Our own northern albatross
Rum has the second biggest Manx shearwater colony and provides the greatest show never seen on TV, writes Roger Morgan-grenville
It is 2am high up on an escarpment on the mountainside of Hallival on the Isle of Rum. Across the water, night has fallen on Ardnamurchan, and Mallaig stands out brightly against the hills with its orange glow of street lights, and its restless fishing vessels riding on their anchors. For an instant, we think we can see the Northern Lights, but we can’t.
Quite suddenly, the quiet of the night is punctuated by a series of cackles and screams, as if someone has opened the door to a Victorian asylum. They come from the right and left, from above us and below; they are close and far away, still and yet moving at speed across the night. This is the wildlife spectacle they never showed you on TV, perhaps the greatest and weirdest show of nature in the British Isles. By the time it reaches its crescendo an hour later, the noise is maybe coming from 2,000 separate mouths.
For these are Manx shearwaters, our own ‘northern albatross’, and they are choosing the safety of the darkest part of night to fly up to their mountain top burrows to feed each solitary chick that awaits them. Those howls and cries are their mechanisms for locating their chicks in the pitch dark. Rum is the second biggest shearwater colony in the world (the first is Skomer, in West Wales), and it is home to maybe one in three of every Manx shearwater on earth.
Centuries ago, marauding Vikings came to the island, and they heard those noises, too, but from their ships. Seeing that this was all the proof they needed that the island was haunted by evil trolls, they climbed back in their boats and left it well alone, leaving only the name Trolleval, a neighbouring mountain that is still home to thousands of the birds.
I am on Hallival in late August with a research team from Oxford University, intercepting the adult shearwaters as they come into their nests, and recovering, and replacing, the tiny geolocators that they have been carrying round the world with them for the last year. Once we know they are in the burrows, we carefully pull them out, weigh them, check their condition, and then work on the geolocator. And what stories those geolocators will tell, when we plug them into the base computer and establish where they have been.
For Scotland’s noisiest bird is also Scotland’s best travelled export, and her journey will stretch your credibility to its limit.
I am holding one in my hand. Shearwaters only come to land in the darkest of nights, when the predators have turned in for the night. She is fit and healthy, weighing about 450 grams, and she is calm while I work on her. Down in the burrow, when I replace her, is a chick that is right now 50 per cent bigger than her, made so by the rich and half-digested diet of sand eels and crustaceans that she has been catching. Any day now, the mother and father will leave, and begin their long journey down to the rich waters off Argentina, a full 8,000 miles away. Ten days later, and starving, the chick will pull himself out of the burrow, up the surface, and he will paddle his inelegant body along the hillside until he finds a rock just high enough to catch a bit of extra wind. After much flapping, he will suddenly fly up into the night sky. It will be the last time he touches land for over a thousand days, maybe four years.
No one tells him where to go, he just
The quiet of the night is punctuated by a series of cackles and screams
goes. South past Mull, past Islay, past Cumbria, Wales, Cornwall and France. South past Spain, Morocco and Senegal, every now and then stopping to feed, but always moving on. South past the fishing vessels and oil rigs of Sierra Leone.
Eventually, he will turn south west across the shortest bit of the Atlantic, and then fly down the coast of South America until he gets to his feeding grounds. At the equivalent age of a six month old human baby, he will have flown those 8,000 miles on his own, teaching himself to fish by sensing the little eruptions of gas that come from krill when they are being eaten near the surface. For the next three or four years, he will ply the seas, learning to fish and creating mind-maps of the best areas to go, but never coming to land. Then one day, the restlessness of every breeding animal on earth will get to him, and he will start once again for Rum, and will be guided by a miraculous mix of magnetic fields, stars, sun, sight, smell and the imprint of the exact location of his birth that he absorbed at the mouth of the burrow all that time ago.
I saw my first shearwater as a 12 year-old boy on holiday with my Mull grandmother, and, over the years, it spoke to my soul, and became a metaphor for the wildness I wanted in my life, and shone a spotlight at the things that we have done to this planet we call home. Since 1960, we have killed off 66 per cent of all the seabirds on earth, so it is a miracle that our little half kilo Celtic survivor is actually growing in numbers at the moment. It is its intense good fortune to breed mainly on an island where rats have been cleared, (Rum is an exception but not many rats make it up to the heights of the colony), to fish above the nets but below the hawsers that other birds get caught up in, and to avoid humanity wherever it can.
Recently, for a full year, I followed those shearwaters. I spent days and nights on their breeding sites, and watched them out at sea fishing. Then I went to Argentina and wandered the coasts to find people prepared to take me out to sea to find them. I welcomed them back to their breeding grounds from an Irish Peninsula, watched them making a comeback in the Scilly Isles, and spent a magical evening off Eigg watching maybe 15,000 of them rafting. Finally, I returned to my childhood haunt of Mull, and went back to Staffa, Iona and Lunga, where I had seen them first.
At the end of the journey, I lay on my own on a cliff side on the deserted island of Lunga and watched the shearwaters flying out at sea where I had first seen them nearly 50 years before. In a year of social distancing, I was miles away from anyone, just being among the fulmars, the gannets, the guillemots and the puffins that produce the soundtrack to the shearwaters’ lives.
And, as I did so, two things dawned on me. The first is that the shearwater is a lucky bird; they will survive, and maybe even thrive, as we lurch uncertainly into tomorrow. But the second is the poignant thought of just how much poorer our world will be if we don’t reverse the gathering extinctions of our other ocean going seabirds. "Biological diversity is messy," said American environmentalist, Paul Hawken. "It walks, it crawls, it swims, it swoops, it buzzes. But extinction is silent; it has no voice other than our own."
Roger Morgan-grenville’s new book, Shearwater: A Bird, an Ocean and a Long Way Home is published by Icon Books on 8 April at £16.99