10

GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL

In which our author goes to the margins of land and sea, gets up close and personal with amazing creatures, and falls in with a band of excellent people

I am fifty-four years old and I have never held a storm petrel. What the hell have I been doing with my life?

In my defence, opportunities for close contact with this magical and mysterious bird have been few. I have lived my life inland, mostly in cities; the storm petrel, otherwise known as Mother Carey’s Chicken, lives almost exclusively at sea. Our trajectories have never coincided. Until now.

Richard has brought the petrel up from the harbour to be ringed, and now Giselle is holding it. It’s calm, unblinking in the red light of our head torches, submitting without panic to the brief ordeal of ringing before it’s released back into the night. From the harbour below comes the recorded sound of storm petrel song, played to lure them in.

I say ‘song’. It’s an evocative sound, described by naturalist Charles Oldham as ‘like a fairy being sick’. The purring part of it sounds to me like a Geiger counter, and it’s capped off with occasional skrerks or cherrkas or just outright squawks. So maybe ‘song’ isn’t the most intuitive word to use.

Giselle supervises as Will carries out the ringing, patiently crimping the tiny metal band around the bird’s leg with specialised pliers, making sure it’s in no danger of causing the bird injury or discomfort. When they’re both satisfied the job’s been done properly, she turns to me.

‘Do you want to release it?’

Yes. And no.

I’m a muggle, in bird-ringing terms. This is proper scientific work, carried out by proper scientific people. Giselle and Richard are the wardens, Will a long-term volunteer. Between them they have ringed more birds than I’ve eaten bowls of Grape Nuts.* Me, I’m a bystander, here for the Skokholm experience, drawn by the remoteness, the isolation, and the birds. My main priority so far has been to get as close to the action as I can without disrupting it. And now I’m being invited to hold a life in my hands. For a moment I feel the incipient horror of getting it wrong, of somehow, in my nervous, eager clumsiness, destroying this tiny, fragile thing.

But I also really, really want to do it.

‘Yeah, OK.’ All casual like.

She gives me the petrel. I cradle it gently in cupped hands, desperate not to squeeze too tight, but equally keen not to let it fly away before I’m told. It fits snugly in my palms, even smaller than I’d expected. It is warm and soft, still, trusting. There’s no flapping, no scrabbling to get away. Unexpectedly, it smells – a distinctive, pleasant, musky scent.

If you had to choose a seabird for this first ‘bird in the hand’ experience, the storm petrel would be as good a choice as any. Gulls are feisty, and the bigger ones do a nice line in beak jabbing; gannets, by turns elegant and thrilling on the water, could have your eye out in a trice; fulmars, larger cousins of storm petrels in the tubenose family, vomit a foul-smelling oily gunk all over you that stays on you for days. I’ll take the storm petrel, thanks.

We walk a few yards down the hill, towards the harbour, across the path to the low wall. Giselle tells me exactly what I’m going to do. Place the bird on the wall, keeping my hands around it, then opening them in a V shape, encouraging it to take the righteous path towards the edge and freedom. It might fly straight away, or it might tarry a while. In any case, what we don’t want is for it to come back pathside. Not that it would be disastrous; just inconvenient for Giselle and embarrassing for me.

I follow her instructions. The petrel sits on the wall, apparently happy to chill there till breakfast. And then it’s gone, plopped off onto the ground just the other side of the wall. Then I hear the tiniest flurry as it flies off into the darkness. I pause for a second, then turn to Giselle, keen to thank her for this lifetime experience.

Before I can say anything, there’s a voice from a few yards up the hill.

‘Giselle?’

Alice, one of the other long-term volunteers, has something.

‘Yes?’

‘There’s a Manx shearwater on the wall.’

Of course there is.

Giselle turns, her head torch picking out a dark shape. Plump, squat, beaky. It looks up at us, unmoving.

‘Correct.’

Welcome to Skokholm.

