Guillemots on Staple Island, Outer Farne The cliffs are white and acrid with guano, dark with a frieze of seabirds as our boat approaches Staple Island. The Farne Islands is a seabird spectacle, cliffs a tight-packed throng in the breeding season. On a fine day in May a fleet of boats brings visitors who crowd the cliff-top barrier, up close with binoculars and cameras. We look into a shag’s throat, hear its bizarre clicks and hissings, a fight breaks out. Arctic tern eggs are so close to the path the birds dive at us to protect them. Our shoulders are smeared with pooh. A rare seabird experience which we cannot take for granted.
I remember the enchantment of kittiwake colonies from childhood. Today, parties of schoolchildren on the Farne Islands watch wide-eyed in wonder. In his two-part documentary, The Last Seabird Summer? writer and broadcaster Adam Nicolson explores the decline in populations of seabirds and the underlying reasons. The picture is complex, and fluctuating, but the overall trend is of loss. Populations of breeding seabirds do well on the Hebridean Shiant Islands which he owns, but there are significant losses about the UK and he sets out to investigate. And to see what can be done. His programmes travel to Orkney and Marwick Head which has seen a massive decline in the last ten years (I was there in 2011). And to northern Greenland where there continues a tradition of snaring and eating puffin. The Farnes are dedicated to conservation under the aegis of the National Trust in conjunction with Billy Shiels whose boat trip was excellent. (His website gives statistics on bird numbers on the Farnes.) I reread Adam Nicolson’s Sea Room, an ‘ unmediated experience’ with the Shiant Islands,’ I love his description of being alone on the islands and watching the return of the seabirds in mid-April at the start of the season, and their sudden departure in August as they head out to sea where they will spend the winter.
Arrival: The Glad Tidings approaches the seabird cliffs of Staple Island as a puffin comes in to land. Kittiwakes nest foreground. Guillemot and razorbill on entablatures of basalt white with guano
Sailing to Staffa and Fingal’s Cave, with its hexagonal columns of basalt , we saw shag cresting the dark rocks, their wings outstretched. They look reptilian and the earliest shag fossil is dated only two million years after the last of the dinosaurs. The shag is ancient ‘as the Giant’s Causeway,’ says Adam Nicolson. The Shiant Islands are of this same hard, dark igneous rock of basalt and dolerite. It’s a recurring geological motif.
Celtic Christianity took root on Iona off the west coast and was translated to the east, to Holy Island, Lindisfarne. Lindisfarne Castle rises on igneous rock, an intrusion of the dolerite of the Whin Sill. Dunstanburgh Castle and Bamburgh are sited on outcrops of this same geology. The cliffs at Cullernose Point, on the Northumbrian coast, show the columnar structure of dolerite, entablatures which determine the distribution of nests of the kittiwake colony we observe. Columnar, not the horizontal strata of cliff ledges.
Consider seabirds in a spectrum of time : Natural History. A day on the Farnes but what’s the historical context? Trips to Holy Island, LIndisfarne and a day in Durham at St Cuthbert’s shrine focus on Northumbria in 7th century and Celtic Christianity. Melvyn Bragg’s excellent series: The Matter of the North delves further. Research on the Lindisfarne Gospels, written to venerate Saint Cuthbert, shows there are ninety colours in the illuminated manuscripts, all derived from lichens, flowers, minerals collected by monks on these islands. In the cosiness of a well-lit study, writing on a computer, I try to imagine the monk Eadfrith creating these beautiful manuscripts on Lindisfarne.
The full day trip to the Farnes gives a wealth of material, but it is a snapshot in time. A single day. I think it through in the context of all the seabird cliffs I’ve known over the years. All I have experienced, and what I have not seen., what few of us see. Like guillemot chicks jumping off a sheer cliff at three weeks, not yet able to fly, and reaching the safety of the sea below- if they judge it right. I’ve seen it in Svalbard, in the Arctic circle, but not in Britain. Seabirds like guillemot, razorbill and puffin are specialized divers, in their element at sea. Puffin dive to a depth of 60 metres , guillemot to 180 metres. They are supreme divers, adapted to their underwater environment. Different species cram tight in crowded territories on the cliffs but each has its own feeding strategy which can determine whether the species thrives.
