The Seabird's Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers

by Adam Nicolson

‘Obéissance à la pesanteur. Le plus grand péché.’ Obedience to gravity. The greatest sin.

What came first, the seabird’s cry or the soul Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried? How habitable is perfected form? And how inhabited the windy light?

We have created a race of gulls that reflects the worst of us.

rule of thumb relating brain-size to a bird’s lifestyle. Intriguingly, the more faithful a bird is to a mate, the more likely it is to have a relatively large brain.

Olkowicz has found that birds have twice as many nerve cells in their brains as mammals of a similar brain-size.

But we fantasize a global love and forget that unaccommodation, the refusal to allow, anti-forgiveness and anti-understanding are the foundations of a seabird’s world.

Their dictates are both strange to us and weirdly familiar, versions of our own habits translated into a language we will only ever struggle to understand. They are our co-beings, co-dominators, co-predators, and like us they embody genius and obstinacy, elegance and terror, persistence and aggression, and perhaps they entrance us because they present us with a vision of the worst and best of ourselves.