If you’re going to spend a week away from the stresses of life, Skokholm,* a small island off the Pembrokeshire coast, is as good a place as any to do it. Off-grid, and accessible only by weekly boat, it’s a mile long, half a mile wide, and home to approximately 200,000 birds. The human population peaks at twenty-six – a mixture of the wardens, volunteers and paying guests like me – so those seeking a hectic social life needn’t bother. It’s all about the birds – with the odd rabbit, seal or dolphin thrown in.

At one end, a lighthouse; at the other, the cottage, old farmhouse, and associated buildings, all pristine white; bird hides dotted around the island complete the roster of buildings.

Some might regard this kind of isolation as hell – for others, it is paradise. For naturalist Ronald Lockley, who leased Skokholm from 1927 to 1941 and established Britain’s first bird observatory here in 1933, it was his dream island.

Lockley had been looking for an island to live on all his adult life. Entranced by nature from an early age, he first tried his hand at poultry farming, but the lure of the wild was great – he and his wife Doris spent their honeymoon on Grassholm,* a neighbouring island inhabited mostly by gannets – and when he discovered that Skokholm was available, he didn’t hesitate. The tumbledown nature of the buildings didn’t bother him. He and Doris were enterprising and capable, and there was plenty of driftwood about the place to help them patch things up. They were helped in this endeavour by the running aground of the schooner Alice Williams in 1928. Lockley paid £5 for its salvage – a bargain price considering how much coal was on board, never mind the rich pickings in the drift-wood department. They also salvaged the boat’s figurehead, which now takes pride of place in the dining room, keeping watch over all the island’s visitors as they eat their evening meals or touch base for a mid-morning coffee before heading out for more birding.

It is, of course, the birding I’m here for, and in particular the Manx shearwaters and storm petrels for which the island is known. Six weeks earlier I’d seen stuffed specimens of both birds on display at the Natural History Museum in Tring. The storm petrel, supported by a stout wire, angled its head towards me; next to it, a Manx shearwater, about twice the size, seemed to be acknowledging my presence with a respectful inclination, as if in the presence of royalty.

But that brief introduction to static, dead birds behind glass was no kind of preparation for the reality of them. The feel of the storm petrel in my hand, the smell of it, the look of its dark eye, its calmness in the face of the unknown, its uncanny wildness –they stay with me. If I’m used to seeing birds at various degrees of separation – from the blue tits at the garden feeder to the far-off maybe-black-guillemots on Raasay – close physical contact, however brief, takes my relationship with them to somewhere different. And it’s made more memorable by the knowledge that here on the island we are in the crossover zone. These birds come here only to breed; humans barely come here at all. Skokholm is one of the few places where our worlds collide. Their true milieu is on and over the water, where we can never get properly close to them. It makes the sense of privilege, of intimacy, even stronger.

It’s an intimacy that was familiar to Lockley, whose work for a long time was the close study of these enigmatic birds. He was exceptional at it, building the big picture by studying the small, and writing about it with a blend of scientific rigour and vivid imagination – including occasional moments of surprising anthropomorphism. His monographs on the storm petrel and Manx shearwater are based on close study of the birds’ behaviour over many years, nearly all of it on Skokholm.

The combination of island life and bird migration was one thing – but the presence of a thriving rabbit population on the island also offered an opportunity to make a living from the land. But his idea to breed chinchilla rabbits was short-lived – they proved more difficult to catch than he thought. He also realised that writing offered a more stable source of income. He wrote and he wrote and he wrote. Articles beyond measure, and more than fifty books. As well as birds, he wrote about Skokholm and other islands, but his most famous publication is The Private Life of the Rabbit, written in 1964, some years after he left Skokholm and set up a nature reserve at Orielton in southern Pembrokeshire, where he subjected the rabbits to the same keen examination he’d given the seabirds. It’s still regarded as one of the definitive works on the species, and was a strong inspiration for his friend Richard Adams’s Watership Down.