We crowded close upon the seabirds of Farne. A day at Dunstanburgh in mist and rain gave solitudes with seabirds. No-one else wandered the castle ruins on their headland. In full waterproofs, we sat having lunch in the shelter of the castle wall looking out at the sea pounding Queen Margaret’s Cove, and listening to the cries of kittiwakes. We peered over the fence at Gull Crag, through sea-pinks, wild thyme, scurvy and sea-campion to razorbill on lichened rocks, their plumage with water droplets our camera lenses with rain drops too. I was struck by the thought that Chris Packham and team and boatloads of visitors to the Farnes have photo archives of the same birds, Cathy the Springwatch shag and the eider who sat patiently on her eggs before the noisy colony of sandwich tern. That Dunstanburgh day was imbued with solitude.
In preparing to give illustrated talks based around this 2016 visit to Northumbria I wanted to draw out certain unifying themes: Seabirds, geology and Celtic Christianity from Iona, Staffa and the west coast to Lindisfarne and the Farne Islands in the east.
So what is the bigger picture? How do seabirds fare about the British Isles? It’s that tension between what the images show and what is actually happening I want to consider.
Reference material:
Tim Birkhead The Most Perfect Thing, a bird's egg
Melvyn Bragg: The Matter of the North.
Spring Watch 2016 on the Farne Islands ( the team arrived shortly after we left.)
Adam Nicolson: Sea room, The Last Seabird Summer?
Celtic Christianity took root on Iona off the west coast and was translated to the east, to Holy Island, Lindisfarne. Lindisfarne Castle rises on igneous rock, an intrusion of the dolerite of the Whin Sill. Dunstanburgh Castle and Bamburgh are sited on outcrops of this same geology. The cliffs at Cullernose Point, on the Northumbrian coast, show the columnar structure of dolerite, entablatures which determine the distribution of nests of the kittiwake colony we observe. Columnar, not the horizontal strata of cliff ledges.
Consider seabirds in a spectrum of time : Natural History. A day on the Farnes but what’s the historical context? Trips to Holy Island, LIndisfarne and a day in Durham at St Cuthbert’s shrine focus on Northumbria in 7th century and Celtic Christianity. Melvyn Bragg’s excellent series: The Matter of the North delves further. Research on the Lindisfarne Gospels, written to venerate Saint Cuthbert, shows there are ninety colours in the illuminated manuscripts, all derived from lichens, flowers, minerals collected by monks on these islands. In the cosiness of a well-lit study, writing on a computer, I try to imagine the monk Eadfrith creating these beautiful manuscripts on Lindisfarne.
The full day trip to the Farnes gives a wealth of material, but it is a snapshot in time. A single day. I think it through in the context of all the seabird cliffs I’ve known over the years. All I have experienced, and what I have not seen., what few of us see. Like guillemot chicks jumping off a sheer cliff at three weeks, not yet able to fly, and reaching the safety of the sea below- if they judge it right. I’ve seen it in Svalbard, in the Arctic circle, but not in Britain. Seabirds like guillemot, razorbill and puffin are specialized divers, in their element at sea. Puffin dive to a depth of 60 metres , guillemot to 180 metres. They are supreme divers, adapted to their underwater environment. Different species cram tight in crowded territories on the cliffs but each has its own feeding strategy which can determine whether the species thrives.
We crowded close upon the seabirds of Farne. A day at Dunstanburgh in mist and rain gave solitudes with seabirds. No-one else wandered the castle ruins on their headland. In full waterproofs, we sat having lunch in the shelter of the castle wall looking out at the sea pounding Queen Margaret’s Cove, and listening to the cries of kittiwakes. We peered over the fence at Gull Crag, through sea-pinks, wild thyme, scurvy and sea-campion to razorbill on lichened rocks, their plumage with water droplets our camera lenses with rain drops too. I was struck by the thought that Chris Packham and team and boatloads of visitors to the Farnes have photo archives of the same birds, Cathy the Springwatch shag and the eider who sat patiently on her eggs before the noisy colony of sandwich tern. That Dunstanburgh day was imbued with solitude.
In preparing to give illustrated talks based around this 2016 visit to Northumbria I wanted to draw out certain unifying themes: Seabirds, geology and Celtic Christianity from Iona, Staffa and the west coast to Lindisfarne and the Farne Islands in the east.
So what is the bigger picture? How do seabirds fare about the British Isles? It’s that tension between what the images show and what is actually happening I want to consider.
Reference material:
Tim Birkhead The Most Perfect Thing, a bird's egg
Melvyn Bragg: The Matter of the North.
Spring Watch 2016 on the Farne Islands ( the team arrived shortly after we left.)
Adam Nicolson: Sea room, The Last Seabird Summer?
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