Puffins- the spell of the Northern Monks.

The little tourist boat out of Ulver Ferry on the Isle of Mull drew towards the towering cliffs of Lunga, largest and northernmost of the Trennish Isles, the chain of rocky little basalt islands in the Inner Hebrides, north of the famous Fingal’s Cave on the isle of Staffa, that great monument to undersea volcanism and geological forces. The water we crossed was crystal clear, and rich in life, fish weaving between fronds of waving kelp beneath the surface, moon jellies, and occasionally more unusual cnidaria, drifting everywhere. At one point even Common Dolphins were leaping beside us.  We docked at a rocky promontory on the island and made our way ashore on the columnar basalt, climbing a short cliff path. The skipper had warned us the birds would hypnotise us, that we’d risk falling into a trance on the cliff path, and would have to come back to the boat without seeing the spectacular heart of the seabird city which lines the steepest cliffs. His warning was spot on, but not heeded.

We sat up on the cliff top, among the wild flowers, the Bird’s foot trefoil and Burnett moths, on the rabbit-grazed, short grass, and watched the comings and goings of the Atlantic Puffins (Fratercula arctica) for hours. Birds flew in off the clear blue water, on wings beating rapidly, with thick, vivid coloured beaks full of silver sandeels.  Adults with food swiftly disappeared into their burrows, even Puffins are not averse to nicking their neighbours’ food, and to the gulls and skuas a Puffin with food on land is an obvious target.  So, they take their food underground hurridly, and unload it for the subterranean Puffling, the single, fluffy youngster waiting in the burrow.  Puffins without bills full of food seemed to enjoy a more leisurely lifestyle, taking some time to enjoy the sun and each other, pairs bill-rubbing and calling to each other, enjoying the bonds which hold them together, companionable, almost romantic. We were, naturally, enchanted by these entertaining little seabirds, and never made the journey across the little island to the spectacular Guillemots and Kittiwakes up on the towering sea stacks.

My paternal Grandma loved Puffins, and as such I must have drawn and painted hundreds of pictures of them, and bought puffin calendars and birthday cards for her every year. Images of them adorned her home.  They were here favourite bird, and as such have always held a special place in my heart. However I was in my mid-twenties by the time I saw one, on another chain of islands on the West coast, right down in the Scillies.  Puffins tend to live far from us, on rocky offshore islands, like the Scillies or the Trennish, or famously on Lundy, where the Bristol Channel meets the Atlantic.  They visit the coastline only briefly, setting up in April, and gone by the end of July. Their vanishing act is thorough and though wintering puffins were encountered at sea from time to time, it wasn’t fully understood until the advent of geotagging.  Once their Puffling has come waddling out under the sky for the first time, and taken to the sea, the parents remaining tie to land is severed. They shed the bright, temporary sheath which has grown around their bill, and darker feathers grow around the eye, masking the big, white face patches.  They loose the ability to fly during the Autumn moult, and spend the winter upon the ocean waves, living like the penguins of the Southern hemisphere, undertaking deep dives, wings adapted for ‘flying’ underwater. The black and white countershading Puffins, plus several related Auks share with Penguins are an example of convergent evolution, where similar evolutionary pressures lead to similar adaptations.  They retain the ability to fly only because of the need to avoid land predators, and only in the breeding season, to reach their cliff-top nesting sites, and they are at their most graceful underwater.  Then, come March or April, they return to their home island, and reunite with their lifelong partner, smartly attired once again. Some compare Puffins to clowns, given their colourful features and ‘eye makeup,’ and their scientific name compares them to monks, Fratercula arctica means ‘little Brother of the North.’ The name Puffin once applied to any burrow-nesting sea bird, hence the confusing scientific name of the Manx Shearwater, Puffinus puffinus.

Puffins are members of the Auk family, Alcidae, and are related to the Guillemot and Razorbill, as well as the extinct Great Auk. The family resemblance is apparent.  Unlike their relatives, puffins nest not on precarious ledges on the cliffs, but in burrows at the cliff-tops, usually taking advantage of those abandoned by rabbits, though they are capable of digging their own, and often do, take note of the sharp grey claws on their feet next time you are close to one.  A single egg is laid underground, in a chamber carved out for the purpose. The chick remains underground in relative safety, out of the reach of Herring Gulls and Raptors which occasionally prey on Guillemot and Razorbill chicks. Puffins also differ from their relatives in their winter habits. Razorbills and Guillemots can often be seen in winter, forming big rafts just offshore from their breeding colonies, remaining visible to birders onshore all year round, but Puffins are always absent from these agglomerations, preferring to spend the winter in the vast, open Atlantic, the Bay of Biscay and the North Sea, rich fishing grounds to which they have been tracked by modern telemetry techniques.