If Lockley’s literary legacy is rich, his ornithological influence has been even more potent. His vision of a place dedicated to the close study of birds led to a network of observatories around the country – twenty of them now, from Fair Isle to Portland – where seabird populations are monitored and a wealth of data is gathered to help us understand more about the mysteries of bird migration.

The storm petrel I held in my hand was one tiny part of that, a single pixel in a mammoth picture, built up over ninety years, and still continuously in the making.

It’s nice to play a part, however small. It makes you feel involved.

My visit to Skokholm coincides with a comparative lull in the island’s year. Its most glamorous breeding visitors, puffins, have gone, the chicks fledged and out at sea, where they spend the majority of their lives. September and October will be migration season – a time when sightings of rarities hit their peak. But the last week of August is relatively quiet. Suits me.

The week before the trip is spent obsessively checking I have all the right gear and enough food. Once you’re on, you’re not getting off until the next boat comes a week later.

I cautiously tell people where I’m spending the week.

‘Oh, it’s a small island off the Pembrokeshire coast.’

‘Sounds lovely. Will you be spending all your time on the beach?’

Yeah no. Skokholm, it’s safe to say, isn’t a beach kind of place. There are cliffs galore, but no beaches. Looking at the map sent in the information pack only whets the appetite. Names like Devil’s Teeth, Mad Bay, Wreck Cove and Wildgoose Bay give you the impression you’re about to embark on a pirate adventure or a Swallows and Amazons re-enactment. Quite apart from anything else, it’ll be good to be in a place where people don’t give you a funny look for wearing a pair of binoculars round your neck.

I’m sharing the island with just a handful of people: there’s Pete, all beard and glasses and camera lenses, a ready smile on his face; Chris, silver-haired, bronzed, rugged and capable, the kind of person you could imagine knows how to skin a porpoise and fashion it into a sturdy backpack; the long-term volunteers, Jodie, Will and Alice, whose enthusiasm and youthful energy are stealthily infectious; Mike and Dale, getting on with the monumental task of trawling and collating the Skokholm archive; and Richard and Giselle, who oversee the whole thing and quietly make sure they include everyone. Through them all island energy flows.

Richard gives us the walkaround on the first day.

The Skokholm landscape is picturesque and rugged. One part of the island is given the feel of a soft, bumpy, fantasy landscape by mounds of thrift and moss; clumps of sea campion drape themselves demurely over the entrances to rabbit burrows; round the corner, huge slabs of red Devonian sandstone breach the water at an angle, waves crashing and frothing at their base; everywhere the rocks protruding through the island’s surface are speckled with lichens – smooth, mustard-yellow patches rubbing shoulders with hairy green-grey tufts; there are large areas of bracken, turning from lush green to orangey copper, fronds curling in the sunlight; and everywhere there are birds. Fulmars, surfing the air on stiff wings with staggering control; mixed rafts of gulls on the sea; choughs – small, glossy black corvids with blood-red beaks and legs – hopping about after each other, their twanging calls echoing around the rocks.

Views towards the mainland take in Skokholm’s sister island, Skomer, the lurking outline of St Ann’s Head on the mainland, and beyond it the oil refinery at Milford Haven, the building of which was vigorously and unsuccessfully opposed by Ronald Lockley. Look the other way and there is nothing but sea, interrupted occasionally by the Rosslare ferry and, today, by seven grey herons flying aimlessly around the lighthouse.

Richard points them out as we follow the path to the quarry at the far end of the island. He’s fresh-faced, affable, and possessed of a nice line in understated wit. He tells us about the island’s history, its bird population and the life of the wardens. They’re on duty from February to November, seven days a week, come hell or high water – and in one of Skokholm’s regular storms, there’s plenty of both.

The ground is dotted with small slabs, each with a number painted on it. Richard stops by one of them.

