Just keep heading north, I repeated to myself. Being back on my bike was fun, but weaving through rush-hour traffic with a bulky and much heavier rucksack wasn’t so much. I felt nervous. Exeter to Orkney is a mere lunge on the map, yet mid-pandemic, and it was little short of a mission via public transport. A 40ºC ‘Spanish Plume’ heatwave smothered Britain that week. Moaning about sunburn, lethargy, and feeling ‘hotter than the sun’ seemed all we could muster in small talk. A grave error of judgement found me racing across London to catch my connecting train to Edinburgh, overdressed, on the hottest day in Britain for years. Costa del North Sea couldn’t come soon enough.
With just 30 minutes to cycle from Paddington to King’s Cross St Pancras, I felt tense. Diversions and road closures hindered my progress. I ended up weaving through back streets, hopping onto pavements and dodging roadworks near the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. All trains were operating on a reduced schedule, and only one train was Edinburgh-bound. I was going to have to pull a blinder to make it in time.
Beautiful people drifted along sunny pavements in floaty dresses. Negotiating my journey to King’s Cross while regularly checking Google Maps, I watched* (*slightly envied) an exotic-looking lady I felt sure was heading to the Bulgari for a seaweed body polish by a beautician called Epiphany. I caught sight of my ridiculous reflection ploughing past a Prada window display, ribbons and couture ruffling in my wake.
Arriving at King’s Cross with five minutes to spare, I hurried to get water for the journey, dropping my phone and tickets in a splash across the floor. In a scramble to shove my bike onto the first available carriage as the doors were closing, it turned out to be first-class. With the same urgency as if a Royal were about to arrive, I was ushered to ‘move quickly along please!’ I later realised I had been holding my phone with its torch on full beam the entire time, which explained why heads turned away as I blundered through the carriage – pah, who cared. Fuelled by the distant hope of a seabird on a remote speck of a northern isle, I was escaping.
A few years ago, my dad and I drove around Scotland's North Coast 500 route and hopped across a turbulent Pentland Firth to the Orkney mainland for a day. There was an aura to this archipelago that, even through dense mist and rain, captivated us. Ever since then, I have wanted to give Orkney more time.
Looking out the window as the train raced north, the land was flat and worked. Peterborough, York, Darlington, Newcastle. Lines of pylons and power plants faded into a mirage like an enormous chain-link fence, disciplining the trees and hedgerows that bordered farmland.
During previous trips, I formulated a list of things that may amuse the regular commuter. My favourite became playing Reason for Travel™, where you guess the purpose of your co-traveller’s journey based on their clothes, snacks and rate of texting. Using these variables, my carriage alone yielded a mixture of: those fleeing a failed relationship, those escaping to a forbidden relationship, and those on a mission to rescue an investment bank from financial ruin.
Five hours from London, Berwick-upon-Tweed – a place I had only read about – brought a choppy blue sea to my right. Then clouds, moorland and crying gulls paved the way into Edinburgh Waverley station. Before long, I was eating a falafel kebab with a tinny gin in Princes Street Garden, ranking the spectrum of tattoos and fake tan in an adjacent group. I felt equally decorated with chain grease and blood stains around my ankles from the fight with my bike in my rush to catch the train, but also thrilled about my Edinburgh debut.
En route to Aberdeen to catch the overnight ferry to Kirkwall in Orkney, torrential rains and high winds dominated the following day. It seemed only fitting that in Scotland, I would arrive at the ferry terminal sodden. I could hear the roar of a rather, shall we say, frustrated North Sea. My earlier zest had faded, but I remembered the Robert Louis Stephenson1 quote I had seen tactfully printed onto the revolving toilet door in the train: ‘I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.’ Agreed. Already my solo hopscotch across pandemic Britain on my way to distant isles did feel rather gung-ho – liberating, even – and I had many more steps to take before I reached my destination. So, I locked up my bike in the enormous hull of the ferry next to lorries and freight, bid it a tentative safe passage and climbed on deck into the storm.
Lying about 10 miles off the Scottish mainland, at 59ºN, around 70 islands lie in wait. Only 20 of them are inhabited by people, drawn to the stiff elemental brew of Neolithic history, culture, fertile soils, geology and wildlife these islands offer. It’s a county close enough to the Scottish mainland to retain governmental influence but far enough to assume its own way of doing things. Ask anyone who has visited Orkney, and they’ll either reel off an endless list of things they loved about it, or they’ll be lost for words. It is unique. If you look at the whole of Orkney on the map (especially on one that shows the shipping lanes), it looks like a beech leaf in a later stage of decay. Brittle and fragmented, yet the veins still trace its form as it scatters pieces of itself into the North Sea. A eulogy to an oceanic jigsaw, and all within easy reach of the Great British doorstep.
Where the nearby archipelago of Shetland thrives on fishing, Orkney islanders farm. The blend of temperate coastal climes and varied geology curates rich soils – critical assets quickly recognised by Neolithic settlers back in 3700bc. I was shocked to discover that Orkney has the highest density of beef cattle per hectare in Europe, grazing 76,500 in 2017 alone. Anyway, back to 3700bc and equipped with seeds, livestock and the hope of building a new island nation, groups of farmers left mainland Britain and crossed the treacherous Pentland Firth to explore this curious new land. Together with the persistence of traditional hunter-gatherer know-how, the settlers were part of the wave of agriculture that defined the Neolithic period from 4000bc to 2500bc. It turned out that transforming their patch of land into something that provided reliably for the family offered a sense of ownership and sustenance that their previous nomadic lives lacked.
Such a renewed feeling of place gave settlers room to explore culture and community, giving rise to world-renowned burial sites, stone circles and monuments scattered across the islands. The Knap of Howar, for instance, dating back to around 3600bc, is a stone-built Neolithic house on the isle of Papa Westray. The architects must have done something right, for it remains the oldest standing building in northern Europe. In a similar vein and part of Orkney’s UNESCO World Heritage Site, the unearthed village of Skara Brae on the west coast of the mainland is one of the most intact European relics of the Neolithic era. Following waves of rugged Norse raiders in the eighth and ninth centuries, Orkney was under the thumb of Norway and Denmark until vanquished by Scottish rule in 1472. The Norse ways still whisper across island culture, popping up in old sayings, seabird names and family traditions. Between all this, the various Viking expeditions to Orkney in the eleventh century – and the importance of Scapa Flow as a strategic naval base during both world wars – Orkney is dripping with history. You’d be a fool not to want to grab a straw and suck it right up.
