A Sky Full of Birds

by Matt Merritt

  The ancient reminder of those other species is relevant even today, however, because it’s all too easy to become so enamoured of the gannets that you forget the other avian marvels all around you.

  There are auks – razorbills, guillemots, and of course puffins. There are gulls, predominantly kittiwakes. And there are fulmars, members of a family – the tubenoses – that ranges from albatrosses, with some of the largest wingspans on earth, to storm-petrels, starling-sized birds that look too frail to survive even a good shower, but which range across the waves every bit as widely as their larger relatives.

  Once ashore, I walk up through the gannet colonies with a mixture of fellow birders, more general tourists, and our boat’s captain. These birds are remarkably tolerant of man, perhaps because they’ve learned they have little, directly at least, to fear from us these days. Or perhaps they’ve always been exactly this way; the huge scale of the harvesting of the birds and their eggs that took place at so many British colonies wouldn’t have been possible had they not been so willing to allow a close approach. One or two lunge at our ankles now as we walk up towards the top of the rock, but for the most part they ignore us as we pass.

  From the top, we can see the whole expanse of this remarkable seabird city, and even the way that it develops its own neighbourhoods: the oldest, most experienced, most dominant birds are in the city centre, while the younger and less experienced birds find themselves in the windier, wetter, more dangerously exposed suburbs.

  And further afield we can see the endless flow of birds to and from the Rock. It’s a windy day, so more gannets than usual are skimming the waves like shearwaters or albatrosses, perhaps looking for prey just below the surface, but more likely scanning for food scraps or by-catch from passing ships and boats, or else making the long commute to a preferred feeding ground. If it were stiller, they’d be circling higher, riding the thermals as they spied out feeding opportunities.

  These can be a great distance away. When I visited the colony at Les Étacs on Alderney recently I was told that the gannets there range not only to closer, obvious fishing grounds in the Bay of Mont St Michel, and along the Brittany and Normandy coasts, but right back across the Channel, to the waters off Devon and Dorset, and even round into the Thames estuary and North Sea. In this respect, their cities are the opposite of the typical human equivalents. Where ours have become, increasingly, places of commerce and industry, with people living on the outskirts or beyond and travelling in to them, the gannets live in the inner city, enjoying all the advantages of a tight-knit community, commuting each day to their places of work in the wide blue yonder.

  Here and there, as we watch, one or two are busy doing the things that we know gannets do, but which make them unlike any other British bird (they’re actually closely related to the more exotic boobies). Gaining height, they wait until a glimpse of silver trips a switch and then folds them into a sleek harpoon, plunging into the waves from around thirty feet, at nearly 60 mph.

  They don’t dive that deep – anything up to fifteen feet – and they’re rarely submerged for long, but it’s still a remarkable sight, and one that induces an involuntary wince in the observer, until you finally become convinced that their anatomical peculiarities are capable of absorbing the impact with no ill-effects. They have a particularly strong sternum, for a start, and no external nostrils, as well as a layer of fat and dense feather down, while highly developed lungs and air sacs all over their bodies help regulate buoyancy as required.

  And if every dive is enough to draw a small, nearly silent gasp of admiration, occasionally you get really lucky – just as the gannets do when one of them spots a dense shoal of fish just below the surface. Then, every bird in the air seems to hang for a moment, quivering with instinct and hunger, before falling like an unexpected strange spring blizzard on the churning, seething waters.

  One of the greatest pleasures of visiting Britain’s seabird cities is that, much of the time, this also means visiting Britain’s many islands. There are mainland colonies, but by their very nature island breeding sites tend to fare better and so grow larger, both because they encounter less direct disturbance from humans, and because the sea acts as a moat, keeping out unwelcome invaders such as rats and cats.

  Scotland and Wales boast many of these island colonies. As well as the Bass Rock, there’s Ailsa Craig, near the entrance to the Firth of Clyde, Papa Westray in the Orkneys, the Pembrokeshire islands of Skokholm, Skomer and Ramsey, and, taking things to an extreme, the lonely archipelago of St Kilda, forty miles beyond the outermost Outer Hebrides.