‘All around this bit of the island is a network of burrows. Homes to rabbits, of course, but also . . .’ he moves the slab to one side and reaches into the burrow ‘. . . to birds.’

He extracts the contents of a Hoover bag and dumps it on the grass.

On closer examination, the grey entity in front of us turns out to be a Manx shearwater chick, but the confusion is understandable. There is a head at one end, tipped with a slender, hooked beak. A wingtip peeks out at an angle at the other end. But otherwise it is just a mass of shaggy grey fluff. You would have to have a heart of stone not to find it overwhelmingly cute.

It sits patiently, plumage more ruffled than its temperament, as Richard gives us a rundown of what life holds for it.

‘In a few weeks this straggly grey fluffbundle will develop actual feathers, and the bird will start to emerge from the burrow and get used to the world. At the moment its parents are still feeding it, but at some point they’ll head out to sea, abandoning it to fend for itself. And then, one night, it will fly that way’ – he points out to sea – ‘for a bit, then it will turn left and it will fly to South America, never having made the journey before, and with nobody to show it the way.’

He pauses for a few seconds to allow us to appreciate the impact of this information. And it’s while I’m thinking of the instinctive and unquestioning bravery of young shearwaters that a large bird of prey flies quickly over our heads and behind the lighthouse. My view of it is fleeting, but the impression I get is enough for the word ‘goshawk’ to jump into my head, albeit accompanied by a floating question mark. I daren’t say anything, though. I am by some distance the least experienced and knowledgeable birder on the island, and it wouldn’t do to lead people up the garden path on the first day.

To my intense gratification, Richard’s reaction matches mine.

‘Was that a goshawk?’

And at this point he is faced with a problem. If this is indeed a goshawk it would be a moment of some excitement, so his birding instinct is to get after it as quickly as possible. That he would be leaving his newly arrived guests in the lurch is incidental – we can fend for ourselves for a minute or two, or even join him in the pursuit – but there is a flightless ball of raw meat on the grass next to him, and any number of hungry gulls in the area. Leaving the shearwater chick undefended, even for a short time, would be an act of wanton cruelty.

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen an affable Yorkshireman bundle a Manx shearwater chick into a nesting burrow. The chick doesn’t even have time to be affronted. And now Richard’s away, bounding up the rise towards the lighthouse, and we’re after him, not wanting to miss out. We reach the top of the rise just in time to see the bird swoop out of sight again behind the cliff. I have time to see it in more detail, and even though my experience of goshawks is restricted to a single bird in Speyside in 2016, this time I see enough to stifle excitement.

It’s a sparrowhawk. A female, notably large, but a sparrowhawk nevertheless. Excellent birds, sparrowhawks, and always a thrilling sight. But not what we hoped it might be.

Richard shrugs.

‘Ah well. Not a gos, then. There you go.’ He turns to me. ‘Didn’t it look massive?’

I nod. It did, to me. And it’s somehow reassuring that even someone of his knowledge and experience can be fooled as well, even if only for a moment.*

The walk continues, and soon Richard is holding up a dried-out Manx shearwater carcass.

I’ve noticed them lying about the place, at various stages of decomposition, like dirty socks on the bedroom floor. One was a recent kill, its neck and throat ripped open, exposed to the elements, head impossibly bent underneath the body. This one is long gone, fossil-like in its desiccation.

‘So this is a dead Manx shearwater. It was most likely killed by the island’s apex predator, the great black-backed gull, or GBBG, or “jeeb” for short.’ He gestures towards a jeeb standing not far from us – huge, beaky, emitting an aura of barely repressed sullen fury. ‘People travel thousands of miles to see apex predators. Lions, tigers. They could just come here and look at a jeeb. They’re magnificent.’

Given the low status of gulls in the public’s estimation, I suspect he knows it’s a pipe dream, but we take his point.

