~ Anne Kilgannon
While sitting on a cliff edge on one of the small islands that make up the Hebrides, observing guillemots with Emily, a young ornithologist who was studying their feeding habits, Adam Nicolson and she saw “a black-backed gull arrive, cruising, easy, sliding low and slow over the guillemot colony, looking for what it might find, and as its shadow crossed them the guillemots in a sudden scare-flight broke away from the cliff, hundreds of them in one dropping, momentous movement, shearing away and down towards the sea. From above, it looked like the rippling of a single wing, a feathered eruption, a dark and magnificent beating of life itself. Why do you love birds? I asked Emily. Because they fly, she said.”
Poetry-infused science; prose informed with meticulous science but written with a poet’s heart. This is a book to read slowly, painting pictures in your mind of birds soaring, dipping, “shearing away and down towards the sea.” Adam Nicolson writes of sea birds that “we see something oceanic in them, the hint and intimation of another scale of existence…that [they] somehow cross the boundary between matter-of-fact and the imagined. Theirs is a realm both of enlargement and of uncertainty, in which the nature of things is unreliable and in doubt.” Nicolson, too, loves them for their grace, their mystery, and in a quest for more exacting knowledge of their lives, he loves them for all the ways they have evolved to make the ocean their home, out beyond the cliffs, in the trackless seas of the world. This book is a record of all he has learned about ten of the species that most exemplify that “oceanic” state of being.
Just saying their names makes one breathe more slowly and taste salt on the tongue: Fulmar; Puffin; Kittiwake; Gull; Guillemot; Cormorant and Shag; Shearwater; Gannet; Great Auk and its Cousin Razorbill; Albatross. These are world travelers, though many nest and rear their young in places like the Hebrides where Nicolson often finds them. They share many characteristics but have surprising individual species idiosyncrasies. Tracing those differences in feeding strategies, how they mate and raise their young, how they congregate for safety or keep wide distances amongst themselves, is the story of evolution worked out over and over again. Studying these birds as a group, in fact, is a study of evolution writ into feather and beak, quite literally. The difference inherent in, say, feather color, black here, white there, or the reverse, is the difference in success for birds who make shallow dives to scoop up fish near the water surface and birds who dive deep into the ocean for other prey found there. Color relates to buoyancy as helpful or impediment and so each bird, according to its taste, has evolved a different pattern that supports its lifestyle. Nothing is by chance.
Each bird has its story, its way of life and survival. And all are challenged by not just the usual swings of adversity, dearth and plenty, but by the changing ocean itself. Climate change has a tremendous impact on minute prey foods, the tiny beings at the bottom of the food pyramids that support all ocean life, as well as the large-scale threat of changes in ocean currents, winds, temperature, and the insidious issue of plastic pollution. Sea birds have evolved with their prey species, just like land birds who time the hatching of their young to the period of the greatest insect infestation; sea birds require like swarms of their food species to be available close to shore just as their eggs crack and release the raucous open-billed chicks. Nicolson writes movingly of the parents’ scramble to stuff those beaks and the tragedy of their failure when the state of the ocean is against them. The sense of urgency is palpable; and our human role in the loss of life can’t be shrugged off. The track of our heedlessness, our greed and careless use of the world and its creatures stares us in the face. Nicolson faces it square on. His writing is like the black and white pattern of so many of these birds: the inescapable darkness of death and loss, as well as the light-filled ecstasy of flight, the sheer beauty and wonder of the plunge and effortless soaring of these great winged beings. Nicolson gives us both sides tightly woven together in each bird, really in all birds. His love and anguish are lashed together, both needed to make us see these birds and touch our love and fear as well, so that we close the book and vow to do something that these birds may continue to live even if we never see them, out there where the wind carries them over the oceans.
