9
SUMMER HAS COME. IT is mid-June. I lie on the grass on the north front of Garbh Eilean and feel the abundance around me. Shut your eyes and the shadows of the passing birds flicker across your lids in a film of profusion, each blip another life, another energising presence. I sometimes dream of the Shiants without the birds and it is like finding a child dead.
These islands are one of the great bird places of the world, with so many birds that counting them is nearly impossible. According to the best estimates of modern ornithologists, struggling with densely packed, mobile, teeming and pullulating masses of identical bodies, all of which come and go at variable rates and in undependable patterns, attempting to identify them from boats below the colonies or with telescopes on distant cliff-tops, there are between fifteen and eighteen thousand guillemots here, eight to eleven thousand razorbills, between four and six thousand fulmars, two thousand kittiwakes, roughly fifteen hundred shags, a few hundred gulls of various kinds (whose numbers are rising), twenty-six great skuas, also on the increase, and two hundred and forty thousand puffins, about one in eight of the British total and two per cent of all the puffins in the world.
There are more puffins on St Kilda, and in one or two offshore islands further north in the Atlantic, but nowhere, it is said, are they more densely packed, or do they make a more extraordinary sight, than on these islands in the Minch.
This is the puffins’ summer outing. They begin to arrive in the first days of April. Malcolm MacSween, Lord Leverhulme’s, Compton Mackenzie’s and, for a while, my father’s tenant on the Shiants, told Mackenzie that ‘the Puffin comes, always on a Sunday night and remains for a week to clear out his burrow and prepare his nest.’ It is a tentative beginning. They have been at sea all winter, dispersed from here to Norway and Greenland, to Sicily and the borders of Morocco with Spanish Sahara, scattered in their unseen millions across the width of the winter ocean, perhaps one puffin per square mile of Atlantic, muted in their winter plumage, with last year’s coloured beak fallen away, a safe and wintry privacy on the sea. I have, once, seen a couple of puffins in December off the rocky west coast of Majorca, sullen, grey-faced things. We looked at each other and then looked away.
Now they are back. To begin with they do not come ashore. Crowds of them, increasingly busy in enormous rafts, float in the bay between the islands and in front of the big north cliffs, clustering there in small conversational groups, as engaged, as social as the people in a Canaletto square. You can take your boat in among them. They scatter to start with, but then slowly seep back in, soon enough clustered around you like a crowd waiting for the pub to open.
In little groups the puffins and other auks come ashore, standing around on rocks for a few minutes before heading back out to sea. They are dipping a toe in the land. Suddenly, one becomes aware of it, a repeopling of the islands. All along the back cliff of Eilean Mhuire, the guillemots cluster in their thousands, standing on shelves and sloping boulders down to the very edge of the sea. On Garbh Eilean, the screes of tumbled hexagonal rocks along the east shore, and on the grassy banks around the corner on the north face, and in one or two places along the east cliffs of Eilean an Tighe, everywhere begins to fill with summer birds. The wrens continue to hop about in the screes while the vast number of far larger seabodies gather around them. It is as if a corpse has come alive. The Shiants flutter with their sudden vitality. Now, for months, the place is never still. Look up and it will be filled with wings passing. The air is whisked into life. There is a shared thickness of coexistence here, a palpitating, repercussing, gyrating co-presence. How it must have been blessed in the past! The bird arrival comes at precisely the moment in the year when the crops stored from the previous year would have been running thin. This was manna on wings.
When John Harvie-Brown, the late nineteenth-century naturalist, came in the 1870s, he could scarcely contain his excitement. The puffins were around him
in countless thousand. The sea, the sky and the land seemed populated by equal proportions, each vast in itself – constantly moving, whirring, eddying, a seething throng of life, drifting, and swooping, and swinging in the wind, or pitching and heaving on the water, or crowding and jostling on the ledges and rocks, arising from and alighting on the boulder-strewn slopes, or perched like small white specks far up in the cliff face amongst the giant basalt columns.
Many of these puffins have been coming here as long as I have. A puffin never moves house if it can help it and soon the returning birds begin to reinvestigate last year’s burrow, poking into it, starting to clear it out. You see puffin and wife sharing the labour. The birds are soon spattered and slick with mud, especially if it has been raining and the burrow is leaky. They emerge from their sodden homes like squaddies at Passchendaele. Little sprigs of grass are brought back to line the end of the burrow, or lengths of orange and blue fishing twine.
By the middle of May eggs are everywhere, the most beautiful ones, turquoise-flecked and scribbled in dark brown like a Jackson Pollock, tucked under the feet of guillemots, single white eggs hidden deep inside the puffins’ burrows, a clutch of three or four laid in the chaos of the shag nests. (If you alarm a puffin in its burrow, it creeps to the far end, a yard or so, and turns its face to the wall, placing the egg between you and it. It is a straightforward calculation: better to lose the egg than the puffin.)