Of course, it was wildlife that I wanted. Luckily, Orkney is genuinely one of the northern hemisphere’s most popular nature hubs – a wild rhapsody for lovers and agnostics alike – and it does very well in the ‘Area’ department. Thirteen Special Protection Areas and six Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) as well as the odd Marine Protected Area (MPA) and National Scenic Area, all of which are well deserved given the place is heaving at its weathered seams with seabirds, seals, whales, dolphins, otters and the endemic (found nowhere else) Orkney vole. This is both a landscape and a soundscape, and the cries of wheeling birds take an equal role in a sonic trio with the wind and waves. Gales and low-lying glacial hills leave this archipelago almost entirely bereft of trees – it’s really quite weird. A teacher I met there explained how schools often organise trips to the Scottish mainland, primarily to allow the local children to see and experience trees and woodland. I haven’t decided whether I could live with that.
Birds gather in seabird cities across Orkney’s sheer cliffs and above the productive seas that surround it. The most recent RSPB2 census on the islands recorded nearly a million breeding birds at any one time. Such epic birdlife has prompted extensive research into the wildlife here, led mainly by the RSPB. Agonising declines in these numbers have spurred much of the recent study (as you’ll soon find out).
Now, if I asked you to think of a seabird, I can almost guarantee you will not think of a black guillemot. Herring gull most probably, perhaps even an albatross or a puffin if you’re feeling rogue? But a black guillemot (Cepphus grylle) is unlikely to come to mind. I would go so far as to say that we don’t give many seabirds much more than a passing thought, despite the fact they are possibly the most accessible link we have between land and sea.
A member of the auk3 family, the black guillemot is a hardy, duck-sized bird found on coasts across the northern hemisphere – an inshore breeder with a penchant for a rocky island and a harbour wall. Like most seabirds, they are long-lived (up to 29 years old) and invest heavily in laying one to two eggs each year. Black guillemots in Europe and the rest of the world are not endangered, but populations in the UK and Ireland are at the southern end of their range and arguably aren’t as secure. Over recent decades, a fall in numbers has awarded black guillemots a place on the UK’s amber list of ‘Birds of Conservation Concern’, meaning care is needed to ensure they don’t get upgraded to the dreaded red list.
In the spirit of general divisiveness, I believe these birds out-rival a puffin any day. Mottled, grey-white winter plumage moults into a summer spent in style: a chocolatey-black and snow-white uniform with killer crimson legs, slender head and a blood-red gape to match. The gape describes the inside of a bird’s open mouth. Honestly, the black guillemot’s is fabulous. During summer, these little guillemots look quite literally suited and booted at all times, thanks to their oval, white wing patches, which may remind you of a killer whale’s false eyes. Nature’s doodles repeat like that sometimes.
Across the Scottish Isles, black guillemots are affectionately named ‘tysties’. Norse words like this still casually feature in Highland and Island conversation – especially around nature – most often nodding to a Norseman’s intangible relationship to seabirds. I must say, it took me a good while to realise that ‘tysties’ were not some sort of local haggis-related delicacy. (Of course, I didn’t like to be a bother and just ask someone to explain.)
North Ronaldsay is the northernmost island of the Orkneys. Famous for its migratory birdlife, world-class bird observatory and seaweed-eating sheep, North Ronaldsay lies on a similar latitude to Karmøy in Norway and is well on the way to the Shetlands and the Fair Isle. It was here I hoped to spend time with the colony of tysties that revel in this tiny island’s rocky shore. For them, North Ronaldsay appears to be the gift that keeps on giving. Both tysties and this island were new to me, and I was eager to meet them.
‘Yeah, she’s not normally this rough at this time of year!’ a crew member admitted to a rather ashen-looking family. He shifted his internal ballast to counter the listing of the ferry as if policing a dinner queue at a 30-degree angle was completely normal. ‘But, this is nothing!’ he added with a cheerful wink as the dad made a swift exit to the toilets. The waves were vast. I had set up a basecamp of sorts in the restaurant at the stern, watching a fading Scottish mainland and a raging wake boiling through the window. I imagined mariners scattered across the North Sea, keenly waiting for the forthcoming Shipping Forecast.
I think I like a rough sea. My brother Tom and I were lucky enough to have a Mirror dinghy with a wooden mast when we were younger. She had all the proper rigging, a butter-yellow hull and red sails. We rinsed every corner of the Exe Estuary in her for years. Mum named her L’oiseau, meaning ‘the bird’ in French. I thought the name ridiculous at the time – but it stuck. And surveying a furious, darkening North Sea, with gulls, gannets and fulmars helming the surf as elegantly as a pianist does the keys, I realised L’oiseau was the perfect name. Because out there? That is a bird’s domain. To mark this revelation, I bought two mini bottles of wine. One down, and my inner soundtrack rose to a glorious crescendo, so I headed out on deck to join my fellow rosy, windswept passengers.
A soup of turquoise waves pummelled the hull of the ferry. Immense offshore wind turbines rose from the churn like a stone circle commemorating an impending War of the Worlds. The sun appeared for a beat and flashed gannets brilliant white. In truth, I felt very enlightened and a bit Scotch mist (apt Cockney rhyming slang) as I finished mini bottle number two, following the contrails of birds as they danced across their North Sea like paper planes. I assumed the confidence of the solo traveller and became that person who wanders up to couples and families, offering to take their photos.
Docking in the capital city of Kirkwall by midnight, I discovered that during the crossing, my bike had acquired a comrade in the form of a laden touring bike. Its rider was an older man who had left the British mainland in search of change. Unlike my meticulous itinerary, time had no place in this man’s journey. His only certainty was his bunk for that evening, which turned out to be at the same destination: a hostel 2 miles away. My headlight had run out of battery, and so had his rear light, so we sensibly decided to become one long tandem: he at the front and me following. The night was thick and dark; the lights of Kirkwall glistened in the distance. St Magnus Cathedral was illuminated like a red sandstone beacon. Known as the ‘Light in the North’, it was founded in 1137 by Viking Earl Rognvald and is the only intact medieval cathedral in Scotland. The man and I didn’t speak on our ride, and after finally making it to the hostel, we bid each other goodnight.
I had two days to kill before I continued to North Ronaldsay. For those isles not joined by relic causeways from Churchill’s time, inter-island transport usually means a short flight via Logan Air. Therefore, my desire for low-carbon travel was met with confusion by the tourist board, who couldn’t fathom why I would choose a three-hour cargo ferry over a 10-minute flight. In the end, I was the sole foot-passenger booked on the weekly supply ship that takes goods to North Ronaldsay every Saturday. Even so, based on the number of grey seals and gannets in the harbour at Kirkwall, I was looking forward to my private boat trip.
