James Fisher - Sea-Birds

We read of the birds’ ecology, their sharing of the wild frontiers of the land where they nest, their niches in the economy of the ocean. We learn of the contrasts between cliff-dwelling and hole-nesting species, of how the guillemot and razorbill chicks, exposed to many dangers on the open rocks, hasten their feather-growth and depart to the sea in two weeks, while the young puffins, safe in the darkness of their burrows, delay their departue for seven weeks, and are finally deserted by their parents; we learn of the strange lives of the shearwaters and small petrels which wander after the breeding season between the North and South Atlantic Oceans, living in perpetual summer—the Tristan shearwater “wintering” in our northern summer, and the Manx shearwater enjoying its “winter” in the southern summer off the coasts of South America.

But we have said enough to indicate the richness of knowledge brought together in this volume, which we confidently recommend as indispensable to everyone interested in the birds of the sea.

THE EDITORS

THE HEROES of our story are rather over a hundred species of birds whose life is a sea-life, whose habits enable them to earn at least part of their living in, or on, salt water, and which have been seen in the Atlantic Ocean north of the Equator.

The North Atlantic is the scene of our book, the great ocean that is now the most travelled by man. Its two sides are provided with an almost equal variety of sea-birds: sixty-eight species, or rather over half are common to both. Of all Atlantic countries Britain, considering its size, has the greatest number of sea-bird species; with no less than eighty, it can boast on its list all but six of those that have been seen on the Atlantic coast of Europe. The British Isles therefore make a good headquarters for a survey of the sea-birds of the North Atlantic. In Britain, and from Britain, the writers of this book have explored the eastern Atlantic sea-bird stations, and enjoyed many fine islands and memorable experiences. One or the other of us has sought the sea-birds south to the frigate-petrel burrows of the Salvages, near the Canary Islands; north to the ivory-gull colonies on the nunataks that rise from the ice-cap of Spitsbergen; or from 30°N. nearly to 80°N., a distance of more than three thousand miles; west we have ranged to Iceland, the Faeroes, Rockall, St. Kilda and the Blaskets of the Kerry coast; east we have travelled to Heligoland, and as far as Laesö in the Kattegat and Gotland in the Baltic, with their off-lying islands of sea-birds. There is no coastal county in England, Wales and Scotland that has not been visited by us both, and not one in Ireland that has not been visited by one of us.

No good British sea-bird cliff or island has been overlooked in our search for what the naturalist searches for; our experience and enjoyment has been long and continuous because both of us are, each in his somewhat different way, obsessed with sea-birds and with islands. We have spent a combined total of nearly seventy years sea-bird watching.

We have seen the little crags and green island swards of the Isles of Scilly and the drowned coast of Cornwall; the granite cliffs and puffins of Lundy; the chalk of south England east from Dorset; the flats and shingles and dunes of Essex and Suffolk and Norfolk, and the sanctuaries of Havergate and Minsmere and Walberswick and Cley and Blakeney and Salthouse, with terns and avocets and many kinds of marsh-birds. One of us has spent many years of his life in the county of Pembroke, living on Skokholm, and on other islands and peninsulas of the Welsh coast; of its sea-birds he has written in many books, and on Skokholm established the first permanent coastal bird observatory in Britain; the other has spent parts of twenty seasons in North Wales, and has worked its coast from St. Tudwal’s Islands to the Little Orme. Both of us know the Yorkshire bird-cliffs most of the way from Flamborough Head to Saltburn; and we have explored the shore of Durham, where bird-cliffs and black industry mix. In Northumberland we know Cullernose Craster, and Dunstan-burgh and Bamburgh Castle, and the cliffs north of Berwick, and other places where sea-birds nest; and we have been to the Holy Island, and to Coquet Isle, and to various of the Farne Islands, where the guillemots and kittiwakes are tame. We have seen the steep cliff-hill of the south part of the Isle of Man, and the sanctuary of the Calf; and have visited the inland gull colonies of North Lancashire and the Lakes.

In Scotland we have, at one time or another, visited every important sea-bird station: in the east St. Abb’s Head, Fast Castle, Tantallon Castle, the Bass Rock, the exciting Isle of May, and many others; in the west the Lowland coast from the Mull of Galloway in Wigtownshire up-Clyde as far as Ailsa Craig, whose magnificent gannetry has been the scene of many weeks of enjoyment and experiment in efforts to improve the counting of nesting sea-birds. Our visits farther north have taken us to Fowlsheugh in Kincardineshire, and round the bird-cliffs of the Aberdeen-Banff border—Pennan Head, Troup Head and others. West along into the Moray Firth we have hunted out the bird-cliffs as far as they go, which is to Covesea in Morayshire.

In the West Highlands we have explored the mainland promontories of Kintyre and Ardnamurchan, and the islands of the Clyde and Inner Hebrides. We have searched the cliffs of west Islay closely from a slow aeroplane. The curious headland of Ceann a ‘Mhara on the lovely sunny Island of Tiree has been investigated, as have the odd-shaped Treshnishs, home of seals, and the capes of Mull. The island of Eigg, where the shearwaters nest in a mountain; the magnificent but somewhat birdless island of Skye, and some of its attendant islets and stacks; both the lonely coast of Ross and its islands—Priest, Tanera, Glas Leac Beg and many others, where Frank Darling first worked out his theory of bird sociality by studying herring-gulls.

In the North Highlands we have watched the birds of the Black Isle Coast, and those of Easter Ross where the coast continues north of the Cromarty Firth to Tarbat Ness. In East Sutherland Dunrobin Castle itself becomes a bird-cliff, because fulmars are now prospecting it—and there we have seen them; in West Sutherland we have travelled nearly the whole wild coast, in instalments spread over several years; we know the crags of Stoer; the Torridonian sandstone precipices of Handa, the best bird island in Sutherland; the lonely cliffs on each side of remote Sandwood Bay—and Eilean Bulgach opposite which only half-a-dozen naturalists have visited; the high promontory of Cape Wrath, and the higher cliff of Clò Mor to the east of it—the highest mainland cliff in Britain—where the guillemots on two-hundred-foot stacks must be observed from six or seven hundred feet above; Fair-Aird Head and the home cliffs and caves of Durness; the huge white crags and stacks of Whiten Head; the complex of islands and cliffs that stretches thence to Caithness, whose headlands too, we know, and their birds—Holborn Head, Dunnet Head, John o’ Groats and Duncansby Head, Noss Head, Berriedale Ness.

In many years, and many boats (as well as from aircraft), we have enjoyed the Outer Hebrides, from North Rona (which many call the loneliest place to have been inhabited in Britain) to Barra Head. We have seen the seals and birds of Rona, and counted the gannets of its lonely neighbour Sula Sgeir; and have hunted out the coast of the Lewis, and much of Harris. One of us has slept some nights on the Shiants, among the rats that may be affecting the population of that vast remote puffinry; and has several times threaded the maze of the Sound of Harris, and eight times has been to St. Kilda, whose unsurpassed cliffs and towering stacks have to be seen to be believed (and are sometimes then not believed). We have traversed the Long Isle—North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist and Barra—and many of its attendant isles, and carried on to sail close under the cliffs of Mingulay and Berneray, which for remoteness, grandeur and personality are rivals—much overlooked rivals—to those mighty precipices of St. Kilda, Conachair, Soay and Boreray.