REFLECTIONS

The Arctic Tern – a timeless navigator of stamina and endurance

EARLY MORNING SUNSHINE danced on silky waters in the Sound of Taransay. Tiny waves rippled over the shallows. Clouds hung motionless in a blue sky, reflected in sea-shades of turquoise and aquamarine. The serene stretch of sand, rated one of the 10 most beautiful in the world, was deserted as a light breeze waved marram grasses on the dunes behind the beach. Great Northern Divers drifted far out in the bay, so far it was impossible to imagine that this beautiful black-and-white bird is the same length as a Golden Eagle, and heavier. Scoter, Eider and so-elegant Red-throated Divers were feeding leisurely in the balmy seas of Luskentyre, on the west coast of Harris, world-famous for its tweed, whose dye-colours reflect local plants and minerals of the hills and moors. One of a chain of islands of the Outer Hebrides or Innis Fada, ‘Long Island’, grandest and most lonely of Scotland’s outlying isles, land of sea caves, of lashing Atlantic breakers and rugged hills. The Hebrides archipelago of two hundred islands (only 15 are inhabited) used to be, in its prehistoric mythology, one long island. A Viking legend tells how they wanted to take it back with them to the Norse Kingdoms: they flung a chain around the top isle to pull it back up through the sea to the north, but the land broke up into little pieces, where they remain. Over millennia, sinking back into the seas from which they once erupted, the mist-laden islands lie alone but for the sound of the sea and the cry of the seabirds. “The language of birds is very ancient,’ wrote ornithologist Gilbert White, ‘little is said, but much is meant and understood.” Waves sweep milk-white over granite rocks as they have done since prehistory, grey winds scour hills and moors of a now all-but-treeless terrain. Too demanding for humankind to make it home, these windswept islands have become the territory of seabirds and waders, a landing platform for migrating birds, and a safe nesting place for those who spend summers in the frozen north. Arctic Terns were racing over the blue-green waters of the bay, elfin, diving like arrows into the gentle waves, plunging for fish. A pair were wind-dancing, skipping and flicking over flat expanses of sand and sea – all bright white rump, streak of pale grey wing and flash of red leg. A heart muscle enclosed in a wing muscle, seemingly fragile, bird of the waters. Sleekheaded with sharp scarlet bill as long as its head, black-hooded and white-cheeked, Sterna paradisaea of

On average, a single Arctic Tern will fly 1.5 million miles in its lifetime. There is no comparable migration, or anything close to it, in the animal kingdom