FLOCK TACTICS
Why on earth do seabirds love cramming together in tiny, stinking, cliff-edge nests? Because it’s a vital part of their...
There’s something up-setting about a seabird colony. It just doesn’t seem natural. Other experiences of immense bio-abundance are more comfortable to deal with: vast herds of wildebeest and lakes filled with flamingoes make sense because the environment is clearly supporting them – and they all have their heads down feeding.
Not so with seabirds, crammed together on a rock or lined up on the wall of a cliff. Nothing on the rock or the cliff will do a seabird any good at all. There are too many of them: crushed together, making a din that hurts the ears and a stink that hurts the nose: and not a bite of food in sight.
That’s because land is nothing to them but a piece of hardstanding with a sea view and room for a couple of feet and an egg. Their food, their lives, their entire beings are concentrated elsewhere: out on the heaving wetness that is forever alien to us humans. ‘The further from home we are, the more at home they are,’ Adam Nicolson writes.
They’re not like us; they’re not much like the birds we are familiar with. The robin in your garden will produce two or even three broods in a year with halfa-dozen eggs in each, foraging for the chicks around the nesting site.
Nicolson sums up the classic seabird strategy: ‘Long life, close if not total fidelity to the partner, a massive investment in one big egg per year, six weeks’ incubation and then six weeks feeding the young chick.’
‘Land is nothing to them but a piece of hard ground with a sea view and room for a couple of feet and an egg’
And, almost always, in vast, stinking colonies that provide some of the world’s great sights. They seem to crowd together because there’s no choice: nesting places are scarce and so you must crowd in just out of pecking range of all your neighbours.
Not so, Ni col son says. Technology has allowed us to understand something of the seabirds’ life in the actual sea. ‘I’ve helped to fit transmitters on to the tails of gannets and these have sent back vital information about their feeding ranges.’
The information tells us that a seabird’s life is about shared knowledge and shared experience that can only come from being part of a colony. A gannet can’t defend a shoal of fish as a robin defends your garden; a lone fisher operating by chance would soon starve. Knowledge of food resources and the movements of fish is a precious community asset and that’s why a place in the colony is life and death to gannets. Nicolson writes with a heart full of poetry and a head full of science. He is up to speed with recent seabird research and tells the tales with relish, sometimes wincing at the cruelty of some methods involved – during the removal of chicks from nesting kittiwakes, birds have in the past been intentionally blinded. He has a well-developed taste for melodrama: gannets are ‘a vision of the best and worst of ourselves’. There is certainly a great intensity in our relationship with seabirds. We have sung songs and written poems about them for hundreds of years, and we have slaughtered them for even longer. We did so with the great auk, the flightless fisher of the northern hemisphere, in the 19th century, and over the past 60 years the world’s population of seabirds has declined 60%. This book is, above all, about wonder: not as childish thing but as something that comes from experience and knowledge and familiarity and maturity and intellect. A rich relationship with wildlife is an essential part of grown-up life.