NATURE COLUMN: Bill Cawley

TWO things happened recently over a 24 hour period to remind me of the far north on these dark nights.

The guest on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs had as a choice of record of Orkney composer Peter Maxwell Davies’s wonderfully evocative music Farewell to Stromness and the previous night we watched a fine BBC documentary on the Shetlands.

If anyone questions the TV licensing fee I would simply point them towards the range of nature documentaries that the company produces.

The film took us back to a week we spent on Shetland in 2011, the archipelago – as has often been remarked – is closer to Bergen in Norway than it is to London.

One day was particularly memorable as Cathy, Phoebe and I stood on the 1,000 feet high volcanic cliffs of Eshaness as we stared out knowing that the next landmass westward would be the coast of Labrador.

Below us the fulmars perched on the rock face, kittiwakes uttered their name exactly as they stitched the air with their flight paths and gannets plunged like daggers into the seafoam.

On the way to the cliffs we paused by a deserted grave yard and the memorials to many their memorials paid by their descendents who had braved the seas to forge a new life over the western horizon.

In the days we were on the island we saw many species of flower, plus sundew and red clover and scores of different type of bird.

The ground was settled by their nests and eggs: brown-speckled eggs of a black-backed gull inside the circular groundworks of a ruined farm house; black-spotted brown of a snipe, which fled away in zigzags when I disturbed one; brownspotted white of a skylark cupped in the grass near the stone-walled pen by the ocean’s edge.

At all times the air was humming with their song, like never-ending cadenzas.

The programme did mention the Great Skuas, whose piratical tactics were demonstrated as the mugged other sea birds forcing them to drop fish they had caught.

The bird is known as Bonxies locally and is unafraid of humans.

They divebomb should anyone venture too close to a nest.

There was also the storm petrel nesting in the remains of the Pictish tower at Mousa.

They are small seabirds who only land on shore during the breeding season in order to lay an egg on the stone shelves and crannies of the 2000 year old broch.

On the way we passed the remains of a dogfish attracting the interests of hooded crows and a raven.

We did not see the simmer dim, which is the name given to the few hours of half light during July when it is light enough to read at midnight.

For people living in these far northern islands, where winter is dominated by darkness, the power of light is of vital importance.