‘If you see a dead bird on the island – and you will – just have a quick look to see if its wings have been clipped. We do that to make sure we don’t count the same bird twice.’ He jiggles the wingtips between thumb and forefinger. ‘If they have, that’s fine, and get on with your day, but if they’re pristine, then just tip us the wink, tell us where it was, and we’ll come out and make sure it’s recorded. We record all the wildlife we find on the island, dead or alive. At the end of the day you’re welcome to join us in the cottage for the log, a roll call of everything seen here. So do feel free to keep records if you want, and share them with us at the log. You don’t have to, but all information is good information, no matter how mundane you think it is. In your back garden, a blue tit is an abundant and commonplace bird. On Skokholm it would be a massive deal. And even if these things seem insignificant to you, they’re all adding to the big picture.’

He throws the shearwater carcass to the ground, near a small patch of mushrooms, their pertness a mockery of its eternal stillness. And as always when I come across the stark finality of death in nature, the words of Werner Herzog, film-maker and noted Pollyanna, float into my head: ‘. . . there is some sort of harmony. It is the harmony of collective murder . . .’

It’s good to have these reminders of the part death plays in the big picture. We’re told over and over again of nature’s benefits. And I subscribe to that view, broadly. But so much of it is airbrushed out. And in our keenness to get people connected with it, unrealistic expectations are set. Sometimes the signs at nature reserves, designed to encourage kids to get involved, smack slightly of desperation.

‘Hey kids! This is FUN! Is everybody having FUN yet?’

Death isn’t fun. It’s brutal, impassive. But it’s part of it all, and to hide it seems disingenuous. Besides, children love a good kill. Show them a peregrine stooping on a pigeon at 200 mph and their attention is guaranteed. And you can bet that a class of ten-year-olds would look at gulls in a different way if they saw a jeeb, as it is perfectly capable of doing, swallowing a live rabbit whole.

We head back, Richard continues with the talk, and as we make our way round Lockley’s Dream Island, its magic revealing itself to us in bright, breezy sunshine, I fall ever so slightly in love with the place.

Night falls. The isle is full of noises. It would be a stretch to describe them as ‘sweet airs’, but they do give delight.

They are the sounds of Manx shearwaters coming in from the sea – hoarse, rhythmic wailings, like haunted asthmatic wood pigeons.

They spend the day out at sea, feeding, coming in to land only when their predators are safely tucked up in bed. Evolution has decided they must be strong flyers, adapted to the low skimming over the ocean swell that gives them their name. So they have slim wings and powerful bodies. But this aerial strength has a side effect: they are comically ungainly on land. Their legs are placed far back on their bodies, so to move on land they either do short stuttering bursts on tiptoe, or shuffle along on their stomachs, pushing with their wings and feet. The young ones, exploring the strange world outside their burrows for the first time, can barely do that. This makes catching and ringing them relatively easy, so after roll call, a party heads out along the main island path that runs from the cottage to the lighthouse and gets to work.

There are Manxies everywhere. Several pass overhead as I follow the ringers. One blunders into my legs and scuttles off into the bracken. Another sits in the middle of the path, almost defiant in its stillness. Up ahead, the ringing group stand in a huddle, ringing a bird with care and diligence.

Richard walks towards me, a Manx shearwater tucked under each arm.

‘Hi, Lev.’ He inclines his head towards a bird shuffling slowly along the edge of the path. ‘Grab that Manxie, will you?’

Yes. Yes, I can definitely do that.

It turns out I can.

The trick to picking up a Manx shearwater, I discover, is to move slowly, then fast. Approach with care, making sure you don’t spook it. Then make your move, ensuring you hold its wings firmly to its side.

I share this knowledge just in case you might at some stage need it. You never know.

I bend down, grab it, and clutch it to my bosom.

Is it stressed by this capture? It’s impossible for me to tell. It shows no resistance at all. Its only response is when I relax the grip of my left hand and it slips into a slightly less comfortable position. A wriggle or two, an irritated peck, a readjustment, and all is well again.

