Guga is an acquired taste (and one not all are anxious to acquire)

SOME Saturday soon, and when I am next in Edinburgh, it will be most officially autumn. I shall kick through swathes of fallen leaves and glimpse, early one morning, the first frost. I can enjoy the scent of fragrant bonfires or the honking of a skein of geese flying south…

My father will haul a carrier bag from the garden shed. Its contents will be thoroughly rinsed under a cold tap, a suitable pan brought forth, and in an hour and a half we shall enjoy our annual feast – served with boiled potatoes, a glass of cold milk and traditionally eaten with our fingers – salted gannet chick.

For as long as anyone can remember a boatload of men from Ness, a constellation of villages by the Butt of Lewis, have each August or so sailed north and west to the remote island of Sùla Sgeir to harvest what every Lewisman knows as guga – fluffy, flightless gannet poults, or ‘solan geese’.

The hardy lads lodge for a week or so in bare drystone cells – earwigs, I gather, can be an issue – and for days on end ensnare these gormless seafowl with wire loops at the end of long poles. They are dispatched humanely with one thwack of a wooden club, then singed, plucked, gutted, spatchcocked and packed in barrels with a great deal of salt.

Someone conducts worship every night – in Gaelic, of course, and the hunt is suspended on the Sabbath. In due course they sail back to Port of Ness, where locals will queue at the pier for their share of guga. They are rationed to a brace per person, two birds, and the going rate is now around £20 per guga.

It is a venerable practice: in 1549, Donald Monro, ‘Dean of the Isles’, writes of the Nessmen’s annual voyage to ‘fetche hame thair boatful of dry wild fowls’.

It probably dates from the Iron Age and was once much more widespread. In 18th century Edinburgh, cured ‘solan goose’ – presumably harvested from the Bass Rock – was a popular breakfast dish, while the people of St Kilda – who, admittedly, were short of alternative fare – had an unrivalled love of seabirds.

‘Puffin, Manx shearwater, razorbill, guillemot, shag, cormorant, fulmar and kittiwake were all subject to the vertiginous art of the fowler,’ notes one scholar. ‘A rather more melancholy addition to that list is, of course, the great auk – the last, luckless specimen of which, under suspicion of witchcraft, was clubbed by three St Kildans in 1844.’

WELL, we all make mistakes; most spectacularly, the Royal Navy, in 1912. A trip to Sùla Sgeir – exposed, minimal and with nothing one could dignify as a jetty or even a beach – is not without risk and, that year, the hunters did not return when expected.

The Admiralty kindly sent a ship out to check, its crew returning to report Sùla Sgeir quite deserted. Then, one morning, the guga hunters sailed happily in to Port of Ness, with a bumper catch, to find their wives in mourning. The naval vessel had gone to North Rona: the wrong island.

The expedition is perfectly legal, the men of Ness enjoying a special exemption from wildlife legislation to ensnare an annual quota of 2,000 birds. The RSPB points out that gannets are in no way endangered and that their numbers in Scotland have increased sixfold since 1902.

Guga hunters like to remind you that when the hunt was resumed in 1946 – for the few years preceding, they and we had more pressing matters to deal with – Sùla Sgeir’s gannet colony had almost collapsed, the cull having for so long been part of its ecosystem.

But there have always been know-it-alls who deplore the guga hunt and clamour for it to be banned. As far back as 1939 Sir Julian Huxley hoped – aloud – that ‘public opinion and the county council will soon put a stop to this practice’.

In 2014, a Dutch woman was among tens of thousands to sign an incandescent online petition: ‘Stop this monstrous and animal-unfriendly chickeating contest in Scotland!’

It is ‘barbaric and inhumane’, stormed the Scottish SPCA’s Mike Flynn in 2010, though he has never set foot on Sùla Sgeir nor witnessed what he was so happy to deplore.

‘The suffering starts before any attempt to kill takes place because the chicks are hauled from clifftops using nooses attached to long poles, which in itself will terrify the birds.

‘They are then struck on the head with a heavy implement until dead. A competent person may kill one or two birds outright with a single blow, but most will take more than one blow to be killed.’

Mr Flynn’s thoughts on the brief, doleful lives and industrial slaughter of most British chickens we are sadly denied.

THERE has long been a streak of disdain among those most devoted to conservation of wildlife in remote places, for those who actually live there. John Muir’s accounts of North America are repeatedly blotted by contemptuous descriptions of the ‘Indians’.

Landing on St Kilda – amid the wiliest and most skilled seafowlers on the planet, as intimate and respectful of their prey as only true hunters can be – one gentleman naturalist complained that the locals knew nothing at all about the birds: they just ate them.

The Western Isles are impoverished, facing depopulation, and the hunters partly rely on it to make a living, points out local author Donald S Murray.

They are the last men carrying out a form of subsistenceculling which was once common across northern Britain and Ireland, he snaps – and snooty critics are ‘modern suburbanites who have still not gotten over the assumption that they know best how to live on the periphery… you’re depriving a low-income society of its right to exist.’

To the uninitiated, guga looks far from appetising – like a bunch of stubbled, oily rags. But I have long preferred it to salt herring: it has a thick, luscious skin and the dark chewy flesh tastes like something between duck and mackerel.

Perhaps most off-putting is the pungent aroma as it cooks. One Lewiswoman, resident in Hyndland, Glasgow, was happy to prepare the feast for her father but always wedged towels under the front door, lest the reek vex her neighbours.

Then there is the tale of the Harris fisherman who, several decades ago, was distressed to find a rare red-throated diver drowned in his nets. As if to lend it some final dignity, he took it home and ate it.

Talk of such unusual fare reached the ears of reporters and a week or two later a man from BBC radio rang him up. Might the gentleman tell the nation’s listeners what redthroated diver tastes like?

He was a good soft-spoken Harrisman, determined to be helpful. He fumbled for appropriate words; then brightened.

‘Well,’ he drawled, ‘have you ever tasted cormorant?’