted with radio packs that allowed us to listen to instructors on the ground, and suddenly mine crackled into life, telling me to steer towards the instructor’s car, parked on one of the runways. I was baffled. I checked, again and again, until the dizzying effect of looking down started to make me feel sick, but I couldn’t see any car. The runways were empty. The whole airfield seemed deserted, in fact.

  And then, at maybe 400 feet up, the realisation hit me. In my line of vision was what I’d taken to be a red crisp packet. Now, greater proximity and a slight change of perspective gave it new shape, a new identity. It was the Citroën 2CV the instructor had been talking about. I pulled down on my right toggle to steer a little to one side of it, and in what seemed like no time the ground came rushing up and I was bending my knees to take the impact exactly as we’d been taught.

  For days, weeks afterwards, I walked around feeling as though I’d had a glimpse into another dimension. It wasn’t the weightlessness of standing on the breeze, so much as those moments when I’d been a colossus, able to encompass an entire world within my gaze. Even now, I can close my eyes and find myself back there.

  But today, just one hour and three hurried cups of tea after waking up disorientated in the hotel, I’m face to face with something even more dizzying. It’s not the pitching and swaying of the boat I’m sitting in, although that doesn’t help. It’s not the wind, which, when it gathers its strength and gusts, threatens to take the breath away, literally, forcing my tongue back down my throat. No, it’s what appears, at first glance, to be a swarm of flies orbiting the bleached bones of some great sea beast.

  The smell is hardly better than you’d expect to find around a carcass, too. There’s a distinctively fishy top note, with an ammoniac finish, and an overall miasma of something dredged up from the depths of the wildest oceans.

  And then, in the trough between two great swells, in the lull between two great gouts of gale, in a few seconds of cool, calm consideration of what I’m here to see, and do, the buzzing, spiralling insects sharpen into focus, become white crosses that glitter in the thin sunshine and expand and contract as they twist and turn. All at once the world expands to its usual size, or else I shrink.

  These are gannets, one of Britain’s most unusual and most spectacular birds. It’s also a species we have an awful lot of, if you know where to look.

  After disembarking, I stand for a moment and try to take in the scale of it all. A seabird city might be the single best reason in the whole of the natural world to stand, head craned skywards and open-mouthed. For other reasons, which the streaked, white hue of the Rock makes obvious, it’s the worst reason too.

  With a drop in the wind comes the sound: a raucous, insistently grating noise raised by thousands of voices at once, which swells and fades, swells and fades, like waves themselves. This is the song of the rush hour.

  Every city has its rush hour, after all. As with any major metropolis, its presence could have been guessed at miles away, even when it was out of sight in an early morning sea mist, due to the steadily gathering volumes of traffic heading to and from its bustling heart. And here, on the edge of downtown, so to speak, there’s a constant flow of birds eager to be about the main business of the day, catching fish and bringing them back to their young waiting on the craggy, precipitous, guano-whitewashed rock above.

  They’ve been waiting, you might say, a very long time. Or rather, their kind have. This is the Bass Rock, sitting in the Firth of Forth between the Lothian shore and the ancient kingdom of Fife. It plays host to one of the largest gannetries in the world, a gloriously noisy, smelly, high-rise community that contains as many as 150,000 birds each year, and so closely are bird and site associated that the species’ scientific name Morus bassanus makes reference to the location.

  In the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’,
which survives in a tenth-century manuscript but is almost certainly at least a couple of hundred years older, there’s a wealth of description that sounds like it might be referring to the Bass Rock:

  Hwilum ylfete song

  dyde ic me to gomene,

  ganetes hleothor

  ond huilpan sweg

  fore hleahtor wera,

  mæw singende

  fore medodrince.

  Stormas thær stanclifu beotan,

  thær him stearn oncwæth

  isigfethera;

  ful oft thæt earn bigeal,

  urigfethra; …

  Which, in modern English, is something like:

  I made the wild swan’s song

  my game; sometimes the gannet

  and curlew would cry out

  though elsewhere men were laughing;

  and the sea-mew would sing

  though elsewhere men drank mead.

  Storms beat against the stone

  cliffs, and the ice-feathered

  tern called back, and often

  the sea-sprayed eagle too.

  ‘Sea-mew’ is a gull, probably the kittiwake, while the eagle, or ‘earn’, is the white-tailed eagle, now making a comeback in Scotland. And there are echoes of ‘huilpan’, for curlew, in some Scottish dialect names for the species and the closely related whimbrel – they’re still known, in some parts of the country, as whaups.

  Certainly the ornithologist James Fisher (1912–1970) thought the Anglo-Saxon poet was talking about the Rock, even arguing that the mixture of species included tied the description to the last ten days of April. Well, maybe, although perhaps we shouldn’t forget that poetic licence was just as likely to be indulged in the mead-halls of the Dark Ages as in any modern creative writing workshop.