FLYING HIGH ONCE MORE
How Adam Nicolson became the Pied Piper of the Shiant islands
Four miles off Lewis lie the three small Shiant Islands, set in the savage tide rips of the Minch, where frequent gales and erratic storms pummel them from every direction. I have sailed around them, hugging their jagged coastline, but have never yet landed, such are the vagaries of the elements. There is no harbour, nor pier, no sandy beach, and sheer cliffs, some up to 500 feet, leer menacingly out of the sea mist that often envelopes the islands at whim. They are uninhabited now and have been since 1901, although this was not always the case: people were living here in the Bronze Age and at their 18th-century peak there were probably 40 people who called the Shiants home.
In summer the Shiants are one of the richest habitats in Scotland. Through binoculars from a boat it is possible to see their verdant emerald swards fertilised annually with tons of guano, the drifts of wind-sculpted flowers: primroses, violets, sea campion, orchids, marsh marigolds, and cushions of pink thrift. Snipe drum and skylarks rise high into the eternal vortex singing Hebridean arias against salted winds. And then the scene fills with hundreds of thousands of seabirds, their pungent aroma, their cries and clamour, achingly beautiful, a world apart, whilst rafts of puffins and other auks congregate on navy blue sea, and lissom
dolphins, porpoises and whales may be a frequent sight. The Shiants are one of the most important breeding grounds in the world for the puffin, and have important numbers of guillemots, razorbills, fulmars, kittiwakes, great skuas and shags.
Compton Mackenzie owned the islands during the 1920s-30s, and in 1937 Nigel Nicolson, the son of Harold Nicolson and Vita SackvilleWest, bought them for the paltry sum of £1,300. When his son Adam reached twenty-one Nigel handed them over to him. This wise decision has led to a quite extraordinary continuity of stewardship of one of the most unspoilt group of islands probably anywhere on earth.
Adam Nicolson’s passion for seabirds has led to his gripping television and radio documentaries, and his latest book, A Seabird’s Cry, a movingly honest account and in-depth study of the birds that begins with his childhood forays to the Shiants. This classic heart-felt work takes the reader on a far longer journey across the world following their astonishing peregrinations, their history and lore, whilst making it harrowingly clear that extinction stalks the ocean as a global tragedy unfolds. It’s something we all need to know, however uncomfortable it might be.
‘I know from experience how blind one can be to deep and threatening change. Our natural assumption is that we live in constancy. I suppose, because many of the best kittiwake breeding grounds on the Shiants are almost inaccessible on some off lying skerries and I seldom go, I don’t instantly recognise what is happening but we know that British kittiwake numbers have fallen by 80% since the 1960s, and fulmar numbers have
‘ Snipe drum and skylarks rise high into the eternal vortex singing Hebridean arias against salted winds’
crashed too. Globally one third of all seabird species is threatened with extinction, half are thought to be in decline.
‘This is an entirely manmade disaster: overfishing, by-catch of birds in industrial tackle, deliberate destruction, warming seas, pollution and insidious amounts of plastics increasingly filling the oceans. We have learnt that many seabirds fish and navigate by sense of smell, and are mistaking gases emitted from plastics as food, and dying in large numbers. It’s a complex situation tied up with the warming of the seas, a change in the food chain, and the way certain plankton movements have altered.
‘The Shiants are places of inherent sanctity – the rest of the world thinks there is nothing much to them but they are the most powerful absence I know. When my own son Tom reached twenty-one in 2005 I handed them over to him. It was time for him to know them in his own way, with his own set of memories just as I have. We visit every year and stay in the house – two rooms, no plumbing, no water, heating or electricity, and until now, rats. It’s utterly wild and beautiful, a place I love with all my heart and always have done.’
Until 2016 the Shiants were listed as the last British stronghold for the black rat, or plague rat, a non-native seafarer that arrived from S. E. Asia. It was clear that with the birds’ decline, they presented yet another major threat.
‘Tom and I were fully supportive of the plan to remove the rats but we were also aware that we shouldn’t ever allow the Shiants to become institutionalised. The ideal is for people to land and feel the kind of amazement at the islands’ natural riches that I remember when I first went there with my father in the 1960s. The rat eradication was entirely in the service of that ideal. The rats have probably been there for about 200 years, after an 18th-century wreck, as against the 9,000 odd post-Ice Age years that the birds have been there. In an excavation of a mid-18th-century midden, we found the bones of a Manx shearwater, a bird no longer present on the Shiants. It’s likely that the rats wiped out this vulnerable burrow-nester. Nor are there any Storm petrels, despite perfect habitat. We viewed the rats as a pernicious introduced weed, a reducer of biodiversity not an example of it. Now finally the islands are rid of them, there is no doubt that the natural richness will flourish in a way it never could with up to 30,000 rats at their annual peak. It was a six-month over-winter programme, involving thousands of bait stations and tens of volunteers. We then had a post-eradication monitoring programme ensuring it had worked. The New Zealand team who did it have had great success globally in similar situations. We made it quite clear that the Shiants were not to become an RSPB outstation and once the rats were eradicated no evidence of RSPB presence should remain. Already this year I have noted far more ground nesting birds, more rock pipits, stone chats, meadow pipits, skylarks, wrens and wheatears. Hopefully the shearwaters and storm petrels will return.’
In 1970 the RSPB endeavoured to buy the islands from Nigel Nicolson by writing indirectly to him suggesting they would be in safer hands if they owned them. ‘My father saw this for what it was, in his eyes, an empire building bogey. The thought of it still makes my hackles rise. Why did they think they could protect it any better than we could?’ It seems they thought they could turn it into a nature reserve, complete with access, and way-marked walks, hides and copious signage. It’s a nature reserve already, in the truest sense of the words. The Shiants can have found no better trustees in the Nicolson family for here nature manages nature, with the absolute minimum of human interference and the birds are left in peace to breed.
One of Adam’s friends once said ‘Promise me one thing, Adam. You will never let one of those organisations get their hands on this place. It would be the end of it, the real death of it. It needs to belong to a person who loves it.’
‘It does,’ Adam replied, ‘and I won’t.’
‘It’s utterly wild and beautiful, a place I love with all my heart and always have done’