Over the next two days, I rode 100 miles around the Orkney mainland and some southern isles. I don’t think I have ever ridden such incredible stretches of road. Sure, I lucked out with clear, sunny skies (worth noting that weather like this was not usual for August), but the absence of traffic, hills and potholes made for the best riding I have ever experienced. Swathes of cotton grass, heather, pollinators, birds and silence hugged miles of long, straight road. I barely realised how many miles I was chewing through until I collapsed with a heap of pizza in the evenings. The first day I rode to the mainland’s west coast. Fuelled senseless by the smell of sea salt, I left an effigy of myself at Twatt Church. Please note that Twatt is a genuine parish. Apparently, its road signs keep getting stolen by tourists. (Can’t imagine why.)
Making quick progress on my bike, I approached the coast at Marwick Head – home to Orkney mainland’s biggest seabird colony. I heard it before I saw it. The RSPB uses this astonishing mass gathering at Marwick as an indicator of general seabird health, noting alarming and inconsistent gaps in species numbers since 2007. Like orchards, seabirds have good and bad years, governed by many variables. The year 2021 marked the end of the fourth national census. This Seabirds Count has been replicated at more than 10,000 sites across the UK and Ireland, providing vital insight into seabird abundance, productivity, survival and dietary changes for five years. We can infer a lot about the state of our climate overall simply by observing seabirds, and counts like these are urgent and essential.
Generally, most seabirds return to places like Orkney to spend a raucous summer – mating, rearing chicks and fattening up – before they endure an unthinkable winter spent feeding in the open ocean. I cannot stress how much we underestimate this phenomenal feat – it sounds horrendous. Someone once told me that seabirds are ‘bastard hard’, but maybe this isn’t the case for tysties, which prefer a more home-based life.
Refuelling with snacks on a beach just along from Marwick Head, I watched shoreline kelp. Its colour was such an intense shade of copper; I imagined it was rusting before my eyes in the midday sun. A mini starling murmuration spilled across the bay – it felt busy, but not with people. Things were happening here. London’s hustle seemed a lifetime ago. Seals were bottling, floating upright with their heads poking out between the waves – they reminded me of bald men in hot tubs. Arctic terns darted overhead as I pedalled on, blowing my mind that the bird with possibly the longest migration of any animal on Earth could be so nimble and tiny. Their annual pole-to-pole 30,000-kilometre flight pales my cycling endurance to a pathetic blip.
The road carried me and my bike easily, pulling us away from the coast for short sections before inevitably returning us to its shores. During these meanders, I noticed inshore wetlands and how their marshy mosaic creates a haven for waders. Vast flocks of oystercatchers were engaged in excitable chatter, stirring in a fluster as I whizzed past them. The mountains of Hoy rose in the distance. I wanted to climb them. The next day I cycled to the Bronze Age site Tomb of the Eagles on South Ronaldsay, where I ate two pasties while getting mobbed by Arctic terns. Orkney made me want to do everything – at least, it made me feel like I could.
I soon discovered these islands were ideal for two things: generating renewable energy and drying laundry. Wending my way around the astonishing Skara Brae, it became clear that life here had been sewn long ago, yet Orkney feels surprisingly with the times and ahead of them sometimes. Orkney is home to the highest concentration of domestic wind turbines in the UK – despite having one of the smallest populations of any county (around 22,400). In 2009, Orkney became the UK’s first ‘smart grid’ and operated more grid-connected devices than any other site in the world. All this makes it a natural base for the European Marine Energy Centre. One in 12 households in Orkney operate on their own renewables, and it’s not uncommon to see bed sheets and tea towels strung up on washing lines alongside a mini wind turbine.
Wind energy has become so productive here (especially in winter) that Orkney was a net energy exporter in 2013 and 2014 and has avoided producing an estimated 50,000 tonnes of carbon emissions to date. While switching to the natural resources offered by the immense winds and waves is no doubt a wise move, it’s more complicated for renewable devices offshore. The pressure to switch to cleaner energy stems from the hefty oil and gas exploitation across the North Sea in the early 1970s. By 1985, the UK was the fifth-largest oil-producing country in the world. Toxic by-products from this drilling remain a significant threat to seabirds, choking, sinking or starving them. Oil coats feathers, preventing flight – this threat is well known across global seas. Rising temperatures, oil spills and a danger to sea life drive the argument for greener energy sources. Orkney leads the world procession in the adoption of renewables. As a nation, Scotland is generating close to 100 per cent of the electricity it needs from renewable resources, moving away from fossil fuels at a pace the rest of us cannot ignore. In the UK as a whole, 2020 was the greenest year on record for generating coal-free electricity. (Let’s hope it wasn’t an anomaly, eh?)
Unlike the turbines we’ve come to know across the landscape, tidal-stream devices are fully submerged underwater. They harvest energy from the kinetic flow of ocean currents around narrow channels, islands and headlands, converting it into electricity. It’s a smart idea. Some of these devices yield astonishing electricity output. The Pentland Firth separates the North Sea and the North Atlantic tidal streams, and the mad strength and speed of its tidal races (more than 30 kilometres per hour in places) have claimed many human lives. Danger to life aside, this firth remains one of the world’s most productive sites for tidal energy. Since 2018, the Scottish energy sector has gained planning permission for nearly 400 tidal stream turbines, bolstering what aims to be Europe’s largest tidal turbine array.
However, the more urgent matter for some scientists is understanding how these devices interact with species that share their environment. Much like the situation with the harbour porpoises off Strumble Head in Wales, we need to step back before worshipping the renewables narrative. As tysties are shallow divers and lovers of rich benthic environments (the seabed, the riverbed, etc.), they are in danger here.
Following a tumultuous history of being hunted in Icelandic waters, a ban on hunting tysties was only recently enforced in 2017. Similarly, bycatch in gillnets – often left unattended for days – is a pressing issue for all diving birds. The estimate of birds killed like this around the world each year hovers at around 400,000 currently. The first proper study of tysties was in Canada in the 1930s on Kent Island. Since then, monitoring technology has been slow to modernise. Research into the physical collision of seabirds with offshore turbines (both wind and tidal) is growing, as are investigations into how our little portly auks might fare in a sea that has composite blades whirring about in the current.
Dr Elizabeth Masden is a research fellow from the Environmental Research Institute at the University of the Highlands and Islands based in Inverness. I’m still furious at everyone for not telling me about this magical-sounding institution when I was choosing where to study. Anyway, Elizabeth has spent the best part of the last decade filling gaping holes in tystie-related knowledge. Several people highly recommended her expertise to me. ‘Tysties were a species that no one was studying in the UK,’ Elizabeth told me over Zoom. ‘There had been some work in the 1980s and 90s, but not much since. It struck me all of sudden that we might be about to put tidal turbines in areas where tysties feed and nest, so we really need to learn about them before that happens.’
