Sea Room

by Adam Nicolson

  Resting above them on the steepness of the slope, I watch a gannet out at sea. That is different country. In the binoculars, its hanging, seeking, intelligent head is mobile, looking left and right in front of its swept-back, spotless body. The fuselage rises on stiletto wings, hangs coolly for a moment, a hundred feet above the sea, and then falls, the body twisting as it goes down, a quarter-revolution or so. There is a sudden half-folding of the wings, a darting of the form, and the bird cuts into the water. The sound is of a paper bag being popped, a muffled implosion, leaving behind it on the surface a pool of broken water, a bubbled glaucousness at the point of entry. A gannet can swallow four or five mackerel or herring in a single dive. It is gorging unseen. Then the bird is up, returning to the surface fast like a human swimmer, bobbing up, shuddering, a pause and then the long haul back into the air, a workman-like beat of the wings before returning to the glide, the hunting glide. You can see them three or four miles away, soaring and diving, the repeated search and plunge for prey. The whiteness is part of their armoury. Gannets are intended to be visible at distances so that their brothers, sisters and cousins, can see them on the ocean and can share in the kill. The sea is their savannah.

  If puffin and gannets are from different worlds, the shags are from another universe. Nothing can really prepare you for the reality of the shag experience. It is an all-power meeting with an extraordinary, ancient, corrupt, imperial, angry, dirty, green-eyed, yellow-gaped, oil-skinned, iridescent, rancid, rock-hole glory that is Phalacrocorax aristotelis. They are scandal and poetry, chaos and individual rage, archaic, ancient beyond any sense of ancientness that other birds might convey. Even an eagle or a buzzard seems slick by comparison. The earliest puffin fossil to have been discovered is no more than five million years old. The oldest shag, identical to its modern descendants, has been found in rocks laid down sixty million years ago, a couple of million years after the cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs.

  As you climb the big broken scree towards their stinking slum, as you hear the honking, guttural hoot of their cry even in mid-flight as they beat against the wind around the headland, you can feel in the creep of your skin that you are somehow, in this coming encounter, penetrating a scale of time that can be measured only geologically. The shag was born half as long ago again as the Alps were made. The shag, or something very like it, flew over seas in which the ichthyosaurs swam. The shag is as old as the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim, as Staffa, as the Cuillins in Skye. Here today, it is older than the rocks on which it sits.

  You can only have a sudden immersion into the shag world. Your head comes over the lip of rock, and there, jutting and quivering in front of you, perhaps two feet away, defending its young, that guarantee of survival, is the bird whose yellow gape, as yellow as the heart of a pot of yellow paint, hawks and spits at you, its gizzard shaking in anger and fear, its whole head prodding and prodding towards you, like an angry finger. There’s nothing neat or controlled about it. There’s a fluster of rage, resentment and clumsiness as the big, black, webbed feet stamp around the sticky, white, guanoed mayhem of kelp stalks and wrack-branches that is its nest, in the back of which, creeping for the shadows, you see the couple of young, half-formed embryonic creatures, shag chicks, rat-birds, serpentine, leathery, hideous.

  Then, through all the fluster, you see the eye of the adult, a green point of clarity, a distillation of the green that lurks in the black of the bird’s damp feathers. But in the light of that eye, the whole greasy body seems an irrelevance. The eye is the source of all that anger, the bright, hard centre of the shag’s existence. It’s an adamantine green, a mineral concentrate, able to outlast any kind of erosion or catastrophe that might occur around it. It is the eye of animal persistence and the colour stays with you as the bird flogs off towards the ruffled sea. How on earth could anyone have ever clubbed one of these things to death? Hunger would make you do it, but then hunger would make you choose a softer option.

