Sea-Birds

Editors:

JAMES FISHER M.A.

JOHN GILMOUR M.A.

JULIAN HUXLEY M.A. D.SC. F.R.S.

L. DUDLEY STAMP C.B.E. D.LIT. D.SC.

PHOTOGRAPHIC EDITOR:

ERIC HOSKING F.R.P.S.

The aim of this series is to interest the general reader in the wild life of Britain by recapturing the inquiring spirit of the old naturalists. The Editors believe that the natural pride of the British public in the native fauna and flora, to which must be added concern for their conservation, is best fostered by maintaining a high standard of accuracy combined with clarity of exposition in presenting the results of modern scientific research. The plants and animals are described in relation to their homes and habitats and are portrayed in the full beauty of their natural colours, by the latest method of colour photography and reproduction.

To

JULIAN HUXLEY

in gratitude for his guidance

and encouragement,and in recollection of the

many happy days we have spent together,

watching sea-birds

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Editors

Editors’ Preface

Authors’ Preface

CHAPTER 1 THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN: ITS STRUCTURE AND ITS SEA-BIRDS

CHAPTER 2 EVOLUTION AND THE NORTH ATLANTIC SEA-BIRDS

CHAPTER 3 SEA-BIRD NUMBERS AND MAN

CHAPTER 4 WHAT CONTROLS THE NUMBERS OF SEA-BIRDS?

CHAPTER 5 SEA-BIRD MOVEMENTS

CHAPTER 6 NAVIGATION BY SEA-BIRDS

CHAPTER 7 SOCIAL AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOUR

CHAPTER 8 THE TUBENOSES

CHAPTER 9 THE PELICANS

CHAPTER 10 THE SKUAS

CHAPTER 11 THE GULLS

CHAPTER 12 TERNS AND SKIMMERS

CHAPTER 13 THE AUKS

APPENDIX LIST OF SEA-BIRDS OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION

Bibliography

Index

Plates in Black and White

Colour Plates

Copyright

About the Publisher

EDITORS’ PREFACE

IT IS NATURAL that in a series dealing with the wild life of the British Isles sea-birds would be a subject planned for early publication; and in fact this book was announced as forthcoming five years ago. That it has not been completed earlier is not due to any want of industry on the part of its authors. On the contrary, in their researches for this book they have found their subject so absorbing that they have made the interval an opportunity to continue to publish numerous scientific papers, and two monographs, on sea-birds. James Fisher is the author of The Fulmar (1952); and R. M. Lockley, author of Shearwaters (1942), has just published Puffins (1953). There could, in fact, hardly be any other pair of authors better qualified to describe the sea-birds of the North Atlantic than these with their experience of many years of field work and visits along the coast and islands, from Spitsbergen and Iceland in the cool north, to Madeira and the Salvages in the warm south, of that great demi-ocean. They have made their visits often together, and lived much on the small remote islands where sea-birds breed.

The North Atlantic, busiest ocean in the world, is revealed in the opening chapters not as a monotonous watery plain, but as an intricately varied, densely inhabited foraging ground for sea-birds. This avian community, though remarkably homogeneous in different sections of the broad expanse of the North Atlantic, is fascinating in the variety of the species that compose it, and in the complexity of their movements and migrations. The annual migrations of some species extend the total range of the community from the arctic to the antarctic. These long transatlantic migrations, verified by ringing, take species from east to west between Europe and North America, and from north to south between Greenland and South Africa, Britain and South America.

The authors tell us of the primitive progenitors of the sea-birds, dating from over sixty million years ago, and the evolutionary adventures of their descendants, including the notorious extinction of the strange flightless great auk, the sad decline of many other fine species, also the rediscovery of the cahow after it had been presumed extinct. They have paid special attention to geographical distribution, and have provided a unique collection of maps, giving us, for the first time, the distribution of most species of North Atlantic sea-birds.