When it comes to monopolising island tidal races in our bid to trump carbon, tysties seem to get in our way. (Or are we getting in tysties’ way? Discuss.) The tystie and the turbine want the same slice of habitat, which puts tysties in a dilemma similar to the one faced by the harbour porpoise. It’s a game of ‘who gets there first?’ with most of the points up for grabs loitering around Orkney and nearby Caithness. Research investigating the potential tystie-versus-turbine story has been slim thus far; however, Elizabeth co-authored a paper in 2019, writing of this emerging paradox surrounding the quest for green energy. Yes, renewal energy represents an essential step towards damning fossil fuels to the history books, but it could also herald a significant human-wildlife conflict. There appears to be an awkward overlap between MPAs and the areas with the leases that govern Scottish wave and tidal energy sites. Winner takes all?
Dr Daniel Johnston studied tystie foraging ecology for his PhD, supervised by Elizabeth. Together, they now work closely to probe these merging worlds. Our ‘other’ guillemot (Uria aalge) is bigger than a tystie. More common too, it is widespread around UK coasts and also feeds far offshore in winter. These guillemots are also among the deepest diving birds in the world, capable of hunting at 180 metres below the surface. Little is known about the diving behaviour of our tystie, however. Working on the hunch that tystie diving habitat coincides with the locations of tidal turbines, Elizabeth attached depth loggers to birds on the nearby uninhabited island Stroma. Tysties were recorded as diving to roughly 40 metres. ‘Meaning, yes, they could coincide,’ said Elizabeth simply. Other observational work on tysties during Daniel’s PhD involved GPS tracking. Along with Elizabeth, he wanted to determine whether tysties visit the fastest-flowing water where the turbines are positioned. ‘The diving ability was impressive for birds as small as these,’ Elizabeth admitted. ‘Although there is location overlap, the birds might not use the fastest-flowing water where the turbines are.’
A separate study in 2015 also used depth recorders and GPS loggers to study tystie diving behaviour in Northern Ireland colonies, finding a strong preference for daylight dives at less than 2 kilometres away from the colony. Most dives were U-shaped, but each tystie had its own technique. These researchers stressed the importance of knowing these things if we are to hope for a future that involves both tysties and tidal turbines. Direct collision with the blades and mortality of the birds remains a threat. Feeding locations, feeding behaviour, prey behaviour and the seabirds’ horizontal underwater movement are just a few of the areas of research about which we are in dire need of enlightenment. The classic ecological fear of ‘too little, too late’ drives nearly all the growing research around tysties. ‘We’re still chipping away. There are so many unanswered questions,’ Elizabeth warned.
Rory Crawford is the Bycatch Programme Manager for the BirdLife International Marine Programme. A Glaswegian with a hint of Viking, he spoke with me over Zoom. Rory loves a tystie and is the kind of guy you want to sink a few pints with while putting the world to rights. He also is an instrumental figure informing and crafting policy on seabird bycatch around the UK and Europe. ‘For me, tysties feel like a totem, a species that has been there since the start of my career … it’s a personal one.’ He described the energy developments around Orkney as ‘the conundrum we can’t avoid at the moment. The industrialisation of the sea is at a scale we’ve never seen before.’ Like Elizabeth, he cautioned about the grey areas. ‘We’re in this zone of not entirely knowing what’s going on, but should we be tackling climate change in a way that threatens the things that make the world worth living in?’ Good point. Whatever we do, there remains much questing to do. And tysties for me to see. To the north!
A curlew dropped a sloppy turd next to me on the pier in Kirkwall. Early and already warm, I queued alongside cargo, ready to board the ferry to North Ronaldsay. I got chatting to a crew member who brokered conversation with a random anecdote about a charm of goldfinches he once saw in his garden. I’m not sure what vibe I was giving off to indicate that I would take an interest in this, but he seemed buoyed that I was excited for him. I discovered satisfaction in announcing to someone that I was simply on a journey ‘heading north!’ without elaborating further because, in this part of the world, heading north is a feat in itself. The ambiguous potential of doing so surely spurred those first settlers to Orkney from mainland Britain, don’t you think?
Stretching my legs along a wooden bench on deck, I felt greedy in my solitary pursuit as we set off. We made swift progress. Hundreds of seabirds cruised a towering cliff, assuming similar choreography to the dandelion seeds of May. As Kirkwall shrank behind us, the spire of St Magnus stood rigid like a rose thorn. Skies quickened. Seas darkened. I lost count of the lion’s mane jellyfish that lit the way to the island and liked the way that no two were ever the same.
As I leaned over the side of the ferry, the breeze whipped my hair, bleached by the sun. I was tanned, strong and felt good. Well, of course, you would, approaching a white strip of sand surrounded by waters that looked like the actual Caribbean despite being further north than Oslo. For the next few days, I was determined to become one of the people here. Already clocking three seals sidling up to the pier, I pretended I was coming home.
Known as ‘Orcadians’, the people living on the Orkney archipelago are among the best people you will ever meet (like the Welsh!). A proud people, they are kind, measured and loyal to their shores. A bit like tysties, perhaps? When Orcadians talk of ‘the mainland’, they mean the mainland of Orkney – not Scotland. They call Scotland ‘Scotland’, emphasising a healthy distance between the two. Tripping up on the gangway and flinging my water bottle across the stones as I fell, it soon became clear that the news of a visitor from England had circulated the island as fast as Covid-19. I was greeted cheerfully by a lady and automatically directed to the bird observatory where I was staying. Granted, I was the first visitor to spend more than a day on the island since the pandemic had begun, and I brought with me the potential to infect the entire island with the disease. All 72 residents had remained sheltered from it thus far, and at the time of my trip, tests for anyone travelling for work were still tricky to come by. So the thought of me being Visitor #1 since the pandemic was thrilling (but also terrifying).
In any other year, I would have been just one of hundreds of annual visitors to the North Ronaldsay Bird Observatory. Established in 1987 by Alison Duncan and located on what is often the first stretch of land birds see after setting off from the Arctic, the observatory is a bit of a Mecca for birders worldwide. Eager to see the birds that make landfall here during their North Sea expeditions, North Ronaldsay is on every birders’ bucket list. Hanging out at ‘The Obs’ (local speak), blowing away the cobwebs after working in ‘the field’ and sponging up decades worth of ecological records in the cosy bar with a hot tea and a mutton sandwich constitutes a day well spent.
