Happy 4th of July everyone. Perhaps perversely for Independence Day I'm going to blog about birds in the United Kingdom. And I'll come right out and say it - the title is a lie. A shameless ploy to draw in the casual Sunday morning reader with a weakness for comical seabirds and tartan. Puffins I have and puffins you will see in all their glory if you read on. And Scottish puffins no less, but unfortunately bereft of kilts. There, I've cleansed the guilt from soul.
This diary is an overview of a brief trip to the Shetland Islands I made in mid-June. A trip I won't soon forget to a magical place. So let's get going.
First a bit of business. Dawn Chorus is being guest hosted over the summer. Here is the schedule of guest hosts.
* Jul 11: Kestrel * Jul 18th: matching mole
* July 25: Julie * August 1: matching mole
* August 8: Kestrel * August 15: lineatus
* August 22: lineatus * August 29: lineatus
A brief note for any British birders who may happen upon this. In cases where the same species has different common names in British and American English I have used the American name (e.g. Common Murre rather than Common Guillemot)
On a Sunday evening I got on the overnight ferry from Aberdeen. As the ferry left the harbor I was able to pick out five different species of gull following behind: Herring, Lesser Black-backed, Mew, and Black-headed Gulls as well as Kittiwakes. As we moved out a bit further from shore there were fewer gulls and small groups of Common Murres could be seen flying low over the water.
Eventually the shore fell away and only smokers and a few oddballs like myself stood outside, chilling very literally in the North Sea breezes and illuminated by a twilight that seemed like it would never end.
Gliding low over the waves and almost lost in the immensity of the ocean were these guys.
Here's a closer look
They look like a gull but their flight is a giveaway. They fly completely differently: instead of the loose, fluid flight of a gull these had rapid stiff wing beats alternating with wave-skimming glides. A closer look would reveal even more differences such as a thick-bodied, bull-headed shape and tubular nostrils. The ferry was being followed by Northern Fulmars. Their flight pattern indicates their relationship with albatrosses and the other tube-nosed birds of the open sea. The only time I had seen them before was on a birding boat trip far off the Oregon coast. Little did I know how much better acquainted we would become.
At about 4 AM we passed Fair Isle, known, apparently, as a source of sweaters and for its seabird colonies. The National Trust owns a property there which you can rent if you want a really secluded vacation on an island with only a few dozen humans and ten of thousands of seabirds.
Three hours later the sun was shining and the wind had dropped as we sailed towards Lerwick harbor, the main port of the Shetlands. Birds flew by, never in great numbers or very close, but in great variety: Common Murres, Black Guillemots, Atlantic Puffins, Razorbills, Northern Gannets, and even a Great Skua or two, and a Parasitic Jaeger.
After we landed, I picked up my rental car and determined that I could in fact drive a manual transmission and switch gears with my left hand. Shortly thereafter I headed out of town. The subarctic landscape was full of marvels. At one of the first major turns leaving town I realized there were fulmars nesting in the 'cliff' formed by the road cut!
I stopped a mile or so south of town at a pull out to take some scenery shots. The instant I stepped out of the car a pair of curlews flew up from hillside below and soared above me giving alarm calls. These birds are similar to our long-billed curlew and are quite impressive, being sandpipers that are the size of an ibis. Almost immediately thereafter a great skua flew by and was hotly pursued by a pair of screaming oyster catchers.
I was beginning to get the idea that I had come to a pretty great place. The fatigue of spending the night on a lounge chair started to lift.
Getting back in the car I made my way down to Sundburgh Head, the southernmost point on Shetland Mainland. The cliffs there are the site of the most accessible seabird colony on the Shetlands, protected by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. You can easily walk the cliff top here and look down on the birds nesting below you.
Here is a group of Common Murres and (probably) Razorbills. They nest on narrow rock ledges that are not easily accessible to predators such as gulls.
A cropped version of the same shot reveals a (blurry) puffin in flight.
The murres and razorbills are penguin-like birds that are closely related to puffins. I'll have a photo of some Murre's in the next diary but unfortunately I was never able to see Razorbills up close - they are a very elegant black and white bird.
The puffins themselves breed in burrows and are found at the very tops of the cliffs. So at several points along the walk they could be observed close up. Here are a group of puffins along with the ubiquitous Northern Fulmars. It was almost impossible to go anywhere in Shetland without running into them.
And here are the stars of our diary in all their glory
And emerging from burrows along the cliff top were puffin chicks which look astonishingly like baby rabbits!
Then it was back in the car and back to town to get on a boat to take a tour to a larger sea bird colony on the Isle of Noss. Noss has all the same species as Sundburgh but it has also has Northern Gannets, the largest sea bird in Britain. Those of you who have frequented Haole in Hawaii's diaries will be familiar with Boobies which are tropical relatives of gannets. Watching the goose-sized gannets fly back and forth and drop vertically into the water was an amazing sight.
These pictures are of the gannet 'bachelor' group, an area where young birds that are not yet breeding hang out. The nests were too high up on the cliffs for me to get pictures. We also saw quite a few puffins, murres, and other sea birds but, again, the distances were too great for my camera.
Our guide told us something that I had read online several times before leaving. Over the last decade most populations of British sea birds have declined fairly dramatically with year after year of poor reproduction. Hardest hit are fairly specialized feeders like the puffin and the arctic tern which largely feed on certain types of small fish. Climate change and/or over-fishing may be to blame. Some fisheries have been closed and 2009 was the first year of good reproduction for some time. There was hope that 2010 would be a repeat performance.
The guides lured in some Great Skuas with food. These birds were described by the guide as 'a gull that is trying to be an eagle'.
A more accurate description in my mind is a gull that flies like a falcon.
These birds are slightly smaller than a Herring Gull but much more robust and have a powerful rapid flight. They are fierce predators and will pursue gannets to steal food from them. The skuas and jaegers are closely related to, but distinct from the gulls and terns. Most skuas breed in the southern hemisphere where they were infamous in the nature films of my youth as predators of penguin chicks. The Great Skua is an exception, as it breeds at various locations in the northeast Atlantic, with about 80% of the world population breeding in the Shetlands.
As we were heading back into the harbor we passed a colony of geriatric gray seals. These seals lived next to a fish processing plant and received ample handouts. As a result they were living to be almost 30 years old, compared to an average 18 year life span for the species. Our guides had caught a few small fish on the trip to feed them. However they had apparently been fed recently as they were not inclined to move. One was eventually lured out with the promise of food.
Despite being old it was very adept at snagging fish
And very hopeful that more might follow.
And that winds up my first 11 hours on the Shetlands. In two weeks time I'll be back with a second Scottish seabird diary which I will entitle either: 'The Quest for the Red-throated Diver' or 'Castles and Cliffs'