Chief among the authors’ interests has been the study of sea-bird numbers. They were largely responsible for organising the surveys of that splendid and typical North Atlantic animal, the gannet, which provided biology with the first reasonably accurate figure for the world population of any single and fairly numerous bird species. They have, from their own notes and those of many amateur and professional bird-watchers, produced interesting statistics of the total population of the fulmar, the Manx shearwater, the puffin and many others. Incidentally, such careful counts, site by site, reveal the continuous change that is going on in sea-bird populations, often directly or indirectly due to man’s influence.

The chapters on life-history are preceded by a general account of social and sexual behaviour, which throws light upon the significance of the prolonged and, to the observer, entertaining, mutual ceremonies of these strictly monogamous birds, their pair-formation, their fidelity to their mates, their nest-sites and their parental duties; at the same time problems of instinct and learning ability are discussed. The life-histories include much original field-work by the authors, who have been responsible for several discoveries concerning the incubation and fledging of a number of sea-birds.

We read of the birds’ ecology, their sharing of the wild frontiers of the land where they nest, their niches in the economy of the ocean. We learn of the contrasts between cliff-dwelling and hole-nesting species, of how the guillemot and razorbill chicks, exposed to many dangers on the open rocks, hasten their feather-growth and depart to the sea in two weeks, while the young puffins, safe in the darkness of their burrows, delay their departue for seven weeks, and are finally deserted by their parents; we learn of the strange lives of the shearwaters and small petrels which wander after the breeding season between the North and South Atlantic Oceans, living in perpetual summer—the Tristan shearwater “wintering” in our northern summer, and the Manx shearwater enjoying its “winter” in the southern summer off the coasts of South America.

But we have said enough to indicate the richness of knowledge brought together in this volume, which we confidently recommend as indispensable to everyone interested in the birds of the sea.

THE EDITORS

AUTHORS’ PREFACE

THE HEROES of our story are rather over a hundred species of birds whose life is a sea-life, whose habits enable them to earn at least part of their living in, or on, salt water, and which have been seen in the Atlantic Ocean north of the Equator.

The North Atlantic is the scene of our book, the great ocean that is now the most travelled by man. Its two sides are provided with an almost equal variety of sea-birds: sixty-eight species, or rather over half are common to both. Of all Atlantic countries Britain, considering its size, has the greatest number of sea-bird species; with no less than eighty, it can boast on its list all but six of those that have been seen on the Atlantic coast of Europe. The British Isles therefore make a good headquarters for a survey of the sea-birds of the North Atlantic. In Britain, and from Britain, the writers of this book have explored the eastern Atlantic sea-bird stations, and enjoyed many fine islands and memorable experiences. One or the other of us has sought the sea-birds south to the frigate-petrel burrows of the Salvages, near the Canary Islands; north to the ivory-gull colonies on the nunataks that rise from the ice-cap of Spitsbergen; or from 30°N. nearly to 80°N., a distance of more than three thousand miles; west we have ranged to Iceland, the Faeroes, Rockall, St. Kilda and the Blaskets of the Kerry coast; east we have travelled to Heligoland, and as far as Laesö in the Kattegat and Gotland in the Baltic, with their off-lying islands of sea-birds. There is no coastal county in England, Wales and Scotland that has not been visited by us both, and not one in Ireland that has not been visited by one of us.

No good British sea-bird cliff or island has been overlooked in our search for what the naturalist searches for; our experience and enjoyment has been long and continuous because both of us are, each in his somewhat different way, obsessed with sea-birds and with islands. We have spent a combined total of nearly seventy years sea-bird watching.