Now I must admit that I am as likely to call myself a ‘birder’ as I am the Emperor of China. I don’t own binoculars. I’m impatient. I never understood the hype when a brown booby blew on to British shores. I was hiking in Cornwall at that moment in 2019. Tens of people had driven hundreds of miles – some had even flown from Ireland – to try and see a brown bird that had been blown off course during its random wander from its regular haunt of Mexico. I am undoubtedly very naive, but I worry that the infamous, often aggressive ‘life list’ competition between serious twitchers risks losing sight of the species itself. However naive I am, I know I am not alone in worrying whether this behaviour deters some potential recruits to the cause.
Nevertheless, we can learn a lot from these enthusiasts and owe much to their patience and fortitude in pursuing rare feathers. Indeed, many birds have had improved fortunes, thanks to the devotion of birder to the scope. And over the following days on North Ronaldsay, I caught a glimpse of what drives this obsession, a glimpse of how seeing a bird that has permeated your thoughts for weeks can swiftly transform you into its doting apostle.
I was the only guest staying at The Obs and was greeted warmly by Darrell and Laura, who not only look after guests but are also residents and bird-ringers4 in their own right. I soon discovered that the people here are an effortless blend of work, nature and community, and nearly all those I met who worked at The Obs were around my age. (I nearly keeled over with the novelty.) They were a healthy mix of those born and raised, those marooned during the pandemic on a bird-related placement, and those who had come here for a birding season then didn’t have the heart to leave, fearing a piece of them would always be left behind. On a stunning August day, it’s easy to see why. Later, Darrell quietly mentioned with a sly grin that there is a bit of a trend at The Obs for winter guests to be ‘women escaping their husbands’. Noted.
As well as birds, the sheep across the island are world-renowned, being both quirky and the last examples of native British sheep. A rare, hardy breed reminiscent of goats, they live on the beaches and eat seaweed. Before I left home, a colleague advised that I eat the mutton out of respect for this fundamental livelihood. It was so delish. The annual North Ronaldsay Sheep Festival is a grand occasion. All the islanders and their extended families on the mainland flock together to champion their unique culture through art, music and the maintenance of the famous Sheep Dyke, which runs 19 kilometres around the island perimeter. The devotion to community here is pure.
Dumping my things in a room with a sea view, I was itching to walk. The island is tiny – its area just under 7 square kilometres – and apart from the airfield strip, pretty much everywhere is accessible on foot. Following a dusty track across fields of dandelion and escorted by some sort of pipit, I climbed over the stone dyke for a full-frontal of the North Sea shores. I’ll be straight with you. There is no ambiguity here, no tentative build-up and purging of my emotional blockages when I see them because I saw the tysties – loads of them.
Swathes of rocky slabs lay before me. Clambering down, I selected one that looked like Pride Rock and lay on my stomach like Simba in The Lion King. I thought of Stephenson’s quote from the train toilet a few days before. Yes, the journey to get here was fun. I loved the variety of it. But begging to differ, Stephenson, mate – this destination is something else. The bird that I had thought about for so many weeks was finally mincing about before my eyes. I watched them for a couple of hours, feeling soporific in the sun.
Tysties nest in pairs and live in social groups of less than 50. You may be pleased to hear that there is no physical distinction between males and females, making one feel less inept when even trained scientists struggle to tell them apart. Nests are usually identified by having splatters of (very on-brand) red poo around the entrance. As I found on the mainland, the shoreline was a happening place. My arrival was met with flashes of black and white erupting into hilarious shrieks, like some primary school PE lesson. Some tysties flew out to settle on the water among gulls and oystercatchers. Others darted into rock crevices like the one belowme. Next to shearwaters and fulmars, tysties look strangely camouflaged and are challenging to see. This congregation of hardy survivors had been flung together by the North Sea soup. When bobbing on the sea, tysties often gaze to the horizon before racing back to shore, congregating in noisy little groups.
Such vocalisations are iconic to tysties, captivating ecologists for years. When I returned home, I caught up with Elizabeth Masden’s former PhD student, Dr Daniel Johnston, who is now a research ecologist for the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO). After completing his PhD viva, Daniel felt suitably compelled to recycle an old Halloween costume, dressing up as a cardboard tystie and charging into the sea. An act that automatically validates all of his thoughts. (The video is still on Twitter – can recommend.)
‘Tysties are really intelligent birds,’ he told me, smiling thoughtfully over our video call. ‘And they’re unlike the other auks. They stick around. They’re this survivor. And they have a sweet song, which not all seabirds have,’ he laughed. This nest song behaviour is crucial to a tystie’s courtship routine and was first studied in detail by Sten Asbirk in 1979 on some Danish islands. Although I cannot tell whether I saw moments of romantic merit on North Ronaldsay, courtship can be seen throughout the breeding season. Its disarming comedy aided, of course, by the fact that tysties on land look like waddling butlers and seem to be capable of displaying a rainbow of emotions in record time. Safe to say that I detected regular subtext chuckles from Asbirk while reading his write-up.
Most seabirds breed in remarkable synchrony, continuing to puzzle science. But studies suggest that the bundle of tystie behaviours I’m about to describe have evolved, extending the breeding season to match the availability of food – an asynchrony ensuring that everything has a fair chance. The ritual begins with a bit of ‘staccato piping’ to fend off the curious (i.e. me). Asbirk informs us that this may mature into a ‘veritable piping concert’. A flash of raunchy red gape is expected here. I must say that the first time I saw this gape in real life, I instantly thought of a pair of Christian Louboutin heels I once lusted after for 5 minutes, the underside of which had the classic red lacquer.
Shortly after the concert follows an erection of their necks (usually in males), with gape half-open at all times, tail cocked, breast puffed while mincing about on their outlandish red legs. A bit of amiable scratching and aggression towards a future mate won’t go amiss, either. If in water, no matter, because a bit of parallel swimming, perhaps a flirty little game of ‘it’ or underwater ‘leapfrog’ with a female, can be an equal turn-on. As is ‘bill-dipping’ and ‘twitter-waggling’, both of which go a long way in a male securing a second date. If the female is interested, she’ll let him know by lying flat, neck and bill outstretched, and tail cocked. The male will then arise and ‘trample’ her back for some time. After the interlude, she then ‘raises and throws the male off’. Sounds about right.
Asbirk describes this all as ‘so infectious’ that the excitement might plague the rest of the colony, initiating the same behaviours in 15–20 other pairings at any one time – meaning that this carefully choreographed, often patient, performance results in a sexual carousel. Ought we take note? Because from a grossly provocative exposé of ankles during a rendition on the fortepiano in the 1800s to a series of late-night ‘likes’ sweeping the 2017 social media archive, it’s fair to say that the art of human courtship has somewhat … evolved.