There’s a kerfuffle off to the right. A Manxie, emerging from the bracken as fast as its wings can carry it. It flies low and fast, straight towards Chris. Half a dozen head torches turn towards him.

He barely blinks, reaching out and catching the bird in both hands like a rugby ball, then holding on to it in the approved manner, nonchalant as anything, as if he doesn’t consider a day complete until he’s caught a fugitive seabird.

He hands it over to Richard.

‘There you go. One Manxie.’

Signed, sealed and delivered.

By any objective measure, sea watching is a ridiculous thing to do – hours are spent staring into the roiling expanse, trying to distinguish one small black dot on the surface of the water from another. And yet there’s a mesmerising magic to it as well, a zen-like mixture of concentration and meditation as the sun and foam and waves and swell and spume conspire to send you into a state of extreme serenity.

A nagging wind blows in from the north west, just strong enough to be called ‘fresh’. There is some high cloud over the mainland to my left, but otherwise the skies are blue. Sunset is a couple of hours away. I’m trying to work out if the raft of auks in the distance are guillemots or razorbills. Matters are made more difficult by the swell, which obscures them from view just as I’ve fixed on what I think is a salient feature. With the naked eye, they’re invisible; through the telescope they’re black and white blobs bobbing on the surface, the specific arrangement of the black and white being a key clue to their identification. My confused brain ties itself in knots.

I leave it, sweep the horizon with my binoculars, and work my way back across, picking up a few gannets in the middle distance. And now, as I accustom myself to what at first seems an empty, featureless seascape, I see something else. Narrow parentheses low over the water, describing long arcs this way then back and this way then back and this way then back, the swaying rhythm of their glides almost lulling me into a trance.

You wouldn’t believe they’re the same bird. Last night, stranded on the path, shuffling out of their burrows, ungainliness in bird form; today, over the sea, masters of their elements, graceful, easy, flowing. I try to equate these slender creatures with the dumpy thing I held in my arms eighteen hours earlier. It’s a stretch.

There’s a rustling without. A cheery bronzed face appears at the window.

‘Oh. Hello, Chris.’

‘Hello. Anything about?’

It feels rude to the seabirds I’ve been admiring for the last halfhour to say, ‘Nothing much’, but convention dictates that we don’t get excited about the usual stuff.

‘Oh, just a few gannets feeding out there, a couple of fulmar, Manxies beginning to come in . . . and there’s a raft of guill—’

‘Oh look, there’s a sunfish.’

He’s pointing down at the sea, close in, just over the lip of the cliff. A few juvenile gulls are floating gently on the surface. I’d seen them and then ignored them. Identification of juvenile gulls is best left to the professionals, as far as I’m concerned, and I had enough on my plate what with the guillemots/razorbills, not to mention the simple and often underrated act of just switching off and letting the mind wander.

Now I look in the direction he’s pointing, and I see, floating just beneath the surface, an indistinct white shape. Closer inspection reveals a fin or two. It wasn’t there when I last looked, a few seconds earlier. But even if I had seen it, I’m pretty sure I would have thought it was a plastic bag. It’s drifting gently across our sightline, closely accompanied by one of the gulls, which gives it an exploratory peck every few seconds.

‘I caught one of those once on my surfboard. Just floating along and it jumped up into my arms.’

Of course it did. Chris has form in the wildlife-catching arena.

The sunfish, still beset by gulls, rotates slightly in the water and hoists a fin languidly above the surface.

‘Oh hi, Chris,’ it seems to be saying. ‘How are things? Who’s your idiot friend?’

I’m aware that this feeling of irritation stems only from my own sense of inadequacy in the face of Chris’s extreme competence. He’s not trying to be more outdoorsy than me, or more attuned to nature. He just is. And if I have difficulty with people who can catch flying Manx shearwaters as easy as winking, then that’s my problem, not his.

It doesn’t help that he’s really nice.

