An ill-wind is blowing for our seabirds
FEARSOME grey skies were devoid of any shapes other than the fast-moving clouds easily mistaken for angry faces pouring scorn.the dastardly human-like swirls reminded me of those ancient maps depicting storms as bloatedcheek cupids blowing for all their worth as well as an incredible new word to my vocabulary.
Pareidolia is something that has smiled – or grimaced – at me since childhood. In short, the term means distinguishing recognisable patterns in inanimate objects, say seeing Elvis Presley’s profile on a slice of toast or tigers prowling across a walnut wardrobe door. I’ve been spooked by such sights many times, especially looking up to the ghostly heavens.
Giving the benign names of Ciara and Dennis to the Atlantic cyclones that produced so much devastation the past two weeks somehow seems nonsensical because of the threats posed to life and property.at least nature took action.
The reason I’d been left imagining human faces embedded in the storm clouds was because, for the first time in my life, there were times when there was not a solitary bird on the wing while the storms roared.
Decades of birding have never seen me witness any occasion when there wasn’t at least one avian silhouette in sight, be it a street pigeon, carrion crow, magpie or gull. Menacing Dennis somehow reprised those extraordinary scenes a decade ago when an Icelandic volcanic ash cloud grounded Europe’s airliners, leaving immaculate skies without the scribbles of jet vapour trails. Last week all bird flights were cancelled temporarily.
When the gusts abated, I awaited news of some prized windfalls. Powerful storms have a long history of delivering spectacular seabird “wrecks” inland, creating some of the most memorable birdwatching days in history.
There are many stories of seabirds being left high and dry, such as puffins promenading down London’s Strand or Manx shearwaters dragged in by pet moggies. Gannets, petrels, fulmars and skuas have all been disrupted from oceanic wanderings by catastrophic weather events.
I live about as far from the sea as you can get but, thanks to powerful storms, I’ve had Bedfordshire encounters with a razorbill, bonxie, pomarine skua and grey phalaropes.
Without doubt the most memorable landlubbers’ “sea watch” came after Michael Fish placated concerned TV viewers about that hurricane only for the Great Storm of 1987 to threaten devastation. It duly did, robbing Sevenoaks of six arboreal giants.
Yet those venturing out into the disruption witnessed unprecedented riches in the shapes of the Leach’s petrels, Sabine’s gulls, little terns and gannets caught up in the eye of the storm and deposited on reservoirs and lakes from Cornwall to Kent.
Ciara and Dennis were far less benevolent. Besides getting garden birds to hunker down and leave the skies empty, the expected arrival of storm-blown pelagic species was not forthcoming. Only a scattering of kittiwakes, a truly marine bird deserving of the name sea gull, turned up across the Home Counties and Midlands. No sniff of a wrecked razorbill or a puffed-out puffin.
Why? Did both storms veer away from traditional wintering grounds or are seabirds declining in such parlous numbers that such spectaculars are a thing of the past?
The winds of change perhaps.
‘At least nature took action’