The Seafarers - Stephen Rutt
An egg-tooth breaks through, as the impulse to life drives the chick inside to break the warm wall of its embryonic state
Arctic terns are said to return to Orkney ‘in the first mist of May’. What happens next is unpredictable – as Stephen Rutt discovered when he worked as a volunteer with the bird observatory on North Ronaldsay.
Averages are unhelpful with terns. They are boom and bust – sometimes in the same season. It took them a week from when they arrived to settle down into their colonies. It took until July for summer to arrive. In the intervening two months of rain the nests in the bog by the loch were washed out, eggs got cold, the vegetation didn’t grow and didn’t hide their eggs from the skuas. I watched what looked like team work, or perhaps just bold opportunism, as one skua emptied the colony of adults, before a second skua would drift over the unprotected colony, eggs presented like a platter, a small snack fit for the maw of a marauding skua.
No nests from the first attempt survived. Numbers dwindled then rose again in July in line with the weather. The advantage of being an island in an archipelago studded with tern colonies is that when the conditions are right the terns will find you. July was redemption: 31 days of azure skies, warm seas; the fish that were here and then not here, returned. There were no storms. July was to be the only month on Orkney when I did not need to wear my winter coat at least once. The island became fit for the scientific name of the Arctic tern, Sterna paradisaea: tern of paradise.
The coast became noisy again. The walks across the rocks to view the colonies were no longer solitary but attended by flashing bills, flickering wings and the heart-wrenching screech of their calls. Even through a hat they felt like a pin prick. Even when I was aware, anticipating the screech and blow, they still made me slip and spin and fall into rock pools.
When we enter the colony our heads hang low, eyes fervently scanning the ground for eggs. Nobody wants to be the one to stand on a nest and nobody does. This shouldn’t need to be the case, but this season is out of kilter. Usually the entire colony is at the same stage together, but not this summer. There are eggs alongside chicks alongside fully fledged young from other islands, seeking shelter in the mass of birds on North Ronaldsay. The flocking instinct is what powers and protects tern colonies. Their aggression lasts most of the season, even for those who have bred or aren’t breeding. Theirs is a colony that lives and dies together.
Before we enter the colonies we watch and wait to pick the ideal day after they’ve hatched: warm with no wind and no chance of rain, so that they do not get cold or caught out in bad weather with us preventing the adults from returning. The perfect day arrives. The perfect mid-afternoon, shirt weather, blue all around the northern headland.
We step out onto the rocks. There is no aerial frenzy, no bombardment. The quiet is jarring, unnerving. The rocks are warm and dry and almost entirely empty. From a count of 150 pairs a few weeks ago, we find only a few fledged young and many abandoned eggs, as cold as wet rock to the touch. It is mystifying – this colony was a third bigger than the one next to it and should be better defended. It feels like failure, as if we’ve somehow failed the birds.
It is not until we leave that we stumble across the reason why. Stashed in a hollow by the drystone dyke, half hidden by long grass, we find a few loose tern feathers. There is a wing, a tail, legs. Half a chick, feather shafts half-grown from its downy wings. The hallmarks of cat predation. A colony without life is a haunting place. Instead of the screeching of adults, all you can hear are the waves gently rolling into the shore. The conspicuousness of absence. The wrongness of it is unbearable. And that feels like a disaster.
Stephen Rutt fell in love with seabirds on North Ronaldsay – and is correspondingly anxious for their survival in a future of plastic pollution and global warming. The Seafarers, his first book, won a Saltire Society award.
Elsewhere the blizzard of terns has worked. By the lighthouse we count 95 terns sitting flush on the rocks, immobile and impervious to the thousands more bustling around them. On a fine day a week later we enter the colony to a shower of excrement. On the rocks we find chicks. I find one chick hiding with its head tucked into a crevice in the rock. It is downy soft, stone-brown, speckled darker. They can vanish from above but at eye-level they look ludicrous, with adult-thick orange legs and a stubby carrot of a beak. Born two days ago, I reckon, though I can’t be sure. I turn it on its back, my fingers either side cradling it. I pull out a ring and gently plier it shut, checking to ensure it fits like a perfect circle around its leg. I place it back where I found it, to resume its life on the hard rocks.
The ring has a unique code on it and back at the observatory it will be put into the national database. When the bird next gets trapped, the ring code will be logged onto the database. It’s a simple method but it’s how we know that Arctic terns can live for a quarter of a century.
It’s how we know that one tern ringed as a chick in Northumberland was found in Australia four months later.
[…] I notice one egg tremble, cracks spreading throughout its shell. An egg-tooth – the hard knob on the tip of a chick’s bill – breaks through, as the impulse to life drives the chick inside to break the warm wall of its embryonic state and change its world forever. It’s a complicated experience. I don’t hang around to watch it happen, despite a compulsion, the nagging sense that it will be the most extraordinary privileged event to witness. By the same token it feels like an intrusion, a transgression of some necessary boundary. I am merely happy that there are tern chicks still hatching. It means the world to me.
From the successful colony we counted 95 pairs nesting, and we ringed 59 fully fledged young. Across the island we counted 95 fledged chicks from the 579 pairs among the 4,000 strong flock. This doesn’t sound like a lot – a productivity rate of 0.16 sounds abysmal, actually – but this is a boom summer wrestled out of a washed-away bust of a spring.
Each fledged chick feels like a victory, defiance against the wind and the rain, the tides and the skuas, the sheep and the cats. The tenacity of terns.