PARADISE BIRD

The Arctic Tern has an incomparable migration, chasing the sun from north to south and back again the pointed silvery wings and tail streamers, bird of paradisal beauty and grace. Sea-swallow, snow white and river-pearl grey with sheen of ice. In Italian sterna codalunga, the tern with the long swallow-tail, is delicate and streamlined, resolute shoulders ploughing the air with graceful wingflaps across the face of the planet and back, not just once but as many times as the years they live – and they can survive for more than 30 years. As they played over the Sound of Taransay, ethereal, dainty, adroit fliers feeding and diving and dancing, it was hard to believe the relentless destiny of this enchanting fairytale seabird, which during its lifetime makes the ultimate Odyssey known to creation, visiting almost every shoreline on earth. The Arctic Tern is a bird of the light, flying through nine months of perpetual day as it travels from northern breeding grounds in summer – the Hebrides among others – to winter on the Antarctic coast. If it flew direct, it would cover 12,000 miles, the shortest distance between the two poles as the crow flies (not that it does). But the Arctic Tern chooses a more complicated route: birds nesting in Iceland and Greenland make a round-trip of more than 44,000 miles, and birds nesting in the Netherlands 56,000. On average, a single Arctic Tern will fly 1.5 million miles in its lifetime. There is no comparable migration, or anything even close to it, in the animal kingdom. Later that week, I stumbled on the remains of an Arctic Tern lying on bog moorland. Just one wing had been left by the predator Handling it is to touch the intangible, something of the stamina and endurance of these timeless navigators of the globe. Rosamond Richardson is an author and journalist who also writes for The Countryman, and her Waiting for the Albino Dunnock will be published in spring 2017