All of this for the ancient Shiant Islanders was the pulse of wild protein for which they had been longing all winter. As late as the Second World War people came out to the Shiants from Lemreway and Scalpay in the summer to supplement their government-controlled diet. I must confess, I have never taken any of the eggs to eat, not through any sense of its wrongness but having been put off by a famous experiment conducted in the early 1950s by the Cambridge zoologist HB Cott. How tasty, he wanted to know, were wild bird eggs? A panel of heroic gourmets was assembled and presented with plate after plate of scrambled eggs, each from a different species. None was labelled and no salt or pepper added. Cott then asked the tasters to score what they had eaten. The scale ranged from 10.0 for ‘ideal’ to 2.0 ‘repulsive and inedible’. Cott, wartime expert on camouflage, later knighted for his services to zoology, ranked the eggs of birds found on the Shiants as follows:
9.0 Very good
8.3 Lesser black-backed gull
8.2 Kittiwake
8.0 Good
7.9 Herring gull
7.7 Fulmar, great black-backed gull, guillemot
7.2 Great skua
7.0 Barely perceptible off flavour
6.6 Puffin
6.0 Definite off flavour
6.0 Common eider
5.4 Gannet
5.0 Unpleasant
4.4 Shag
4.0 Off
If the shag egg lurks between ‘unpleasant’ and ‘off’, shag meat can make a delicious and healthy soup-cum-stew, or so Kennie Mackenzie, the uncle of John Murdo Matheson, the Gravir shepherd, assured me. The Shiants are the second biggest shaggery in the British Isles – only Foula, the loneliest of the Shetland Isles has more – and so, one day a year or two ago in early summer, I took a large stick with me to one of the headquarters of the shags, high up on the west coast of Garbh Eilean, with the idea of getting some lunch.
I headed off for the colony. The wind was coming in riffles off the sea and swirling under the cliffs. Whiffs of shag life, that ammoniac fug of fish and foulness, the smell of seaweed as rotten as manure and filled with creeping bugs the colour of decay, came to me on the wind in heavy doses. A dead puffin, its body turned inside out by a black-backed gull and the breast meat picked away, was slopping to and fro in the shore surf, its sodden wings flapping as the water stirred. A big grey seal was lying on its back on the pebbled beach, long dead, its jaw twisted open, half sideways as though in mid-chew. The molars looked human. The flesh on the body, where the fur had rubbed away, was half-rotten, half air-dried, bresaola on the turn. On its flippers, the fingernails, which were five inches long, hung stiffly together like the fingers of a paralysed hand. Involuntarily, my nostrils closed against it. In the nooks of the cliff below the shag-fest, I found a dog-rose in bud the colour of a pink iced gem, bunches of meadowsweet and tall flowering sorrel, the weeds and flowers of sweeter places, surviving here only where shelter allowed them space from the gales. Beside them, the sea pinks and the sea campion were over, the flowers no more than wisps of brown paper on the end of six-inch stalks.
I climbed towards the shag rocks. The turf is a bright skin across the underlying bone. Tormentil and self-heal alternate in a tiny, rich, repeating pattern of yellow and purple among the watermint and the irises. The shags are up towards the top of the big boulder scree. Lower down, there are puffins standing about on the rocks near their burrows in what ornithologists call ‘clubs’, groups of young puffins, less than five years old, and so not old enough to have a wife or a burrow. Ludicrous and lovable puffins! Their sociability is as stiff and predictable as an evening in an Edwardian London. Gestures of deference are required of any newcomer, and a little accepting dance of stamping feet is made by those already settled with cigars around the fender. They walk around by the mouths of each other’s burrows as if on eggshells; or bat their bills in little love displays, one puffin of a pair always apparently keener than the other, his mate slightly bored with this love thing, particularly when he goes on too long; or make little threats with their mouths agape; or suddenly jump into a tussling, angry clinch with a neighbour, bill to bill, turning each other over and over as they tumble down the slope towards the sea, suddenly realising at the last minute what a spectacle they are making of themselves. They are more capable of looking embarrassed than any bird I have seen. So polite is this world, in fact, that most of its members seem struck dumb by their sense of propriety. Puffins remain monogamous (or at least about ninety per cent of them are, because both spouses remain loyal to the same burrow) throughout their extraordinarily long and stable lives: up to forty years of politeness and tedium, the whirring of wings and the ritual stamping of little orange feet.