Watching tysties muck about on the rocks in front of me, in between erratic flights to a bright blue sea, I could understand Elizabeth’s love for this bird. ‘They just have so much character,’ she said, grinning over the screen. ‘It’s fascinating to watch and try to understand. They’re incredibly social, which explains their quirky behaviours.’ When a pair breed successfully (wahey!), the female tystie incubates the egg for up to 40 days. Like many seabirds, they co-parent, are known to defend the nest and engage in equal feeding of their one or two chicks. So very wholesome.
I still find it funny that a bird as performative as the black guillemot would economise so intensely on their nest. There must be a trade-off in there somewhere as, for many birds, nest design is critical in attracting a suitable mate. Elizabeth agreed. ‘Yeah, it’s not a “nest” as you’d expect. It’s just some rocks.’ She described how she and Daniel would be walking across Stroma and encounter an eider duck nest, ‘the most luxurious nest in the world! And then we’d find a tystie nest, which is essentially two rocks that have touched, and an egg sat in the crevice.’ Ask any ecologist who has studied tysties, and it turns out these crevices are the thorn in their cargo-trousered side. They are one of the main reasons tysties have been notoriously challenging to study. Remaining loyal to nest locations, Elizabeth described how tysties would return to nests annually and that at each site, she would often find the same bird, suggesting a tystie’s loyalty to the doorstep.
Rory Crawford also explained that tysties ‘like their nests to have an entrance and an exit’. Civilised, yet #humble. I like it. ‘And they’re the classic “once bitten, twice shy”, so when they’ve been caught once, and you want to retrieve a tracking device back off them again, they’re like, “Argh, you’re the tube who caught me before – nice try!”’. I shook as the sonic boom of his laugh came through my headphones. Tysties are naturally cautious birds and tend to creep to the back of the rock crevice, especially when a group of researchers want a cheeky probe in the name of data. Elizabeth, too, reeled off hilarious anecdotes of dangling upside-down to reach her hands into deep holes while tystie chicks aimed squirts of poo at said hands. ‘But, weirdly, because of all their caution,’ she said, ‘you feel a huge amount of respect for these birds themselves and how they monopolise these tight spaces – they’re really, really smart.’
The following day I walked the island’s perimeter – just under 20 kilometres. A few of the bird-ringers from The Obs had invited me to tag along with them while they finished ringing fulmar chicks. ‘Any tysties?’ had become their general greeting to me. I felt like I was being initiated into some sort of society. Following the track that ran alongside the sheep dyke, we hiked clockwise. The winds were easterly, and the ringers said these conditions were perfect for migrants drifting south from Scandinavia. Conversation was effortless and mostly bird-related. We asked each other what we hoped to see on the walk, as though pre-drinking before a wild night out. Alex, the chattiest of the group, told me that if puffins are ‘pop music’, tysties are ‘indie’.’ Exactly. Our edgier auk.
As we walked on, I saw that impossibly fluffy fulmar chicks occupied nearly every other crevice in the dyke – clearly a vital place of refuge. What followed was an entertaining episode from Chunder from Fulmar: a series.One of the girls sensibly tied her hair back before squatting down by the fulmar to attempt to ring it. Immediately, she was met with incessant squawking, clattering bills and bright-orange vomit, which exploded onto the ringer’s hands and clothes. Fulmars’ natural defence mechanism, this orange acid gave rise to their name, ‘fulmar’, translating to ‘foul gull’ in Norse. These chicks were at their awkward, greasy stage (we all have one), fidgeting within an orb of downy feathers. But soon, they would moult into the sleek, seductive plumage of their parents.
Despite ringing tystie chicks earlier in the season, the guys gallantly re-enacted for me the infamous palaver of prostrating themselves across the rocks to access a feisty tystie chick. Rain or shine, there have been daily surveys like this for more than 30 years, and we have this brilliant bunch to thank for much of the knowledge of seabird movement up here.
Enormous rocky slabs fringed the entire west side of the island. Tysties came and went in disorderly flurries, deftly navigating the chinks and chasms that housed their young. When they fly into land, their red feet are splayed, and their wings are madly propelling. When they move on land, there’s a hint of penguin waddle about them. I imagined that watching them underwater would be a total game-changer, though – ‘streamlined’ being the foregone conclusion. I watched as tysties landed on the water with a jaunty splash the way a human-atop-rubber-ring might exit a water slide. I couldn’t get enough of them.
Calm waters defined the day, but the high winter seas the locals told me about sounded unsettling. It’s no secret that more storms are the sidekick to climate change for the entire planet. And, worryingly, thanks to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, recent research has measured clouds across the planet absorbing 7 per cent more water than before. Higher cloud saturation essentially intensifies a feedback loop between rising temperatures and unstable weather. What a to-do! Our centrally heated, jet-setting, soya-latte lives are paving the way for more numerous and extreme storms.
As shallow divers, studies have shown that tysties are at risk of death and injury from being hurled into the rocky shore when a turbulent sea batters them. Other research suggests these events can also flush benthic prey further out into deeper water, away from the assumed shallow comfort zone of the tystie. Speaking to Daniel, it makes sense that overwinter survival remains the most challenging time for them. He described ‘wrecks’ of starved birds seen in the wake of severe storms and explained that breeding success could also be hampered. ‘We saw nests get flooded out by some horrendous storms,’ he recalled of his time on Stroma during 2017. ‘A few of our study nests failed. Coupled with a storm during that summer was a supermoon bringing huge spring tides. It was sad to witness.’
The Stroma nests that Daniel was studying in 2017 with Elizabeth are similar to those on North Ronaldsay: open, rocky and utterly exposed. ‘If the storms increase in number and intensity with climate change, that is terrible news for the black guillemots,’ Elizabeth sighed. She added how, because they nest on boulder shores, tysties expect a certain maximum tide height, so ‘if a storm surges further up the shoreline, that directly affects the breeding success of these birds. The chicks and eggs just flush away.’ But remember that tysties are cunning, and they may be able to anticipate dangerous environmental shifts. Daniel told me they were able to move their breeding habitat if they had to. So, yes, some North Ronaldsay storms filled tystie nests with sand. However, upon investigation, they discovered the birds had already relocated to a different part of the island before this happened. Do they know something we don’t? Or are they just paying more attention than we are?
It seems a tystie’s loyalty to its home shores could be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because they are spared (what I imagine to be) hellish winters in the open ocean. However, if they remain on increasingly exposed, volatile shores and cannot move quickly enough to safer ground, we have a problem.