The sunfish has drifted out of view, and the gulls look slightly peeved at the disappearance of their new toy. I redirect my attention to the Manxies and their eternal sweeping dance.

A new morning. Fresh and bright and dewy.

Four days in, and I’ve developed a routine. Up early, straight down to the harbour to say hello to the seals.

There are eighteen of them today, lolling about on the rocks or bobbing languidly in the water, whiskery noses poking up above the surface, their eyes deep dark holes which only encourage Herzogian thoughts. The natural melancholy induced by the sight of them is enhanced by the acoustics of the harbour, which amplify their sounds – eerie, otherworldly howlings – in an uncanny way.

For all that they effectively do nothing for half an hour, this is time well spent, and I allow myself to stay still and savour it for a few minutes more. My instinct is to keep moving, but one phrase from a conversation with Richard the day before sticks in my head.

‘Sometimes all you need to do is sit back and let it all come to you.’

It’s not meant as a rebuke, but it strikes a chord. Activity is all very well, but I sometimes – often, in fact – forget the benefits of stillness.

On the other hand, I’m hungry. I head back to the observatory. The kitchen and courtyard are empty. Everyone else is out and about. I make myself a coffee and sit on the bench, looking back towards the mainland – no more than three miles away, but effectively on another planet. Time, ever variable in its passing, slows to a standstill. Peace washes over me. A painted lady butterfly flutters past, lands on the buddleia next to me. Every few years there is a mass influx of these large yet somehow delicate butterflies from the Continent. This has been one of those years, and I have drunk my fill of them while on Skokholm. Part of their attraction is the light orange and black colouring – less gaudy than the more obvious charms of a red admiral or small tortoiseshell – but it’s the migration that bewilders. My brain can, more or less, encompass the idea of a bird undertaking those long, hazardous journeys, but a butterfly? Show me a hundred times and I still won’t quite believe it.

Mike leaves the library and walks past me towards the nets on the left. This is a Heligoland trap, named after the place where they were invented. Built like a fruit cage, they have a wide opening at one end, narrowing towards a catching box at the other. Once in the cage, birds funnel towards the box, where they are easily retrieved for ringing.

Mike is one of those people whose eyes tell the story. A favourite uncle or grandfather, quiet humour just below the surface, intelligence and wisdom ingrained. He says little, but understands much.

He lopes back past me, into the courtyard, towards the ringing hut. He has a cotton bag in his left hand. It is wriggling.

‘Would you like to see me ring a whitethroat?’

I think so, yes.

He handles the bird with an expertise born of decades of experience, talking me through the process. Log the bird. If it is already ringed, take the ring number; if not, apply the ring using the appropriate ring and pliers. If fitted correctly, the ring is no inconvenience to the bird. But care must be taken. The number one rule for any ringer is that the bird’s welfare comes first.

There are 2,300 trained ringers in Britain and Ireland. It’s a rigorous process, involving many hours of supervision by a ringing trainer, and many early mornings, this being the most active time for bird movements. It takes several years to qualify, and even then you are constantly monitored, and have to remain active as a ringer to keep your licence. You can become prime minister with fewer qualifications.

The whitethroat looks tiny in Mike’s hand. He applies the ring with efficiency and minimal adjustment, logs its details, and the time and date of the bird’s capture. He measures the bird’s body length and wing feathers. Then he pops it into a little tube and weighs it. He blows through a short straw, ruffling the bird’s chest and stomach feathers so the dark pink flesh underneath is visible. His movements are small, neat and controlled.

‘I’m measuring how much fat the bird has. Too little, and it’ll likely not survive migration; too much, and it might slow it down and make it easier prey for predators on the way.’

Soon enough, he’s done, and now he looks at me, the twinkle ever present.

‘Have you ever held a small bird in the hand?’

He knows the answer already.

‘Just the storm petrel the other night.’