Resting above them on the steepness of the slope, I watch a gannet out at sea. That is different country. In the binoculars, its hanging, seeking, intelligent head is mobile, looking left and right in front of its swept-back, spotless body. The fuselage rises on stiletto wings, hangs coolly for a moment, a hundred feet above the sea, and then falls, the body twisting as it goes down, a quarter-revolution or so. There is a sudden half-folding of the wings, a darting of the form, and the bird cuts into the water. The sound is of a paper bag being popped, a muffled implosion, leaving behind it on the surface a pool of broken water, a bubbled glaucousness at the point of entry. A gannet can swallow four or five mackerel or herring in a single dive. It is gorging unseen. Then the bird is up, returning to the surface fast like a human swimmer, bobbing up, shuddering, a pause and then the long haul back into the air, a workman-like beat of the wings before returning to the glide, the hunting glide. You can see them three or four miles away, soaring and diving, the repeated search and plunge for prey. The whiteness is part of their armoury. Gannets are intended to be visible at distances so that their brothers, sisters and cousins, can see them on the ocean and can share in the kill. The sea is their savannah.
If puffin and gannets are from different worlds, the shags are from another universe. Nothing can really prepare you for the reality of the shag experience. It is an all-power meeting with an extraordinary, ancient, corrupt, imperial, angry, dirty, green-eyed, yellow-gaped, oil-skinned, iridescent, rancid, rock-hole glory that is Phalacrocorax aristotelis. They are scandal and poetry, chaos and individual rage, archaic, ancient beyond any sense of ancientness that other birds might convey. Even an eagle or a buzzard seems slick by comparison. The earliest puffin fossil to have been discovered is no more than five million years old. The oldest shag, identical to its modern descendants, has been found in rocks laid down sixty million years ago, a couple of million years after the cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs.
As you climb the big broken scree towards their stinking slum, as you hear the honking, guttural hoot of their cry even in mid-flight as they beat against the wind around the headland, you can feel in the creep of your skin that you are somehow, in this coming encounter, penetrating a scale of time that can be measured only geologically. The shag was born half as long ago again as the Alps were made. The shag, or something very like it, flew over seas in which the ichthyosaurs swam. The shag is as old as the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim, as Staffa, as the Cuillins in Skye. Here today, it is older than the rocks on which it sits.
You can only have a sudden immersion into the shag world. Your head comes over the lip of rock, and there, jutting and quivering in front of you, perhaps two feet away, defending its young, that guarantee of survival, is the bird whose yellow gape, as yellow as the heart of a pot of yellow paint, hawks and spits at you, its gizzard shaking in anger and fear, its whole head prodding and prodding towards you, like an angry finger. There’s nothing neat or controlled about it. There’s a fluster of rage, resentment and clumsiness as the big, black, webbed feet stamp around the sticky, white, guanoed mayhem of kelp stalks and wrack-branches that is its nest, in the back of which, creeping for the shadows, you see the couple of young, half-formed embryonic creatures, shag chicks, rat-birds, serpentine, leathery, hideous.
Then, through all the fluster, you see the eye of the adult, a green point of clarity, a distillation of the green that lurks in the black of the bird’s damp feathers. But in the light of that eye, the whole greasy body seems an irrelevance. The eye is the source of all that anger, the bright, hard centre of the shag’s existence. It’s an adamantine green, a mineral concentrate, able to outlast any kind of erosion or catastrophe that might occur around it. It is the eye of animal persistence and the colour stays with you as the bird flogs off towards the ruffled sea. How on earth could anyone have ever clubbed one of these things to death? Hunger would make you do it, but then hunger would make you choose a softer option.
The puffins are prep-school boys beside the shags and it is their innocence that encourages you to catch them. Puffin eggs may be relatively disgusting, mysteriously more disgusting than those of their relatives the razorbill and guillemot, with whites that are a livid blue, but the adult puffin’s flesh is delicious boiled, stuffed, roasted, smoked or salted, as it is throughout the lands bordering the north-east Atlantic. There is no doubt that puffins were eaten here in the past: we found clutches of puffin heads in the midden that we excavated next to the eighteenth-century house on Eilean an Tighe. The heads were still clustered together deep in the pile, where they had been thrown, once cut from the bodies being prepared for a stew.
Almost certainly these puffins would have been caught with snares. I have done it myself and it requires little skill. There is a snare preserved in the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh and I made a copy of it. It is as primitive and as ingenious as technology gets. Take, first, a length of rope, perhaps six or eight feet long. Tie loops in each of its ends. Then, at intervals of about a foot along its length, tie on short snares made of string. Form each of these little strings into a noose with a mouth about four inches across, so that if you put your finger into the noose and pull, the string will tighten around it. Then pin the rope to the ground at each end in front of some puffin burrows and retire. The puffin is an extremely curious bird. It will inspect and pick up anything of interest on the grass in front of its burrow. They will soon begin to investigate the catching rope. One puffin after another sees it, snaps it up in its beak, shakes it, examines it with one eye like a monocled biologist, thinking perhaps that the string is some kind of land-fish or out-of-element sprat.
This is now illegal. The puffin is protected by law. You can buy them frozen in supermarkets in the Faeroes but there is no eating them here. Besides, there is, for us now, something a little wicked about attempting to catch a puffin. It is – I shudder slightly to say this – amusing in a way of which the modern eco-consciousness does not entirely approve. Where the boys from Lemreway would have taken it with glee and a sense of fun, happy at the abundance of this marvellous summer presence of the birds, we must now stand back, in silence and admiration, committed to non-involvement, to ‘respect’, to whispered distance.
