By john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

Adam Nicolson, in The Seabird’s Cry, describes the arrival of a kittiwake ( Rissa tridactyla) to see him safely home to the Shiant Isles. He owns the islands, which lie in the notoriously rough Minch, the channel between mainland Scotland and the Outer Hebrides.

He was labouring to keep his boat afloat when ‘this bird, a companion, even a form of consolation, floated above me. I felt then that I had never before been in the presence of such a sprung and beautiful thing, dawn grey, black eyes, black tips to the wings, the body held there as if on wires above me, afloat, dancing, its whole being like a singer’s held note, not flickering or rag-like, nor blown about like a tern, but elastic, vibrant, investigative, delicate, the suggestion of a goddess momentarily present above me.’ He speculates that aithuia, the sea bird that landed on Odysseus’s wave-swept raft in the Odyssey, was a kittiwake.

If any gull deserves to be called a ‘sea gull’, it is the kittiwake, which comes ashore only to breed. The UK’S 205,000 population arrives in force from March, breeds from mid-may to late July on coastal cliffs, predominantly in Scotland and Ireland, and disperses from August.

The most famous colony in the world is not on a cliff but on the façade of the BALTIC, formerly a grain warehouse and now a centre for contemporary art, on the Gateshead quayside of the River Tyne.

This bucks a declining trend. Kittiwakes are among the species most dependent on sand eels, thousands of tons of which are turned into animal feed and fertiliser. In Scotland, it was one of 12 seabird species to have declined by 50 per cent between 1986 and 2015. This is despite a 7,700-square-mile closed area for fishing, established by law in 2000, extending from north-east Scotland to Northumberland.

Unlike other urbanised gulls, the kittiwake does not scavenge but can make round trips of 100 miles for fish; so Tyneside birds have clearly benefited from this exclusion zone.

Walking west from Newcastle’s Central Station last July, I saw nesting kittiwakes grow in number as the river approached. The length of the arched High Bridge was studded with them, with others on supports or in crannies, down the hill to the Tyne Bridge colony.

Businesses have complained of the birds’ mess and noise. Spikes and netting were still visible, but whereas in 2015 15 birds died ‘horribly’ in nets, in 2019 just one suffered that fate. Gateshead and

Newcastle now take pride in their kittiwakes, with the result that the population has risen from 872 pairs in 2015 to 1,353 in 2019.

As for the BALTIC colony, temporarily displaced during the building’s conversion, it provides the quayside’s kittiwake climax. Visitors can stand outside, within feet of the birds, at one end of the principal nesting ledge, which underlines the lettering proclaiming the old warehouse title. Here spectators have intimate access to the most inland and urban colony of a marine bird anywhere – truly one of the world’s wonders.