The Seabirds Cry

Of all the birds I enjoy seeing, I'd put seabirds at the top of my list. Not birds that live on our shores but those whose link with the land can seem very tenuous and only of importance when it comes to breeding. A very perceptive friend has just bought me a book called The Seabird’s Cry and it was one of those books that was very difficult to put down. It wasn't a 'read in one sitting' book but it wasn't far off. Its sub-title The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers gives a clue as to what its about.
 

Ten species of birds more at home in the deep ocean than on land are described, some of them with lifetimes longer than our own, faithful to their partners and dedicated as parents – birds such as the fulmar, cormorant and albatross. Changes in technology have enabled a dramatic widening of our understanding of their habits. Geolocators and GPS loggers track fishing patterns during the breeding season and the movements of young and adult birds for the rest of the year. We can build up a picture for each species and even individual birds, and create graphs which both illustrate reality and create more questions as the complexity deepens. The wonder grows: it seems that seabirds can make decisions based on learned experience – about tidal changes or smell, for example, or about the availability of food in a poor year, forcing a choice between chicks or parents surviving the winter. Each species is uniquely adapted to its own Umwelt, a word the author clearly loves, which can be translated from the German as the product of close and extreme attention to the things that matter in your life and indifference to those that don’t. An intelligence so finely focussed that it enables gannet colonies in close proximity to each other to divide up its fishing areas. Seven out of the ten species are in decline – leaving us with the bitter irony that the technology providing the information about the brilliance and mastery of their lives is also the source of the changes in the ocean that are killing them.

The author, Adam Nicolson, has the gift of all the best storytellers, he twists the heart strings and delivers the message. But don’t fall for anthropomorphism; don’t get cuddly and sentimental about chicks and puffins. This is a life and death struggle against unimaginable odds. When I see these birds in future, they will never be as they were before I read The Seabird’s Cry. I loved this book. It provides genuine insight into challenges and family lives of these birds that are at the same time familiar to us as humans and yet very alien. I came away with a new appreciation for the struggles these birds go through and extreme gratitude that I was not born a Nazca Booby (spoiler alert: a daft name is the least of these bird's worries).

A by-product of my reading the book was my trawling through my files for some photographs to illustrate this post. It was a very enjoyable exercise as it brought back so many memories of my travels with the long-suffering Mrs P, who will admit herself that her primary interest is history and not birds.

Lots and lots of cormorants in the Beagle Sound just off Ushuaia in Terra del Fuego. The collective noun is a 'gulp of cormorants', nicely referencing how they eat fish.

Have never seen a Nazca Booby but here are some Blue Footed Boobies we saw on a boat trip to the Ballestas Islands off the Peruvian coast. I can't find what the collective noun for boobies is but it should be something like clutch or uplift or cup or ...(oh, shut up, Parsons). Whilst thinking about the boat trip, it sticks in the memory because Mrs P was assailed by a vicious stomach bug and 4 hours on a heaving, rolling open boat was not what she wanted.

Ooh look, a bazaar (yes, really) of guillemots clinging for dear life on a cliff on Orkney.

Puffins, puffins, puffins in lots of places. This was one of many we saw at Sumburgh Head on the mainland of the Shetland Isles. And if there were many puffins, what would we call them? I found several collective nouns - parliament, raft, loomery, circus and (to me the strangest) an improbability of puffins. Take your pick. Who is the final arbiter on such matters? Is there a Keeper of the Queen's Puffins? They'd know.

Two shags hanging out ...in a hangout. Yep, that's what a group is called, a hangout. Pretty cool, eh, for a pretty cool bird. Get the quiff, if that's not cool, I don't know what is.

A very happy pair of fulmars on a cliff on the Brough of Birsay in Orkney. I couldn't find any reliable source for a collective noun for them so I'll suggest one: a vomit of fulmars after their disgusting habit of spraying regurgitated and smelly stomach contents on potential attackers.

A group of gannets on one of the largest gannetries in the Northern Hemisphere - Boreray, St Kilda. Gannets, apparently, have many collective nouns, including a company, gannetry and a plunging. I'd go with plunging as that's exactly what they do when they fish.