So this catching of a puffin is a historical experience and a strange one, as you watch the sweet bird getting caught in the trap you have devised. It picks up the snare string and ignores it. It walks to and fro in front of its burrow. It stands for a moment, Chamberlain on the tarmac back from Munich, sniffy-nosed, buttoned up, the chest feathers riffled by the breeze, and as it does so, looking out to the north, it puts its foot inside the noose. I am watching from a hundred yards away on the grassy bank. I see the puffin lift its orange foot, I see the foot within the noose and I see the string tighten around the orange scaly leg. The bird does not know for a moment that it is caught. It stands, a captive on the grass, and examines its identical neighbours. The colony is an almost silent place. A little burred growling comes from the puffins inside the burrows, a slow, creaking note. But my puffin has now felt that it is caught. It wants to promenade a little to the left. It can’t. It tries to walk a little the other way. It can, but only for six inches or so. It then, most pitiably of all, goes into its burrow. I see the saddest thing: a single, bright orange puffin leg sticking out horizontally from the mouth of a burrow, the body of the bird invisible, the leg held there by the string of my snare.
It doesn’t take much to kill a puffin. I hit it on the head – people often used their tillers for this – and the bird dies. The body is a little longer and fatter than a large and old-fashioned mobile phone. Its chest is thickly and beautifully insulated with a mass of tiny feathers. They have the consistency of felt wadding and you can push your fingers in among them, covering the quick of your nails, feeling for the warm breast flesh underneath. This is what keeps it from dying of cold out in its eight-month-long vigil in the North Atlantic. The bird, in fact, has a wonderful circulatory system, consisting of three separate loops – one for the body and one for each orange foot – which are only connected to each other by the narrowest of necks. This means that the blood in the feet, which inevitably dangle in the ocean, can remain at a temperature scarcely above freezing, while the blood in the body, behind that thick mat of feather-hair, remains beautifully warm. The ornithologist who discovered this miracle of self-preservation described the puffin as ‘a hot water bottle with two orange icicles hanging off the end.’
It is a bird whose life has made it useful for human beings. That thick chest down makes for perfect pillow stuffing. So much was it valued in the nineteenth century that on St Kilda puffins were caught by the tens of thousand for their feathers alone. The naked bodies were spread out as a manure-cum-mulch on the fields and gardens. That turns upside-down some of the ideas that people still have of the poverty of life in these places. At times there was glut, far too much goodness to know what to do with because the meat of the puffin, well basted and roasted in the oven for thirty-five or forty minutes at most, is delicious. It is as dark as wild duck, as rich as that, with no more than the suspicion of a life at sea about it. I have eaten puffin with my friends. It is dense with a kind of mineral substance, next to which farmed animals seem vapid and soggy. Eating a puffin is a sudden reminder of the reality of wildness from which we are removed. What we eat is as flaccid as ourselves. And that is the heart of Shiantism: the shock of unmediated life.
The puffin is a chesty creature and there is a curiously large amount of meat on such a small bird. If, as my father used to tell me, the definition of a gentleman is ‘someone who can make a grouse do for six’, the Shiant Islanders, with their annual puffin bonanza, would have had no difficulty qualifying. The puffin could give them so much breast meat because of the way it lives its life. It must fly but it must also swim and its fore-limbs are a compromise between paddles and wings. The ideal wing for a sea bird, giving maximum lift for minimum effort, allowing easy, energy-conserving glides across the waves, is long and narrow, like the wings of an albatross by which it can be hung around the mariner’s neck. You could never hang a puffin around a mariner’s neck because its wings have been trimmed back to make them work underwater. They are feathered fins and I have spent summer afternoons on the Shiants swimming with these birds. They are not frightened. They gather around you, swimming up to you, looking curiously sideways at this new kind of rubber-suited whale. The puffins – and the guillemots, which are braver, beside them – dart in the sea, those wing-fins propelling them suddenly forward, a pulsed movement, more gobbling on the sea than grazing on it.
At sea, the wing-fin is extremely efficient. Ornithologists have attached depth meters to puffins and the deepest dive they have recorded, extraordinarily, is a hundred and eighty feet below the surface. Another was observed making a hundred and ninety-four dives in eighty-four minutes, with an average of only three seconds between each dive, which is a measure either of stamina or desperation or both. In the air, the puffin has to beat his short wings extremely fast. There is not enough lift for any sort of level glide. Only when taking off from the heights of their burrow slopes can they half-glide, a beautiful angel-like position as they drop to sea-level. There they must begin level flight. That involves an exhausting six hundred beats a minute and that is why they are such good eaters. A huge breast muscle is needed to power the wing which life at sea – and under the sea – has designed.