  When St Kilda was inhabited, until 1930, the population’s very survival depended on a systematic but sustainable exploitation of the seabirds, which were used not only as food, but as fuel, too, the fat on the young gannets being utilised in lamps and candles.

  Not all these island homes are so difficult to get to. Holy Island, in North Wales, stands barely separated from the main body of the larger island of Anglesey. You can slip across to it without realising, watch the ferries leaving Holyhead harbour on their way to Ireland, then turn your attention to the seabirds of South Stack, which include black guillemots, a dapper but scarcer relative of the more common guillemot. Or there’s Rathlin Island, half-a-dozen miles off the Antrim coast in Northern Ireland. It’s where a particularly indefatigable arachnid is said to have inspired Robert the Bruce, who was on the run and sheltering in a cave, to continue his struggle to win the crown of Scotland, and when you visit the island you can well imagine that the story is true. When Islay and the Mull of Kintyre loom across the water blue and beautiful on a bright morning, seemingly close enough to reach out and touch, you can understand his reluctance to give them up.

  The ferry crossing to Rathlin is quick and easy, and the island has places to stay, and to eat, but best of all it has a uniquely accessible point from which to watch the nesting seabirds. You can cycle up the gentle hills to the West Point, where the RSPB reserve incorporates the lighthouse, enabling you to get right down into the middle of the bickering birds. If it lacks the numbers of some sites, it makes up for that with a rare immediacy and closeness.

  In addition to the aforementioned isolation from potential predators, what these islands all have in common, of course, is a variety of habitat perfect for the different species. Across them all, the broader bare ledges relatively low down on the cliffs are preferred by razorbills and black guillemots; both will also nest among boulders, while common guillemots look for narrower but still bare ledges. The eggs of all these species are tapered, to prevent them rolling off, but in all cases it’s impossible not to look at them and marvel at the knife-edge existence these birds lead, with eggs and young always only a few inches from oblivion.

  Further up the cliffs, on grassier ledges and mini-plateaus, you’ll find the gannets and kittiwakes and fulmars, as well as those gulls that haven’t decided a suburban life is for them.

  Finally, in burrows in the clifftop turf, there are puffins. Along with the kingfisher and the barn owl, they seem to inspire instant and undying affection, even among those casual birdwatchers who have never seen them in the flesh. And while the popularity of those other two species is based on elusive, transient, iridescent beauty, and serene, ethereal grace respectively, the puffin’s is rooted in deeply anthropomorphic impulses. It’s impossible to see them waddling around their colonies with a rolling sailor’s gait, chuntering to each other, without thinking of them as human – and the rather clown-like effect of their large, colourful bills only adds to the effect.

  Perhaps there’s even more to it than that. Does the puffins’ need to live in such close proximity to each other also strike a chord with social animals such as ourselves? There are times, probably, when even the most sociable and convivial of us find ourselves agreeing with Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that ‘hell is other people’, but not many of us would care to take it to its logical conclusion and put ourselves beyond all human contact. In that respect, we’re all puffins
and gannets and fulmars and guillemots. Yet seabird cities can often feel so hopelessly crowded that you wonder why there’s not even more conflict and aggression than there is; and yet the birds seem to find a way to coexist through a mixture of unwritten rules (handed down who knows how?), ad hoc negotiation, and good old-fashioned muddling through.

  They weren’t always so densely populated, though, and one of Britain’s best seabird breeding sites is a constant reminder of that fact.

  Seventh-century Northumbria isn’t the obvious place to look for Britain’s first wildlife protection laws, but the so-called Dark Ages were nothing like as unenlightened as some would have us believe. Northumbria was one of the largest, and most powerful, of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to develop across what’s now England after the departure of the Romans. The Celtic-speaking Britons had, for the most part, retreated towards the west and north of Britain, although the picture remained more complicated than that for a long time. Intermarriage between Celt and Anglo-Saxon was probably fairly common at all levels of society; Celtic political units (such as Elmet, a kingdom around the Leeds area) survived in the heart of ‘enemy’ territory; and, above all, Christianity provided a certain amount of common ground.