  The puffins are prep-school boys beside the shags and it is their innocence that encourages you to catch them. Puffin eggs may be relatively disgusting, mysteriously more disgusting than those of their relatives the razorbill and guillemot, with whites that are a livid blue, but the adult puffin’s flesh is delicious boiled, stuffed, roasted, smoked or salted, as it is throughout the lands bordering the north-east Atlantic. There is no doubt that puffins were eaten here in the past: we found clutches of puffin heads in the midden that we excavated next to the eighteenth-century house on Eilean an Tighe. The heads were still clustered together deep in the pile, where they had been thrown, once cut from the bodies being prepared for a stew.

  Almost certainly these puffins would have been caught with snares. I have done it myself and it requires little skill. There is a snare preserved in the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh and I made a copy of it. It is as primitive and as ingenious as technology gets. Take, first, a length of rope, perhaps six or eight feet long. Tie loops in each of its ends. Then, at intervals of about a foot along its length, tie on short snares made of string. Form each of these little strings into a noose with a mouth about four inches across, so that if you put your finger into the noose and pull, the string will tighten around it. Then pin the rope to the ground at each end in front of some puffin burrows and retire. The puffin is an extremely curious bird. It will inspect and pick up anything of interest on the grass in front of its burrow. They will soon begin to investigate the catching rope. One puffin after another sees it, snaps it up in its beak, shakes it, examines it with one eye like a monocled biologist, thinking perhaps that the string is some kind of land-fish or out-of-element sprat.

  This is now illegal. The puffin is protected by law. You can buy them frozen in supermarkets in the Faeroes but there is no eating them here. Besides, there is, for us now, something a little wicked about attempting to catch a puffin. It is – I shudder slightly to say this – amusing in a way of which the modern eco-consciousness does not entirely approve. Where the boys from Lemreway would have taken it with glee and a sense of fun, happy at the abundance of this marvellous summer presence of the birds, we must now stand back, in silence and admiration, committed to non-involvement, to ‘respect’, to whispered distance.

  So this catching of a puffin is a historical experience and a strange one, as you watch the sweet bird getting caught in the trap you have devised. It picks up the snare string and ignores it. It walks to and fro in front of its burrow. It stands for a moment, Chamberlain on the tarmac back from Munich, sniffy-nosed, buttoned up, the chest feathers riffled by the breeze, and as it does so, looking out to the north, it puts its foot inside the noose. I am watching from a hundred yards away on the grassy bank. I see the puffin lift its orange foot, I see the foot within the noose and I see the string tighten around the orange scaly leg. The bird does not know for a moment that it is caught. It stands, a captive on the grass, and examines its identical neighbours. The colony is an almost silent place. A little burred growling comes from the puffins inside the burrows, a slow, creaking note. But my puffin has now felt that it is caught. It wants to promenade a little to the left. It can’t. It tries to walk a little the other way. It can, but only for six inches or so. It then, most pitiably of all, goes into its burrow. I see the saddest thing: a single, bright orange puffin leg sticking out horizontally from the mouth of a burrow, the body of the bird invisible, the leg held there by the string of my snare.

  It doesn’t take much to kill a puffin. I hit it on the head – people often used their tillers for this – and the bird dies. The body is a little longer and fatter than a large and old-fashioned mobile phone. Its chest is thickly and beautifully insulated with a mass of tiny feathers. They have the consistency of felt wadding and you can push your fingers in among them, covering the quick of your nails, feeling for the warm breast flesh underneath. This is what keeps it from dying of cold out in its eight-month-long vigil in the North Atlantic. The bird, in fact, has a wonderful circulatory system, consisting of t
hree separate loops – one for the body and one for each orange foot – which are only connected to each other by the narrowest of necks. This means that the blood in the feet, which inevitably dangle in the ocean, can remain at a temperature scarcely above freezing, while the blood in the body, behind that thick mat of feather-hair, remains beautifully warm. The ornithologist who discovered this miracle of self-preservation described the puffin as ‘a hot water bottle with two orange icicles hanging off the end.’