The bird teeters, like most of the auks, on the borders of flightlessness. You see a puffin taking off from the sea and it is a desperate business, a grinding attempt to get airborne, to get up the speed at which those wing-fins will work. It is buffeted in a gale as alarmingly as a Sopwith Camel. Once going, a puffin can fly fast, up to sixty miles an hour, but then the landing can be difficult, less a controlled jump jet settling into place than a managed crash, after which there is a lot of head-shaking and shoulder ruffling by which coherence is re-established and dignity restored.
The birds are here and that’s their vindication. Their strategic compromise has worked. There were scares in the early 1970s that the puffins had experienced an enormous crash in numbers. There is some anecdotal but no hard evidence of this. Harvie-Brown’s account is more one of amazement than of calculation and it is difficult to say that the numbers there today are less than in the past. The first careful counts ever made, in 1970, were repeated in the summer of 2000. Although the shape of the colonies seems to have changed slightly – an extension here, a retraction there – the overall numbers of puffins on the Shiants seems to have remained almost constant over twenty-five years.
Their presence here, at the top end of a chain that stretches deep into the geological roots of the islands, is a miracle of connectivity. Each step is ripplingly consequent on the one before: because the sea-bed in the Minch is roughened and corrugated with the hard volcanic rock ridges that are the Shiants’ submarine cousins, the tides run violently across them; because the tides are so turbulent the nutrients in the muds and sands on the sea floor are stirred up throughout the height of the water column; because the water column is so thick with those elements, the phytoplankton, the lowest level of life, thrives in the enrichment. On those microscopic plants the zooplankton, the smallest of animals, can happily graze. Sandeels and sprats feed on the zooplankton, and both the larger fish, the mackerels and herring, and the birds can, in turn, feed on them. The birds are not here by chance, or by some kind of avian romanticism. They are here because around them is the great hunting ground and marketplace.
It goes further than that. The Shiants are on a frontier. They are the northernmost outcrop of the hard volcanic dolerite sills. Those rocks not only cause the currents and turbulence in the sea. They create the protected place of the islands themselves, away from land predators, the foxes, or nowadays the mink, which would destroy the birds. Isolated cliff habitat plus enriched turbulent seas equals bird heaven. This is an ideal site because just to the north, the nature of the sea-bed changes. There, over an area of about ten miles long and ten miles wide, is the perfect breeding ground for the sandeel, the little silver-flash needle of a fish on which the majority of sea birds feed. Sandeels like a rapid but not too rapid circulation of water above a sandy or gravelly, rather than muddy or rocky, sea floor at a depth of no more than two hundred feet. That is just what the North Minch gives them. There they live for the most of the year buried in the sand, waiting for the glory months of spring and summer.
Everything is precisely timed. With the growing light and warmth in March and April, the plankton begin to thicken in the sea. Then, and only in the daytime, the sandeels emerge from their sandy beds to prey on that plankton and to lay their own eggs. The sea birds then begin to arrive and, while making their nests and incubating the eggs, prey on the adult sandeels. Each bird has a different strategy: the kittiwakes and gulls dabbling in the surface, puffins (despite their two-hundred-foot depth record) usually diving to thirty or forty feet, shags, foot-propelled, feeding on the fish close to shore, the guillemots, wing-propelled pursuit-divers, plunging much deeper, often to a hundred and fifty feet, and going much further afield.
Each bird is designed for a niche, but each must satisfy the same need. The making of the next generation is the most demanding task ever confronting a bird. Energy expenditure in the breeding season, in terms of building a nest, catching fish, avoiding the predatory gulls and skuas, goes up by two thirds compared with the relatively restful time spent out on the ocean in winter. That energy expenditure needs feeding. For every three fish caught in the winter, five must be caught during their Shiants summer. And for that surge in appetite, each sandeel or small sprat represents a package of high-energy food. They are also, incidentally, delicious. Every morning during the breeding season in the puffin colonies you find sandeels accidentally dropped, many of them bearing the marks where the puffins carried them in their beaks. They make a delicious whitebait. A breeding sea bird requires 2,200 kilojoules a day. A small shrimp, for example, provides only 4 kJ/gram, a squid no more than 3.5 kJ/g, but the rich, oily sandeel packs in a huge 6.5 kJ/gram. Here, in other words, is the concentrated protein pulse on which the entire bird system relies. Without it, this whirring miracle in the air above me could scarcely happen.
The birds are perfectly synchronised with it. When laying and incubating, they feed on the adult sandeels. By late May the young sandeels, which were born in March, have metamorphosed into little fish themselves and are catchable by the sea birds just at the moment when their own young are going through their sharpest growth phase. Baby sandeels provide the food for baby chicks. That is what you see hour after hour as the puffins come in out of the Minch, the tiny glittering fish still wriggling in their beaks: infant prey for infant predators.
