The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers

by Adam Nicolson

The Scottish ornithologists Bob Furness and David Bryant have investigated the energy budget of fulmars in different wind conditions. If it were calm and the bird had to flap its wings to move all day – they never do, because a calm day is when you will find fulmars sitting on their nests or the sea – they would have to expend 2,000 calories, thirteen times what they would consume sitting or sleeping doing nothing. As the wind increases, life becomes more viable so that when it is blowing at about 20 miles an hour, or Force 4–5, when the sea is just beginning to be covered in breaking crests, they can glide most of the time and the energy they expend on the wing is, astonishingly, as low as what it would be if they were sitting on the nest. At that speed, they still have to beat their wings about once every second, but when the wind notches up a little further, to about 25 miles an hour, or Force 5 to 6, flying costs them nothing. It is the magic horizon. In those winds, fulmars almost never beat their wings at all, but drink in the energy they need from the wind around them.

they are: wind-runners, wind-dancers, the wind-spirits, alive with an evolved ability to live with the wind, in it and on it, drawing out its energy to make their own feathered, mobile, ocean-ranging magnificence.

For many other seabirds, including the puffin and the other auks, this relationship is reversed, so that the windier it becomes the more difficult they find it and the more energy they must expend on maintaining their equilibrium. Not the fulmar.

Nothing but the wind governs where fulmars can live; they are addicts of wind, incapable of living without it, needing wind to animate their lives, and, like most of the albatrosses, prevented from living in the fluky Horse latitudes of the Tropics not from a shortage of prey but because the winds there could not sustain them. In the tropics they would have to flap and would die. High-latitude gales are fulmar life-blood.

The islanders loved the fulmar, and the smell of the oil, which was ‘a catholicon for diseases’, an emetic, good for rheumatism, to anoint a wound or lessen a swelling, to help with toothache or boils, ‘was sweet to his nose’, as James Fisher wrote after talking to an ancient St Kildan fowler. He loved nothing more than to stir some dried fulmar flesh into his porridge.

panacea / all purpose cure

Gulls are different, on the edge of the seabird world, coastal creatures, living on the ecotone, that margin between life systems, picking at the leavings of the tide, relishing the comings and goings of a beach.

At one pool, where a couple of bird scientists happened to be watching, a herring gull arrived, rushed into the gang of mallards, grabbed a piece of bread, swam a few feet away towards the middle of the pool and then started to lift and drop the bread into the water. Each time, the bread broke into smaller pieces. Once he had scattered it into perfect crumbs, the gull stayed there waiting, as still as glass, neck out, head down, looking intently at the surface of the water. After a few seconds, the goldfish in the pool came up to nibble at the crumbs and the gull struck, about one in every two strikes resulting in a catch and a goldfish down the gullet. Once the bread had gone, the gull swam over to the people around the edge of the pool, stared hard at them, waiting for another piece of bread to be thrown in. After they had given it one, the gull repeated the whole process. It never ate the bread.

Across the whole of Eurasian culture, the cormorant has been the bird of greed, the enemy, the dark one, the usurer – ‘Shylock’ is a rough transliteration of the Hebrew name for it – the water-crow, eel-rook, fish-hawk or, in China, the thief and black devil.