  It is a bird whose life has made it useful for human beings. That thick chest down makes for perfect pillow stuffing. So much was it valued in the nineteenth century that on St Kilda puffins were caught by the tens of thousand for their feathers alone. The naked bodies were spread out as a manure-cum-mulch on the fields and gardens. That turns upside-down some of the ideas that people still have of the poverty of life in these places. At times there was glut, far too much goodness to know what to do with because the meat of the puffin, well basted and roasted in the oven for thirty-five or forty minutes at most, is delicious. It is as dark as wild duck, as rich as that, with no more than the suspicion of a life at sea about it. I have eaten puffin with my friends. It is dense with a kind of mineral substance, next to which farmed animals seem vapid and soggy. Eating a puffin is a sudden reminder of the reality of wildness from which we are removed. What we eat is as flaccid as ourselves. And that is the heart of Shiantism: the shock of unmediated life.

  The puffin is a chesty creature and there is a curiously large amount of meat on such a small bird. If, as my father used to tell me, the definition of a gentleman is ‘someone who can make a grouse do for six’, the Shiant Islanders, with their annual puffin bonanza, would have had no difficulty qualifying. The puffin could give them so much breast meat because of the way it lives its life. It must fly but it must also swim and its fore-limbs are a compromise between paddles and wings. The ideal wing for a sea bird, giving maximum lift for minimum effort, allowing easy, energy-conserving glides across the waves, is long and narrow, like the wings of an albatross by which it can be hung around the mariner’s neck. You could never hang a puffin around a mariner’s neck because its wings have been trimmed back to make them work underwater. They are feathered fins and I have spent summer afternoons on the Shiants swimming with these birds. They are not frightened. They gather around you, swimming up to you, looking curiously sideways at this new kind of rubber-suited whale. The puffins – and the guillemots, which are braver, beside them – dart in the sea, those wing-fins propelling them suddenly forward, a pulsed movement, more gobbling on the sea than grazing on it.

  At sea, the wing-fin is extremely efficient. Ornithologists have attached depth meters to puffins and the deepest dive they have recorded, extraordinarily, is a hundred and eighty feet below the surface. Another was observed making a hundred and ninety-four dives in eighty-four minutes, with an average of only three seconds between each dive, which is a measure either of stamina or desperation or both. In the air, the puffin has to beat his short wings extremely fast. There is not enough lift for any sort of level glide. Only when taking off from the heights of their burrow slopes can they half-glide, a beautiful angel-like position as they drop to sea-level. There they must begin level flight. That involves an exhausting six hundred beats a minute and that is why they are such good eaters. A huge breast muscle is needed to power the wing which life at sea – and under the sea – has designed.

  The bird teeters, like most of the auks, on the borders of flightlessness. You see a puffin taking off from the sea and it is a desperate business, a grinding attempt to get airborne, to get up the speed at which those wing-fins will work. It is buffeted in a gale as alarmingly as a Sopwith Camel. Once going, a puffin can fly fast, up to sixty miles an hour, but then the landing can be difficult, less a controlled jump jet settling into place than a managed crash, after which there is a lot of head-shaking and shoulder ruffling by which coherence is re-established and dignity restored.

  The birds are here and that’s their vindication. Their strategic compromise has worked. There were scares in the early 1970s that the puffins had experienced an enormous crash in numbers. There is some anecdotal but no hard evidence of this. Harvie-Brown’s account is more one of amazement than of calculation and it is difficult to say that the numbers there today are less than in the past. The first careful counts ever made, in 1970, were repeated in the summer of 2000. Although the shape of the colonies seems to have changed slightly – an extension here, a retraction there – the overall numbers of puffins on the Shiants seems to have remained almost constant over twenty-five years.