Puffins have a number of predators, with Gulls and Arctic Skuas all too keen to steal their hard won catch of Sandeels, which the young Puffling relies on almost exclusively, and Great Skuas, Great Black Back Gulls and birds of prey such as Peregrines, will occasionally prey on the adult Puffins. They are even, in some parts of their range, still hunted by man, though not in Britain.  Climate Change, and the loss of Sandeels as a result, and as a result of overfishing remain the biggest threats they face. They are confined to relatively few colonies around the North Atlantic, largely on islands off North America and North-Western Europe, and this reliance on a small number of sites led to the Atlantic Puffin’s listing as Vulnerable by the IUCN, and they are Red-Listed as Birds of Conservation Concern.

Yet at some of their colonies they are thriving, and one of those seems to be that of the Isle of Lunga. Rich, clear Atlantic seas offer them the food they need, and they are bothered little by the tourists who continue to visit their island breeding sites in considerable numbers. They are confiding and allow close approach, and photography. A few nest still at Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire, alongside the Gannets and the occasional visiting Albatross, and though closed this year given the unfortunate impact of the ongoing HPAI epidemic, the Farne Islands still host a healthy population of these charming, entertaining little sea birds. Go and see them.

 

Gannets. Magnificent Gannets, and everything I know about them.

I recently returned from a trip to Lewis, in the Western Isles of Scotland, a land of plentiful seabird life. One species in particular seemed ubiquitous when scanning the open sea, I don't think, on the ferry crossing, I recall a moment when at least one white cruciform shape, on stiff black tipped wings, was not in view. We'd see them fishing in the bay at Ullapool, taking advantage perhaps of the clear, calm water to better pick out the shapes of fish, diving on swept back wings, a single point plunging like a spear into the sea. We'd see them following the boat crossing the Minch, or, in good numbers, following every passing fishing boat. And during our time on the island, though we saw many other seagoing birds while scanning the horizon, Gannets seemed to crop up every day. And well they might, these magnificent birds have shown a consistent, albeit slow increase in population over the past 30 years (JNCC), and while there are no colonies on Lewis itself, Sula skeir, which takes its name from the Old Norse for 'Gannet Island' hosts a substantial colony, some 42 miles North of the Island. Still more nest on that outermost of the Western Isles, St Kilda, and the birds are capable of undertaking fishing trips of up to 270 miles.

Northern Gannets (Morus bassanus), to give them their full English name, breed only in large colonies, with several of these scattered around the coasts of Northern and Western Britain. The largest is at Bass Rock in the Irish Sea, the largest on the UK Mainland, and also one of the most southerly, is at Bempton Cliffs on the Yorkshire coast (RSPB) an RSPB reserve, where, in contrast to many other seabirds, their numbers continue to rapidly increase. A birder I met during a recent visit to Bempton told me he could recall when Gannets were relatively scarce at this site. Now they cover huge swathes of cliff, and fill the sky. Their fat chicks loafed on clifftop nests, heads lolling awkwardly on the rocks, huge black bills with sagging skin. They are odd, ungainly, and so relaxed many of them could be mistaken for corpses, causing Natty and I had brief anxious moments when we first beheld them in their clifftop domain. Gannet nestlings have a curious habit of looking dead when they are sleeping. Adults were constantly on the move, early in the season they could be seen ripping up grass from the clifftops to build their nests, or moving out to sea gathering fish to feed their chicks growing appetites. Non breeding juveniles share these clifftop nest sites, perhaps to learn the way of life of the colony, to observe the feeding behaviour of the adults, and learn the best fishing grounds.