If any link in the chain fails to deliver, catastrophe threatens. If the sea temperatures disturb the production of plankton, or delay it, or if for some reason the immense productivity of the sandeels, as ubiquitous as grass in the ocean, fails to come up to its usual volume, or if they are late, or if, as has happened in the North Sea but never yet in the Minch, vast tonnages of sandeel are caught for catfood – then the immense bird populations of the Shiants would be threatened with death. That catastrophe has at times in the past twenty years struck in Shetland, Norway and the Americas, where dead birds have littered the sand like feathered surf.
It must happen quite regularly, as a natural event, because sea birds have built into them a set of buffers against it. They can feed on other fish apart from sandeels. Some years on the Shiants, the ornithologists have found the adults bringing mostly sprats and relatively few sandeels. They can also fly further to find other sources of food. But more important for the long-term survival of the Shiant birds is their large-scale life-strategy. Most of them produce few young but live a long time. The puffin only ever has a single chick, and the chick will be five years old before it breeds, but each bird can live up to forty years. If the timing or the food production goes wrong one year, and the chick dies, that is not going to affect the population of the colony. Only failure year after year, and a dearth of chicks coming forward to breed, will begin to shrink the overall numbers.
Mike Brooke, curator of birds at Cambridge University Zoological Museum, who has twice been to the Shiants to count the puffins, explained the maths to me. About one in four or five puffin fledglings survives to an age when they can breed. On average they then will breed for, say, ten years. Out of a puffin couple’s ten fledglings, then, two will survive and so the population remains constant.
These may be the wrong terms, but that sense of robustness, of a marvellously mature and adult approach to risk, with all the elasticity of response that it implies, is, I think, one of the reasons that the spectacle of the summer birds is so stimulating. This life-phenomenon is not sweet, in the way that puffins are often portrayed. Nor is it heroically violent, in the way that nature is often seen. It is a wonderfully sober, serious and ingenious response to the problems and challenges of a sea and island life. What is eternally beautiful about the hundreds of thousands of puffins that come to make the Shiants their summer home is not the individual bird, not the funny little self-satisfied figure in a tail coat and stiff shirt, but this big strong body of genetic intelligence, drawing spectacular life from the hidden abundance of the sea around it.
There is only one clamouring absence. Throughout history the Shiants were the haunt of the white-tailed sea eagle. I have never seen sea eagles on the Shiants but I have seen them in Morvern, on the Sound of Mull, a pair of enormous, tatty creatures, flustered in the breeze, their wing feathers fluttering about them like the rags of an old bag woman, their wings eight feet across and perhaps eighteen inches from the leading to the trailing edge. You can have no doubt, as the shepherds on Mull know, that these creatures can take living, healthy lambs from beside their mothers. They make the greater black-backed gulls look like pigeons.
The Shiants were the famous home of a pair for well over two centuries. In 1690, Martin Martin
saw a couple of Eagles here: the Natives told me, that these Eagles would never suffer any of their kind to live there but themselves, and that they drove away their young ones as soon as they were able to fly. And they told me likewise, that those Eagles are so careful of the place of their abode, that they never yet killed any Sheep or Lamb in the Island, tho the Bones of Lambs, of Fawns and Wild-Fowls, are frequently found in and about their Nests; so that they make their Purchase in the opposite islands, the nearest of which is a League distant.
Martin was a modern man, a graduate of Edinburgh University, a friend of Sir Robert Sibbald, the Edinburgh physician and botanist, a doctor qualified at Leyden and a corresponding member of the Royal Society in London. His journeys around the Hebrides were partly, as a good seventeenth-century scientist, in pursuit of vulgar errors. And he makes a modern joke: the Garbh Eilean eagles do their shopping in Eilean Mhuire. But he was also a native of Duntulm in Skye, no more than fourteen miles away, and so a Gaelic speaker, and his description, at least in reporting the Shiant Islanders’ view of their native eagles, is filled, I think, with a certain animist respect, an attitude which carries in it a faint echo of those long-distant people in Isbister, who shared their graves with the sea eagles.
The eagles continued to grace these cliffs until the early part of the twentieth century. Even now, empty as it is, the precise location of the eyrie, high up on the north cliffs of Garbh Eilean, is clear: a smallish place about twenty feet across, protected from below by sheer dolerite columns rising from the sea and protected from above by an enormous corbelled roof of dolerite. Lord Teignmouth saw them here in 1828, and forty years later the highly acquisitive birder Captain HJ Elwes saw this eyrie as one of the ultimate challenges. Elwes had lost any respect for the birds. There were sea eagle eyries reported to him in North Uist, Scalpay, Wiay, Benbecula, above Loch Bhrollúm and several other places in Lewis and Harris. There was even one man, he heard, Dr MacGillivray of Eoligarry in Barra, who had a tame sea eagle for a while ‘and this bird used to follow his sons in their rambles over the island.’ Virtually every eyrie was on north-facing cliffs but the Shiants’ throne was the only one thought to be inaccessible. That is what motivated Captain Elwes.