  Their presence here, at the top end of a chain that stretches deep into the geological roots of the islands, is a miracle of connectivity. Each step is ripplingly consequent on the one before: because the sea-bed in the Minch is roughened and corrugated with the hard volcanic rock ridges that are the Shiants’ submarine cousins, the tides run violently across them; because the tides are so turbulent the nutrients in the muds and sands on the sea floor are stirred up throughout the height of the water column; because the water column is so thick with those elements, the phytoplankton, the lowest level of life, thrives in the enrichment. On those microscopic plants the zooplankton, the smallest of animals, can happily graze. Sandeels and sprats feed on the zooplankton, and both the larger fish, the mackerels and herring, and the birds can, in turn, feed on them. The birds are not here by chance, or by some kind of avian romanticism. They are here because around them is the great hunting ground and marketplace.

  It goes further than that. The Shiants are on a frontier. They are the northernmost outcrop of the hard volcanic dolerite sills. Those rocks not only cause the currents and turbulence in the sea. They create the protected place of the islands themselves, away from land predators, the foxes, or nowadays the mink, which would destroy the birds. Isolated cliff habitat plus enriched turbulent seas equals bird heaven. This is an ideal site because just to the north, the nature of the sea-bed changes. There, over an area of about ten miles long and ten miles wide, is the perfect breeding ground for the sandeel, the little silver-flash needle of a fish on which the majority of sea birds feed. Sandeels like a rapid but not too rapid circulation of water above a sandy or gravelly, rather than muddy or rocky, sea floor at a depth of no more than two hundred feet. That is just what the North Minch gives them. There they live for the most of the year buried in the sand, waiting for the glory months of spring and summer.

  Everything is precisely timed. With the growing light and warmth in March and April, the plankton begin to thicken in the sea. Then, and only in the daytime, the sandeels emerge from their sandy beds to prey on that plankton and to lay their own eggs. The sea birds then begin to arrive and, while making their nests and incubating the eggs, prey on the adult sandeels. Each bird has a different strategy: the kittiwakes and gulls dabbling in the surface, puffins (despite their two-hundred-foot depth record) usually diving to thirty or forty feet, shags, foot-propelled, feeding on the fish close to shore, the guillemots, wing-propelled pursuit-divers, plunging much deeper, often to a hundred and fifty feet, and going much further afield.

  Each bird is designed for a niche, but each must satisfy the same need. The making of the next generation is the most demanding task ever confronting a bird. Energy expenditure in the breeding season, in terms of building a nest, catching fish, avoiding the predatory gulls and skuas, goes up by two thirds compared with the relatively restful time spent out on the ocean in winter. That energy expenditure needs feeding. For every three fish caught in the winter, five must be caught during their Shiants summer. And for that surge in appetite, each sandeel or small sprat represents a package of high-energy food. They are also, incidentally, delicious. Every morning during the breeding season in the puffin colonies you find sandeels accidentally dropped, many of them bearing the marks where the puffins carried them in their beaks. They make a delicious whitebait. A breeding sea bird requires 2,200 kilojoules a day. A small shrimp, for exa
mple, provides only 4 kJ/gram, a squid no more than 3.5 kJ/g, but the rich, oily sandeel packs in a huge 6.5 kJ/gram. Here, in other words, is the concentrated protein pulse on which the entire bird system relies. Without it, this whirring miracle in the air above me could scarcely happen.

  The birds are perfectly synchronised with it. When laying and incubating, they feed on the adult sandeels. By late May the young sandeels, which were born in March, have metamorphosed into little fish themselves and are catchable by the sea birds just at the moment when their own young are going through their sharpest growth phase. Baby sandeels provide the food for baby chicks. That is what you see hour after hour as the puffins come in out of the Minch, the tiny glittering fish still wriggling in their beaks: infant prey for infant predators.

  If any link in the chain fails to deliver, catastrophe threatens. If the sea temperatures disturb the production of plankton, or delay it, or if for some reason the immense productivity of the sandeels, as ubiquitous as grass in the ocean, fails to come up to its usual volume, or if they are late, or if, as has happened in the North Sea but never yet in the Minch, vast tonnages of sandeel are caught for catfood – then the immense bird populations of the Shiants would be threatened with death. That catastrophe has at times in the past twenty years struck in Shetland, Norway and the Americas, where dead birds have littered the sand like feathered surf.