As well as the stormy threats they’re facing, because they prefer to nest on the shoreline, tysties are also vulnerable to land predators. Calculating invasive species like cats, American minks and rats have long had a history of denting tystie populations. Arguably, they were the primary stressor that confined current tystie colonies to far-flung, sparsely habited islands devoid of mammalian predators. And I must tell you about something else that is unfolding as I write this in September 2021. Surreal numbers of guillemots and razorbills are dying. These seabirds are washing up emaciated and en masse on eastern shores from Orkney to Norfolk. Although wrecks are relatively typical following winter storms, it is incredibly concerning when they occur in September. Kayakers, swimmers and fishermen have also reported bizarrely close encounters with confused and devastatingly disorientated guillemots swimming in the shallows along our east coasts. I reached out to Rory over email, desperate for answers and genuinely terrified that this was the start of a new normal. There was no denying how alarmed he sounded. He told me that while exact causes of this phenomenon are still unknown, scientists are scrambling to determine the role of extreme weather events generating toxic algal blooms in seabird feeding hotspots around the UK. When seabirds hunt in these waters, they ingest lethal toxins that seize their bodies, slowly killing them. Some studies predict that climate change will increase incidences of these algal blooms in the North Sea. It’s just one thing after another, isn’t it? Does anyone else’s head hurt?
I asked Rory if seabirds have pulled the short straw in general. ‘We’re always caught in this guessing game with seabirds. Dealing with what might happen,’ he told me. ‘Like if there is increased turbidity, and kelp beds get ripped up, then that’s absolutely a problem for the tystie.’ Kelp beds are an interesting one, actually. The image of towering golden fronds and dancing sea lions in underwater shafts of exotic, foreign sunlight comes to mind. But in the British Isles, kelp beds are (like seagrass, of course) a contender for our Ace of Spades.
We have the most diverse range of kelp species in Europe, spread across nearly twice the area of our terrestrial woodland. Tysties and kelp occupy the same habitat a lot of the time, along with many worms, crustaceans, lumpsuckers and such. Now tysties enjoy a variety of prey (and are lucky to do so), but they have a long-standing relationship with butterfish – a small, ‘eel-like’ thing found along the UK’s rocky shoreline – and butterfish love a kelp bed. Daniel has observed a strong association between tysties and kelp in the field, but when we spoke, he mused it is ‘likely we could lose these habitats to increased winter storms’.
Kelp is usually anchored to the seabed by a ‘holdfast’ (an anchor-like root system), but potent storms can uproot it like a carpet. Kelp and seaweed are also highly temperature-sensitive. Already around the British Isles, the temperature of some of our waters has risen by one degree Celsius within the last 40 years. But before you begin to picture summers spent frolicking in British waters without experiencing circulation difficulties, remember how warmer, more carbon-saturated waters become corrosive, breaking down the calcium compounds that cement these habitats together. Remembering seagrass, we’ve learned that ocean acidification knows no bounds. What follows could be a desertion of ecology. Cue the toppling dominos. (Again.)
Kelp beds function as a vital corridor that connects land and sea via seabirds. ‘Many seabirds, not just tysties, bring nutrients back from the sea that otherwise wouldn’t make it onto the land,’ Rory continued. Seabird guano (poo) in the tropics, for instance, ‘feeds’ coral reefs, the resulting productivity of which influences marine systems across oceans. ‘The thing is,’ he added, ‘seabirds are “the flow” between the terrestrial and the aquatic. There’s something special about that. They connect these environments like no other animal.’
I can honestly say my walk that day was one of the best of my life. I had left the fulmar ringing team to their vital, vomity task and roamed on alone. Back at home, south-west England grappled with record temperatures and heaving beaches, but North Ronaldsay was spared. I’m still unsure what I’d done to deserve having pristine white sands and turquoise seas all to myself. With every passing minute, I fell more deeply for the island, and I will forever associate it with the pop-rock band, The 1975, as their music was on repeat in my headphones for most of that day. Feeling as ‘indie’ as a tystie, I picked my way across rocky shores, peering into tidal pools and abandoned crofts, shepherding friendly sheep, madly waving at farmers, and straining my eyes towards a fuzzy Shetland in the distance beyond the lighthouse (Scotland’s oldest and most intact!). I adopted the slow, measured walking pace of someone for whom time has no bearing. Solitude had a different flavour here. I felt lucky. Freer than ever. Passive abandon.
But I wasn’t alone. A huge rush of wind made me instinctively throw both hands up over my head. ‘Bonxies’ – great skuas. The guys at The Obs had warned me to wear a hat to protect me from a (not unheard of) scalping, but I had ‘forgotten’ in favour of a tan. Quickly ramming a cap over my head, I stole a glance at my antagonist. Dark, large and a bona fide ‘bad arse’ – as a friend of mine would say – it banked ahead of me, ready for a second go. Skuas – both great and the more dainty Arctic – are in their element on Shetland and Orkney. Agile and clever, they are notorious for their tactical ‘mobbing’ behaviour to protect their nest or even steal prey from others. Arctic terns do it, too, but they are not nearly so intimidating as a skua.
With Orkney and Shetland both suffering population losses of more than 80 per cent since 1986, the BTO classes the Arctic skua as the UK’s fastest-declining seabird. Caustic and daring in their pursuit of food, a skua’s methods appeal to my dark side. Rotund little birds (like the tystie and the puffin) are an ideal target for a bit of food piracy, or ‘kleptoparasitism’. One reason for this is their sloppy table manners. After catching long, skinny fish like sand eels, tysties and puffins don’t bother to conceal them. Instead, on the return journey to the nest, sand eels dangle from their mouths like floppy cigars for all to see. Carrying sand eels crossways like this creates easy pickings for a nimble robber that can snatch a fish without even making contact with its unlucky carrier.
As a proud left-hander, one of the things I can’t stop thinking about is the fact that scientists are wondering whether tysties show ‘handedness’. Some adult tysties and puffins carry prey like sand eels with the head always on the same side of the bird’s bill. I noticed, too, that those tysties that carried food on the surface of the water were hesitant, often panic diving. This reaction seemed much quicker for them than taking to the air to evade ambush. Often huddling in a group, tysties may also fly in from the sea together in a bid to confuse and disarm a lingering food pirate. A paper in 1986 found that skuas conducted the majority of attacks on tysties, and persistent pursuit can result in the tystie dropping or abandoning its prey altogether. Oh, mate. Elizabeth told me, ‘You root for them! You sit there shouting, “GO ON! You can make it! Get in!” and then a skua steals it. You know the skua needs the fish too, but you can’t help rooting for a black guillemot.’
