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

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

Copyright 2017 Adam Nicolson

Cover illustration and chapter opener illustrations Kate Boxer

Maps John Gilkes

Extracts from Squarings from Seeing Things by Seamus Heaney, London, Faber and Faber Ltd, 1991. Reprinted with permission of the publishers and the Esate of Seamus Heaney.

Extract from At the Fishhouses by Elizabeth Bishop from The Complete Poems 19271979, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Extract from The Marks T Gan By by Katrina Porteous from The Lost Music (Bloodaxe Books, 1996) reproduced with permission of Bloodaxe Books. (www.bloodaxebooks.com)

While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers will be glad to rectify any omissions in future editions.

Adam Nicolson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008165697

Ebook Edition June 2017 ISBN: 9780008165710

Version: 2017-05-09

for Willow: up!

One day, on a steeply sloping grass shelf on the Shiant Isles in the Hebrides, two or three hundred feet above the surface of the Minch, the wide sleeve of sea between the mainland of Scotland and the Outer Isles, I was sitting with Emily Scragg, a young ornithologist who was spending her summer tracking guillemots and razorbills on their fishing trips out from the islands. The sea below us was alight with mid-morning, midsummer sunshine as if polished by it, and we were in shirt sleeves, watching the guillemots on the cliff, dark, handsome birds gathered and jostling there in their thousands. Emily had been putting a GPS tag on one of them, meticulously taped to the feathers on its back, hoping to track it as it foraged in the sea lochs of Lewis and Harris. She had done her work and the bird was back on the rock shelf from which she had picked it ten minutes before. She now had to wait twenty-four hours and the guillemots data would return.

As we sat there, watching the big roughened crozier-arms of the tide swirling a mile or more out from the headlands below us, a black-backed gull arrived, cruising, easy, sliding low and slow over the guillemot colony, looking for what it might find, and as its shadow crossed them the guillemots in a sudden scare-flight broke away from the cliff, hundreds of them in one dropping, momentous movement, shearing away and down towards the sea. From above, it looked like the rippling of a single wing, a feathered eruption, a dark and magnificent beating of life itself.

Why do you love birds? I asked Emily. Because they fly, she said. That act of release is what is marvellous about them, not as a single done thing but as something that happens again and again, every year, every day, every new life.

The Atlantic seabirds come to breed in places of unremitting hardness. Much of the coastline is a sort of quarry, brutal and intractable, but above it the birds float like beings from the otherworld. They are gravity-free creatures in a place where gravity seems to rule. That, essentially, is what this book is about. Its governing thought is a pair of phrases I read years ago, quoted by Seamus Heaney in one of his lectures as professor of poetry at Oxford. They had been written by the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil in her collection of aphorisms on grace and transcendence, published after she had died. Weil was exploring the idea that possibility and openness were necessary parts of what was good the generosity of risk when she wrote these mind-changing words: Obeissance a la pesanteur. Le plus grand peche. Obedience to gravity. The greatest sin.

Seabirds never commit it and intuitively, pre-scientifically, we see something oceanic in them, the hint and intimation of another scale of existence, not as part of another, spiritual world, but as the most miraculous and in some ways troubling quality of the one we inhabit. The poets have always understood this. Ill be the Bonxie, Hugh MacDiarmid wrote of the great skua, that noble scua,/That infects aother birds wi its qualms, as if one only had to look at a skua to feel the subtlety and edginess of the life it leads.

Seabirds somehow cross the boundary between the matter-of-fact and the imagined. Theirs is the realm both of enlargement and of uncertainty, in which the nature of things is unreliable and in doubt. After both his parents had died within two years of each other in the mid-1980s, Seamus Heaney for a while left behind the poetry of rich and tangible substance and from the earth earthy, as Helen Vendler the Harvard critic has called it, quoting St Pauls description of the nature of the first Adam, turned towards a poetry of half-presences and near-absences. Right at the centre of his 1991 collection, which he called Seeing Things, are some set questions for the ghost of W.B. his challenge to Yeatss austere presence over his shoulder.

What came first, the seabirds cry or the soul

Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried?

How habitable is perfected form?

And how inhabited the windy light?

There are no answers, only questions and suggestions, but in that Platonic vision Heaneys imagined soul-seabird is not only the great boundary-crosser, but linked to the emergence and genesis of things. The seabirds cry comes from the beginning of the world.

When any kind of seabirds first materialize in written English, in two eighth-century poems called by later scholars The Wanderer and The Seafarer, they are not on the shore but out at sea, referred to by the Anglo-Saxons as lone-fliers, inhabiting a strange and ambivalent, half-actual world: half material, half ghostly, half part of our life, half from another realm.

When the friendless man wakes again,

he sees before him the fruitless waves,

sea-birds bathing, wings outspread,

frost and snow half as hail.

Then the hearts wounds deepen, thicken,

sore after sweet sorrow renewed

memory of love recurs in the mind;

he greets with open heart, longingly looks

at dead companions. Again they swim away!

Spirits of seamen do not bring

Words you know or songs you love.

Where and what are these seabirds? Are they truly seen by the grieving and lonely sailor? Has he imagined them? Are they present on the sea around him? Or hallucinated, figments of the past now drifting into view? They may be the spirits of his dead friends but they seem to spread their wings on the cold of the sea.