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February 4 - February 13, 2020
I watched carefully as the islands slowly acquired form and contour in front of me. Their grey whale-backed outlines grew and ballooned into something substantial. Dark rocks, grassy slopes, a sheltered bay, the little white house, stony beaches. I had never seen this scale of things before: tall, cliffed, remote, fierce, beautiful, harsh and difficult but, for all that, dazzlingly and almost overwhelmingly thick with the swirl of existence, lichened, the rocks glowing saffron orange on that summer morning, the air and the sea around us filled with 300,000 birds, a pumping, raucous
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The shags and cormorants are, largely, creatures of the coast, rarely adventuring into the depths or the ocean wilds but beautiful, slightly alien, dark-souled and supremely efficient scavengers and divers. They are mostly to be found down near the shore
It is a figure that makes me laugh, as if they were all one giant bird, weighing half as much again as Salisbury Cathedral, its feathered wings stretched across those Atlantic shores like the great bird of dreams.
One estimate in 2005 reckoned the number of urban gulls in Britain was growing by almost 25 per cent a year.
As I came over a lip of rock, there was the shag right in front of my face, a foot away, juddering and hissing, its whole head shaking in rage and fear, terrifying as much as it was terrified of me, a fluster of beautiful dark green iridescent feathers in the mayhem of kelp stalk and guano that was its nest. Ancientness bellowed at me from inside the filth-lined crevice, where, in the shadows, two or three featherless, scrotal-skinned shag chicks writhed like embryo sea monsters from the past.
We are the holocaust, the destroyers of what we come to live with, and not only because we hunt them. We bring with us the other three horsemen of the apocalypse: habitat destruction, diseases which the indigenous animals have no defence against, and the introduction of other predators, the snails, rats and cats which eat their way into the lives of animals that do not understand them or what they represent.
From studies of shyness and boldness in bats and shrews, it also seems likely that shy is connected to clever.