  The Germanic settlers encountered this new religion through contact with the Continent: Aethelbert, King of Kent, for example, married a Christian Frankish princess and was then persuaded to accept missionaries from Rome. However, further north the English were converted by Irish missionaries travelling south from what’s now Scotland, and the result was a particular kind of Christianity that took much of its inspiration from the ‘desert fathers’ – hermits, ascetics and monks of the early Church in Egypt. Often this resulted in the practice of perigrinatio pro Christo, literally ‘exile in Christ’, in which the believer undertook to live away from their homeland while they awaited the kingdom of God. Even if the believer stayed closer to home, however, they could strive to become closer to God by living as a hermit.

  I’m remembering all this – the content of half-a-dozen essays during my university years – as our boat butts its way through heaving waves towards the Farne Islands, my visit to the Bass Rock having whetted my appetite for offshore exploration. Just a few miles off the Northumberland coast and not far north of Newcastle, these rocky islets figured high in my consciousness throughout my student career. If I wasn’t thinking of their seabirds, I was pondering the remarkable life of St Cuthbert.

  Growing up near Melrose, St Cuthbert became a monk after seeing a vision on the night that St Aidan, founder of the monastery at Lindisfarne, died. After eventually becoming prior of Lindisfarne himself, and making a name as a humble and tireless evangelist and champion of the poor, he retired to Inner Farne to pursue a contemplative life. Presumably, in his many years criss-crossing Northumbria (which included most of the land between the Humber and the Forth), Cuthbert had already become well acquainted with the bird and mammal life of this sometimes harsh but always beautiful region. It was once he was on Inner Farne that his relationship with the natural world really took off.

  For starters, according to the legends, otters were wont to swim over to Inner Farne and use their fur and breath to dry his feet. And then there were the ravens: after the saint had scolded and banished a group of them for stealing straw from the roof of a house that Cuthbert kept ready for guests, one of the corvids returned to beg his pardon, proffering a gift of pig lard as recompense. Cuthbert accepted and the fat was used by his visitors to waterproof their shoes.

  Now, both those stories sound like the sort of tall tales that routinely appeared in the saints’ lives and hagiographies of the medieval period; the writers (in Cuthbert’s case, an anonymous scribe, and then later, a life by the Venerable Bede) were at pains to show that their subject was capable of miracles and all-round holiness.

  But the raven story isn’t entirely beyond the realms of possibility: recently there was a widely reported story about a girl who received a stream of gifts from the crows she regularly fed. Strip out the details of the cause and effect, and you have what could be a genuine incident involving a species that can still be seen around the Farnes to this day.

  What’s certain is that Cuthbert had a great concern for, and love of, the natural world. This led, in 676, to his passing special laws to protect the seabirds nesting on the island – in particular the eider ducks, seagoing birds that have, of course, long had a close relationship with man because of our use of their down for bedding. Again, we have to take anything appearing in an early medieval history or saint’s life with a healthy pinch of sea salt, but what is inarguable is that to this day eiders are known as ‘cuddy ducks’ in Northumberland, ‘Cuddy’ being the locals’ affectionate name for the saint.

  Striking as they are I’m not here for the eiders today. Nor am I here for the thousands of guillemots and puffins, or even the shags and cormorants perched on the rocks, who look as though they’ve sprung to life straight from one of the cross-carpet pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels. No, I’m here for what might be the world’s greatest avian traveller of all: the Arctic tern.

  There are well over a thousand pairs of Arctic terns on the Farnes as a whole, and the reception that they give to visitors can be enough to convince some to turn tail and head back out onto even the choppiest waters. Most birds are willing to risk life and limb to defend their nests and young, and species as disparate as avocets and tawny owls are known for attacking anything that comes too close, but Arctic terns make an art form of it, swooping on intruders, hovering over them, and stabbing away at the tops of heads, or unprotected arms and shoulders. If you’ve been to the Farnes or a similar colony before, and you’ve been properly warned, as I have, you know to wear a sturdy hat, at the very least; holding your spotting scope and fully extended tripod in a ‘shoulder arms’ position can also help deter the worst of the onslaught. Even then you have to accept that a few of these dive-bombers will get through, and if you escape without a scratch your hat and clothes will certainly bear the white-streaked evidence of what you’ve been through.