He describes how I’ll need to hold it, using the ‘ringer’s grip’. The bird will be held loosely but firmly, its neck between my index and middle fingers, the rest of it in the palm of my hand.

He gives it to me. The whitethroat is calm. Whether this is because it is resigned to its fate or because I ooze trustworthiness, it’s hard to tell, but I opt to believe the latter. It looks at me with a cool black eye, completely still. I would like to keep it forever, or at least a minute more. But it is a free, wild thing, its enslavement temporary.

I bring my left hand up to my right, forming a little cup. The whitethroat’s feet touch down briefly in the palm of my left hand. A tiny scrape. And then I lift my right hand and open up the fingers, and it’s free to go. For the merest instant, so brief I can only conclude it’s wishful thinking on my part, the whitethroat stays in my hand, as if it too would like to prolong our relationship. And then it flies, wings strong, fast and delicate on the air, and the feeling, so vivid, is already a memory as it makes for the bush on the other side of the courtyard, the only rebuke to my tenderness a bathetic squirt of poo on the cobbles below.

Life-changing moments take many forms.

The last night. Roll call.

Richard goes through the list in taxonomic order as usual, inviting contributions from the floor. Over the course of the week I’ve become confident enough in my knowledge of the island’s geography and the likely make-up of its bird life to be able to contribute some definitive counts. Gannets, fifteen at Howard’s End; buzzard, one at lighthouse; rock pipit, thirteen at Isthmian Heath; swallow, ten over North Plain.

I leave the gulls to the experts.

Occasionally a mild discussion breaks out, delaying proceedings. Richard sits it out, takes a sip of whisky, allows the chatter to die down, then nudges the room back to the business at hand.

‘Guillemots, anyone?’

Forty-eight on the sea at Crab Bay, apparently.

There is a quiet warmth to these proceedings, a community spirit engendered by the wardens and springing from the reason everyone is here – a love of nature in general and birds in particular. Skokholm visitors come in different shapes and sizes – birders, artists, general wildlife people, photographers, people just wanting a break and not interested in the run-of-the-mill, and many more. And they come back time and again. This is in part down to the lure of the place. Of course it is. But there’s more to it than that.

The trick that Richard and Giselle have pulled off here is a remarkable one. Everyone is welcome. It’s as simple as that. If you come to the island, you belong. And you’re not just welcomed; you’re positively included. It’s a rare and special thing, and as Richard winds up proceedings, I feel a pang, knowing this is the last time. This is a place where worlds meet. Land and sea, day and night, birds and humans. I’m leaving it sooner than I’d like.

Perhaps I’ll return. Yes, that’s a plan.

Outside, it’s clear and chilly with a hint of melancholy. We head out along the lighthouse path. The relentless cycle of ringing continues up ahead, but I trail behind, wanting a bit of solitude before lending the mighty weight of my expertise to the ringing effort. A Manx shearwater looks up at me from the edge of the path, almost expectant. I pay it no heed and stroll on. I find a rock, as flat as I can, and lie on it. One of Skokholm’s many charms is the darkness of the night sky. I look up at it, not looking at anything in particular. There is no moon, and the stars are all the brighter for it. There are a lot of them too – far more than I’ve ever seen in London. I don’t know what they all are, of course. I can do the Plough, and Orion. And I suppose if I had to, I could find Polaris. I might know the names of other celestial bodies – Cassiopeia, Cygnus, Canis Major, and maybe a few others not beginning with ‘C’ – but I’d have zero chance of finding them. My knowledge of the night sky is vague, to say the least.

And as I look up at them and realise the full extent of my ignorance, something goes click in my head.

I have one more place to visit. Maybe two.

* I have eaten many bowls of Grape Nuts.

* I had always imagined it to rhyme with ‘Stockholm’, and it does indeed have the same root, but it turns out it’s more similar to ‘Slocombe’.

* Coincidentally the first RSPB reserve in Wales, established in 1948.

* I discover later that it would have been just the second record of the bird on the island.