May 4 1868
To Shiant Isles in smack – Got there about 1 – on the way 5 eagles were in sight at one time. – 2 golden and 3 white-tailed –.
The eagles’ nest was in the highest part of the cliff which is quite perpendicular and positioned as far down that the rope would only just reach it. It was a very nasty place altogether, but Sandy [Maclver, the keeper from Eishken in Pairc] said he thought that he could get it, so we let him down. When he had gone about 23 fathoms he stopped so long that I was afraid something was wrong, so I ran round to see and found that Sandy was so giddy from the twisting of the rope that he could do nothing. He said he could not make out where the nest was even then and that the rock hung over too much to get it. So we pulled him up. I am much annoyed at our failure, and I had made so sure of getting the eggs in the Shiant Isles. – back to Eishken.
This extract from Elwes’s journal is preserved, without comment, in Harvie-Brown’s notebooks, now in the Library of the Royal Museum in Edinburgh. Elwes was the rule, not the aberration. Harvie-Brown also reproduces nature notes from another near-contemporary called Hogg: ‘10 April 82. Brollum Hill, Loch Shell. White-tailed sea-eagles. Both birds shot in both places. Very fine old birds.’
It may well have been the invention of the camera which brought this habit to an end. On his visit to the Shiants in 1886, Harvie-Brown had a photographer with him, William Norrie of Fraserburgh, and in The Vertebrate Fauna of the Outer Hebrides, which Harvie-Brown published in 1888, he included a plate taken by Norrie of the northern cliffs of the Shiants just below the sea eagle’s eyrie.
It is the earliest photograph of the islands in existence and is peculiarly uninformative: a misty set of columns which look the same today as they did over a century ago. Other photographs which Norrie took of the Campbell family, mentioned by Harvie-Brown in his journal, have disappeared.
But the naturalist, not averse to killing large amounts of wildlife himself (his collected skins were also deposited in the Royal Museum) writes rather differently about the sea eagle:
In 1887 the Shiant islands pair were still ‘to the fore’ and gave our party a fine opportunity of watching all the phases of their flight. Long may they continue in their inaccessible retreat; and may the broken overhanging basalt columns, which project far beyond the giant ribs of similar structure down below, resist the tear and wear of time, and prove a sheltering roof to them. So far as we are concerned we are pleased with a feather (‘tickled with a straw’, if you like) which we picked up on the boulder-strewn beach below the eyrie, ay and a great deal more than if we had shot the bird.
This charming, serious and energetic man was ahead of his time. In about 1905, although the date is uncertain, and the name of the culprit unknown, the last of the Shiant Isles’ white-tailed sea eagles was shot. Compton Mackenzie heard that it had been done by ‘a clergyman collector’ but there is another possibility. The Eishken estate on Pairc was certainly killing ‘vermin’ on the Shiants’ cliffs up until the 1930s and perhaps beyond. When I asked Tommy Macrae, a practised raconteur, loved throughout Pairc, who worked as a keeper on Eishken for a good part of the twentieth century, what was meant by vermin, he had a one-word answer: ‘hawks’. His father, a keeper on Eishken in the 1930s, used to go out there to kill them. Elwes had seen a ‘Falcon’ on the Shiants as well as two sea eagles in the 1860s but there were no hawks on the Shiants in the 1960s, ’70s or ’80s. Only recently has a pair of peregrines re-established itself on the east cliffs of Eilean an Tighe. The persecution by the gamekeepers from Eishken, intent on eradicating the ‘vermin’ to protect the grouse, was persistent for decades. It seems as likely as not that the sea eagles were shot in the same cause.
There is a footnote to the story of the Shiant sea eagles. They were seen again over the Minch between the islands and Pairc in the last few years of the 1990s. A pair, descendants of those which since the 1980s the Nature Conservancy and its successors have been reintroducing to Rum and the Inner Hebrides, set up their nest somewhere in Pairc. The present owners of the Eishken estate welcomed and treasured them. Ravens harassed the eagles at their enormous nest but people did not. The officers of Scottish Natural Heritage were considering installing a closed circuit camera so that these precious creatures – there are some twenty-two pairs with territories in Scotland – could be continuously monitored. The nest was littered, just as Martin Martin had described it, with the bones of their victims. Through binoculars you could see on the nest the remains of puffins in the summer-time and fulmars in the winter. These eagles were also making ‘their Purchase in the opposite islands.’
Despite all of this and despite the wonderful midsummer glory of the Shiants, there is something troublingly wrong. The modern Minch is an illusion of perfection. The range of pollution in the sea here, even apart from the radioactivity drifting up from Sellafield, makes alarming reading. Some of it is visible. Ships’ crew and fishermen throw overboard about three or four pounds of rubbish per person per day. A ship as a whole, it is thought, chucks on average another two hundred and ninety tons of cargo-associated waste into the sea every year. Landlubbers are no better. So-called Sewage Related Debris is increasingly made of plastic. SRD, as it is discreetly termed, includes sanitary towels, tampons, nappies, condoms, bandages, tights and medical waste. Most of the sewage in the Minch area is untreated and so all of this is discharged directly into the sea. I have sailed past much of it in Freyja.