  But once you have a chance to pause away from the gauntlet of nest-defenders (and many of the nests are right next to the path), the Arctic terns suddenly take on a different appearance and aura, wholly appropriate to the religious past of the islands. As they hover, with the back-lighting sun coming through the translucent primary feathers of their wings, there’s something distinctly angelic about them.

  Both they and the very similar common tern (a more widespread breeder in the UK, but often found inland) have been known as sea-swallows in the past, thanks to their forked tails and fast, agile flight. But it’s the Arctic that is the more deserving of the title – slightly smaller than its relative, there’s also something more graceful and elegant about its structure, with its narrower wings and shorter neck. Those primaries help, too; the translucent ‘window’ on a common tern is smaller and far less noticeable.

  Most British breeders can be found in Scotland, and the majority of the wider population are further north still, right up into the Arctic Circle from which the bird takes its name; and yet they spend the northern hemisphere winter in the waters off Antarctica, at the other end of the planet. Recent studies using tracking technology have shown that each bird travels an average of 56,000 miles each year on migration, and one chick from the Farnes, ringed in the nest in 1982, showed up in Melbourne, Australia just three months later, after a journey along the coasts of Europe and Africa, then across the Indian Ocean.

  I watch one now, just offshore. Wheeling and gyring, slowing down while it peers into the murky waters, then accelerating sharply away again, it looks like a puppet at times, bouncing on unseen strings. But when it stalls, momentarily, wings outstretched to form a wispy, impressionistic Latin cross, I see it as the creature of light that it is, an unresting pilgrim in constant search of the sun, seeing more hours of daylight every year than virtually any other creature on the planet.

  And I wonder what Cuthbert made of it,
here alone with only a chattering mass of seabirds for company? He would have known nothing of their long odysseys and their Antipodean sojourns, of course, but perhaps in the regularity of their arrival each spring, and their departure each autumn, he saw a reassuring confirmation of a world working the way that its Creator had meant it to.

  Perhaps Cuthbert saw something else, too, in the seabird colonies all around him. Although he’d chosen seclusion in his later years, his had always been a pragmatic Christianity, fully engaged with the material world of the ordinary people, and he can hardly have failed to see, in the seabird cities, the interdependence of the birds.

  This manifests itself in many ways. As with bird flocks, there’s an element of safety in numbers. Although some studies have shown that the conspicuousness of such colonies also serves to attract predators that might not otherwise notice individual nests, in many cases seabirds can act together to mob intruders and drive them away – as seen in the Farnes. The hatching of chicks in each species is also often synchronised, which means that any predator that does get through is faced with far more prey than it could possibly manage to make off with, and any individual egg or chick has a good chance of surviving.

  But there are other reasons, one being that there simply aren’t that many suitable nest sites available, given that most seabirds have a very specific habitat requirement. They also need to be within reach of abundant food supplies, although as we’ve seen with gannets, this can involve a significant commute.

  While islands often offer the best combination of conditions for breeding seabirds, there are other places to find them – to the great relief of birdwatchers for whom a boat trip on heaving seas is a sure-fire recipe for a rapid reacquaintance with their breakfast. I’m not, I should add, one of those. I’ve birdwatched from boats and ships off Iceland, the Falklands, the North Sea, the English Channel and the Mediterranean, in choppy and sometimes downright frightening seas. Not so much as a hint of nausea. But, embarrassingly, I’ve passed out on a flat-bottomed Thames barge while travelling the perfectly calm waters of the Stour estuary, between Essex and Suffolk; and during a morning’s snorkelling in a reef-ringed lagoon off New Britain, Papua New Guinea, I spent most of my time green-faced and bleary-eyed, instead of enjoying the staggeringly beautiful views over textbook South Sea islands and swimming-pool-still waters. The human mind, and the inner ear, are very strange things indeed.