Contemplating piracy on an island like North Ronaldsay was enough to send me into a Treasure Island spin. Parasitism of tysties, in particular, is frequently observed by Daniel in his fieldwork: ‘There’s often a whole chain of piracy: skuas would steal some food, then a black-headed gull would have a go, then a herring gull would snatch it.’ I wondered whether this is a growing problem for tysties, but it seems the pressure is nothing new. The same 1986 study found that, although skuas benefited considerably from stealing tystie food, tystie breeding success was unaffected unless the rate of attack was unreasonably high.
‘It’s more that their overall diet is crucial for us to observe,’ Daniel said. ‘Because their responses to tidal turbines, storms, temperature changes, parasitism – it all comes down to prey’ – and whether prey is resilient. We’ve seen the danger in showing favouritism in a prey item. The terminal decline in UK Arctic skuas and kittiwakes, for instance, is owed mainly to a terrifying slump in sand eel numbers. It is ‘LAST ORDERS!’ on repeat for these birds. Dreadful times.
Sand eels feed on cold-water plankton, and more than 90 years’ worth of ocean data (thanks to that Continuous Plankton Recorder!) has directly linked warming sea surface temperatures to its rapid decline. Put simply, this reduction in food for sand eels has meant they are not as numerous themselves or of sufficiently fatty quality for the seabirds that rely on them. Have skuas resorted to robbery in desperation? It’s hard to say, but there is no doubt that skuas would be on an even more slippery slope if the tysties and their dangling prey weren’t around to target.
Now tysties have been known to enjoy a sand eel, along with butterfish and other treats. Both Daniel and Elizabeth recalled a certain tystie on Stroma ‘constantly bringing back sand eels … its chicks were so fat and healthy!’ Daniel laughed. Feeding niches between individuals in a colony can range from kelp beds to sandy areas, tidal streams and rocky shores. Such individual variation in prey choice and foraging habitats seems typical of tysties. ‘It’s a mixed picture,’ Elizabeth admitted, ‘but not as bad as it would be if they only ate sand eels.’ A bonus, perhaps, to have a flexible palate? ‘Yes, but they’ve been shown to favour prey, and if that prey has had a bad year, then it’s not going to be good for them either,’ she said.
What we want to avoid is change at the colony level – that’s what will trigger the alarm system. We have to hope this eccentricity within a black guillemot colony – the varied eaters and trademark diving behaviours – is sufficiently robust to keep tystie numbers afloat. We want this bird to ride out the storms to come.
Eventually, I circled back to The Obs and stayed (or rather, laid) a while on South Bay. In my daze of sore feet and dehydration, what I thought were mounds of intertidal rocks suddenly materialised into snoozing, snorting, flatulent mammals. Easily mistaken for heatwave survivors on any British beach, a bob of grey seals (what a collective noun!) was hauled out on the sand, swivelling their dog-like heads in unison towards me. Whiskers twitched. Grinning and keenly aware they were assessing me, I tiptoed around the back of them.
Only bird prints accompanied mine on the sand, for the tide had long washed away any other signatories. Chilled, turquoise waters soothed my swollen feet. Before long, five, seven, ten – wait – twelve enormous, whiskered heads were in the shallows keeping pace with me. Inquisitive and unafraid. It felt like these seals had been spared as participants in the Great Conditioning Experiment™, in which nature has learned that humans are an immediate threat. They just wanted to know what, where and who I was.
Buoyant in my happiest mood, I assumed this whole performance was a personal invitation to go swimming. The seals didn’t seem to enjoy the whole undressing situation, flicking away at me with tail splashes and such. But in my white pants and sports bra (big mistake), I waded up to my shoulders and waited. And they came. The clarity of the water offered a porthole to their underwater playground. In a short space of time, their repeated probes into my world grew less bashful. I’m not sure how long I was in there for, but I stayed until it became too cold to bear, feeling elated, freezing, branded. The seals and I exchanged a transaction for which I never want a refund.
That evening I ate alone in the dining area, thinking as I soaked in the panoramic view of the camping meadows and sea beyond. A commotion of voices filled the reception. Before long, I was spontaneously bundled into the back of a van with Darrell, Laura, Heather (daughter of Alison, who founded The Obs) and a few others. ‘Fancy a swim in a tidal pool before the sun sets?’ they asked me. Hath Her Majesty a crown?
On the short drive, Heather stopped the truck, turned the engine off and engaged in friendly chat with every person we passed. Actual chat. Far more than obliging small-talk in a queue. A rare thing. I admired it immensely.
The sun hung low over the horizon, a golden medallion against a pink, lilac and baby-blue mackerel sky. Others were already at the pool that was left behind as the tide retreated. Beyond them, the setting sun silhouetted an enormous bull seal above the swell. Westray and the other islands rested in a distant blue blur to our left. Easy laughter, honesty and #acceptance was the general theme of the evening. Feeling inspired, it came to me that moments like these are what life might be about, and the simplicity of it stunned me – a group of people, a van, an island and Pot the dog.
Being my last evening here, I wanted to finish where I had started. Salty and wind burnt, I later dangled my legs over the harbour wall. Around thirty tysties busied about, dancing day into night. ‘They have their own little thing going on,’ one of the bird-ringers had said to me, ‘but only those who know them love them.’
The sitting tysties looked like they were resting on a red whoopie cushion, their legs folded underneath their tuxedo. Despite the dusk, the clarity of the water meant I could watch the seals from South Bay swim over – just checking in. Arctic terns wheeled above. This time, the tystie song was more of a whistle, like a childless swing in the breeze.
It turns out this scene of tysties on the harbour wall is in many ways the key to their survival because it links them to people. Elizabeth, Daniel and Rory all spoke of tysties’ immense adaptability to nest in human-made places. Nesting on walls, houses and under balconies allows tysties to act as a ‘gateway’ species to all seabirds. ‘People may feel more of a connection with a butterfly or a bee,’ Rory had said. ‘But seabirds are telling us the story of the climate in an immediate way – humans just stay a bit too far away from them to hear what they’re saying.’ A solitary black guillemot on my right was gazing out towards the mainland. Time to go. I had some literal shit to deal with back in the south of England. Coming?
Notes
1 The Scotsman who wrote the 1883 classic, Treasure Island. Originally named The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys – I’m glad to say that times have changed and it’s a cracking read for all genders alike.
2 The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, established in 1889 by Emily Williamson, who sought to eradicate the trend of using feathers in fashion. With more than one million members, the RSPB is Europe’s largest nature conservation charity.
3 Pronounced ‘awk’ – it includes birds like razorbills, guillemots and puffins.
4 Those who are licensed to attach small, numbered rings to the legs of wild birds to gather data.