The beaches of the Shiants are nowadays lined from end to end in multi-coloured plastic rubbish, and I can walk the length of them finding loo cleaners, soft drink bottles, cans of Coke with Japanese script, dolls’ heads, Dettol and Domestos where in the past the shore was scattered with fish boxes on every one of which was the instruction ‘Return to Lochinver’.
I don’t want to overstate this. The Minch is not a poisoned place. Life here seems more complete than anywhere I know, miraculously uncontaminated considering how near it is to the huge industrial centres of Britain and Europe. But there are signs of something under strain. In addition to the stream of radioactivity pouring into the Minch from the Irish Sea, levels of cadmium and copper were found here in concentrations much higher than expected for coastal waters. These metals probably come from the rivers of industrial England.
The deep health of the sea is the great unaddressed issue of environmental politics. It remains both a toxin-sink and the most egregious example of a property that is over-exploited and maltreated because it is held in common. No one owns it to protect it. Everyone abuses it because it isn’t theirs. The fiendishly complicated population dynamics of sea plants and creatures and the birds around them is not properly understood but there is one big, alarming signal: the sea eagles that fly over the Minch are failing to breed. That is as good a sign as any that more attention needs to be paid and more precautions taken. The Shiants’ corbelled eagle-throne is still empty and I won’t be happy until it is occupied again.
Then, in the house on Eilean an Tighe, I will think of those emperor-birds in residence on Garbh Eilean. Like lairds in their Highland fastness, they will scarcely show themselves to the world at large. The sea eagle is not a self-promoter, does not engage in the sort of daily noisy business of more ordinary bird life. He has his self-regard and his reticence. He is known to be there, a sovereign presence, and there is no need to flaunt it. Eagles colour the country they inhabit, but it is a glimpsed presence not a displayed one. I would not need to see them, but only to enjoy the reverberating knowledge that somewhere on that cliff they were staring out to the north across the Minch, the only truly imperial creature in the British Isles, standing three feet from talon to eye, immensely strong, a creature which, if rarely seen, nevertheless sinks deep into the consciousness, a symbol of grandeur, distance, acuity and imperium.
Occasionally perhaps, inside the house with my daughters, a friend outside would shout, ‘Look, look!’ We would go out. The sky is a bright blue and on the lip of the hill above us, perhaps four hundred feet above the house and the sea, is the sea eagle. That incredible wing is spread like a floorboard above us. It is a black stroke on the sky made with a fat-bladed pen. There is little you can do when watching an eagle quartering the ground on which you stand but gawp at its leonine presence. Those sprung wings held in a shallow V, a slight flex to them as the air shifts beneath it, the primaries flared at the tips, its quivering, delicate fingers feeling the wind and its own place in it. In the field-glasses, I can see the eagle’s head moving, never still, surveying the country, to and fro across us, across the map of house and shore and the abandoned fields. The bird is taking us in, calmly, circlingly, from its ever higher position of distant knowledge. Analyst, examiner, assessor-king.
I know three things about eagles. Their eyes, in whose retinas the rods and cones are packed many times more tightly than our own, have a resolution eight times better than ours. They live in a world of visual intensity whose nature we cannot, quite literally, even dream of. It is said that an eagle can see a shrew twitch in the grass from three thousand feet above it. And, thirdly, if our eyes occupied the same proportion of our skull as the eagle’s eyes do of his, they would be the size of oranges.
The bird comes back down on to the cliff-top and sits there, inward and disconsolate. The ravens, which live on the same cliff, whose cliff, in their mind anyway, this really is, flip up out of somewhere and start nagging at the eagle. He sits there being bothered by these birds like gnats around him. His stillness makes the ravens look small. As they dive and pirouette around him, he ducks his head like a half-tolerant old dog, just dropping it down into his neck as the ravens make their pass. You have to love the eagle for that, the old bastard being swatted by the nagging kids. After four or five minutes he has had enough and falls off his throne into flight above the Sound. Then you see the heroic beauty of the bird. He beats his way eastwards along the steepening and darkening cliff, heavy wing-beats, long and laboured, each one giving a visible lift to the body, while the ravens play like Messerschmitts around him. The heaviness of that beat, the grandeur of the creature in his dark and rocky surroundings: I remember Shelley’s description of Coleridge as ‘a hooded eagle among blinking owls’. The rest of the passage describes the great, impenetrable Coleridge as
he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind
Which, with its own internal lightning blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair.
It is those last lines I want to see in flight on the Shiants, that sagacious, unknowable, all-seeing creature, flying to the east along the fissured cliff, while the late sun slides across the rocks beneath him. That is what I want: Coleridge on the Shiants.