Gannets are, despite their positive population trend, which defies that of almost all other British seabirds, Amber Listed by the RSPB, though the IUCN and Europe both consider the species 'Least Concern'. Though numerous and increasing, they really are almost entirely confined to large colonies, of several thousand breeding pairs. The nests in the colonies are surprisingly evenly spaced, typically just outside pecking distance, and peck, when faced with an intruder, they do indeed, with surprising brutality, comparable perhaps to Gulls and quite unlike more 'genteel' species like Auks. Wandering Gannet chicks have been seen killed by their neighbours when straying too far from their nests (Nicholson). Sometimes they even peck their partners when they arrive back from fishing trips, before pair recognition occurs and they bond again with noisy displays of bill rubbing, which Adam Nicholson describes as a kind of play fighting. They make very good parents, with two out of every three chicks fledging successfully.

The reasons for their bucking the seabird trend is unclear, but they are adaptable, and more than happy to follow the fishing boats and grab any discards, something they do in impressive numbers. From the shores of Lewis seldom did a fishing boat pass by without a small cloud of white crosses following it. The tourist boat from Bridlington in Yorkshire makes spectacular use of this ability, throwing fish overboard when passing the big colony at Bempton, attracting an enthusiastic following of Gannets.  The ability to feed on a range of pelagic fish of different sizes,  rather than be limited to Sandeels like the struggling Auks, probably makes them relatively resilient to local changes, as does the ability to travel many miles in order to catch them, though as to their breeding colonies they display some considerable fidelity to their fishing grounds during the breeding season. Gannets hunt by plunge diving from heights of about 25 metres, sweeping their wings back, their shape transforming into that of a short spear as they dive into the water, either siezing prey just below the surface, or, remarkably, powering down to depths of 30 metres or so, propelled on folded in wings, turning those supreme works of natural aeronautical engineering into simple paddles.  Their heads and necks are powerful and reinforced in order to survive the impact, and serrations on the insides of their bills grasp the fish they catch.

Gannets have relatively few predators. Among their predators is man, with the colony at Sula Skeir attracting a group of licenced commercial hunters from Ness, near Lewis' Northernmost point, to kill a limited number of juveniles every year. Though it does not seem to affect the Gannet's conservation status, and I'll not dwell on this too much, the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty To Animals (SPCA) have described the hunt as 'Barbaric' and called for a ban. I am drawn to agree with them.  Also among their enemies at sea are Great Skuas, which occasionally kill but more commonly just rob Gannets of their hard won food, and White Tailed Eagles, which are considered important predators of Gannets on the coasts of Norway, where both species are common.

 

There are more than one species of Gannet around the globe. The Cape Gannet (Morus capensis), often featured in documentaries about such phenomena as the Sardine Run, is distinguished from the Northern, our sort of Gannet, by the extensive of black on the tail and primaries. It breeds on six islands off the coasts of South Africa and Namibia, and is considered Endangered by the IUCN. The Australasian Gannet (M. serrator) is common and widespread, and increasing, along the temperate Southern coasts of Australia and New Zealand. The dramatically marked Boobies of Equatorial regions are slightly more distant relatives, retaining the generic name Sula.  The Northern Gannet colonies around the British Isles are globally important, hosting as much as 55% of their global breeding population, and they can be seen, while sea watching, almost anywhere, especially in the Spring and Autumn, and at their colonies, of which Bempton is probably the most visited and most accessible, and, for me, something of an annual pilgrimage. There are not just Gannets to be seen there, but Puffins, Guillemots, Fulmars, Kittiwakes and others, as well as fantastic cliff views. They hang about there well into August, though the site is best visited from April to June for the full show. The photos here were all taken on a recent visit to Bempton, at the beginning of August, where the presence of the Black Browed Albatross, which eluded me, offered me the excuse to head down there and enjoy avian spectacle and some twitcher camaraderie.

Above all, I find Gannets stunningly beautiful. Sharp, pointed, and profoundly wild, but equally stunningly elegant. They are the largest seabirds regularly found around Britain, though their colonies occasionally attract even bigger guests in the form of lost Albatrosses which have ended up on the wrong side of the equator. Their pure brilliant white body feathers, those jet black primaries, the warm yellow ochre of the neck and head, their graceful, long winged glide as they pass by in their small bands, often incorporating both adults and black feathered juveniles. I love the joy of their pair bonding displays. And I find them somewhat hopeful, a rare success story among the troubled guild of piscivorous seabirds of the North Western Atlantic.