We have seen the little crags and green island swards of the Isles of Scilly and the drowned coast of Cornwall; the granite cliffs and puffins of Lundy; the chalk of south England east from Dorset; the flats and shingles and dunes of Essex and Suffolk and Norfolk, and the sanctuaries of Havergate and Minsmere and Walberswick and Cley and Blakeney and Salthouse, with terns and avocets and many kinds of marsh-birds. One of us has spent many years of his life in the county of Pembroke, living on Skokholm, and on other islands and peninsulas of the Welsh coast; of its sea-birds he has written in many books, and on Skokholm established the first permanent coastal bird observatory in Britain; the other has spent parts of twenty seasons in North Wales, and has worked its coast from St. Tudwal’s Islands to the Little Orme. Both of us know the Yorkshire bird-cliffs most of the way from Flamborough Head to Saltburn; and we have explored the shore of Durham, where bird-cliffs and black industry mix. In Northumberland we know Cullernose Craster, and Dunstan-burgh and Bamburgh Castle, and the cliffs north of Berwick, and other places where sea-birds nest; and we have been to the Holy Island, and to Coquet Isle, and to various of the Farne Islands, where the guillemots and kittiwakes are tame. We have seen the steep cliff-hill of the south part of the Isle of Man, and the sanctuary of the Calf; and have visited the inland gull colonies of North Lancashire and the Lakes.

In Scotland we have, at one time or another, visited every important sea-bird station: in the east St. Abb’s Head, Fast Castle, Tantallon Castle, the Bass Rock, the exciting Isle of May, and many others; in the west the Lowland coast from the Mull of Galloway in Wigtownshire up-Clyde as far as Ailsa Craig, whose magnificent gannetry has been the scene of many weeks of enjoyment and experiment in efforts to improve the counting of nesting sea-birds. Our visits farther north have taken us to Fowlsheugh in Kincardineshire, and round the bird-cliffs of the Aberdeen-Banff border—Pennan Head, Troup Head and others. West along into the Moray Firth we have hunted out the bird-cliffs as far as they go, which is to Covesea in Morayshire.

In the West Highlands we have explored the mainland promontories of Kintyre and Ardnamurchan, and the islands of the Clyde and Inner Hebrides. We have searched the cliffs of west Islay closely from a slow aeroplane. The curious headland of Ceann a ‘Mhara on the lovely sunny Island of Tiree has been investigated, as have the odd-shaped Treshnishs, home of seals, and the capes of Mull. The island of Eigg, where the shearwaters nest in a mountain; the magnificent but somewhat birdless island of Skye, and some of its attendant islets and stacks; both the lonely coast of Ross and its islands—Priest, Tanera, Glas Leac Beg and many others, where Frank Darling first worked out his theory of bird sociality by studying herring-gulls.

In the North Highlands we have watched the birds of the Black Isle Coast, and those of Easter Ross where the coast continues north of the Cromarty Firth to Tarbat Ness. In East Sutherland Dunrobin Castle itself becomes a bird-cliff, because fulmars are now prospecting it—and there we have seen them; in West Sutherland we have travelled nearly the whole wild coast, in instalments spread over several years; we know the crags of Stoer; the Torridonian sandstone precipices of Handa, the best bird island in Sutherland; the lonely cliffs on each side of remote Sandwood Bay—and Eilean Bulgach opposite which only half-a-dozen naturalists have visited; the high promontory of Cape Wrath, and the higher cliff of Clò Mor to the east of it—the highest mainland cliff in Britain—where the guillemots on two-hundred-foot stacks must be observed from six or seven hundred feet above; Fair-Aird Head and the home cliffs and caves of Durness; the huge white crags and stacks of Whiten Head; the complex of islands and cliffs that stretches thence to Caithness, whose headlands too, we know, and their birds—Holborn Head, Dunnet Head, John o’ Groats and Duncansby Head, Noss Head, Berriedale Ness.

In many years, and many boats (as well as from aircraft), we have enjoyed the Outer Hebrides, from North Rona (which many call the loneliest place to have been inhabited in Britain) to Barra Head. We have seen the seals and birds of Rona, and counted the gannets of its lonely neighbour Sula Sgeir; and have hunted out the coast of the Lewis, and much of Harris. One of us has slept some nights on the Shiants, among the rats that may be affecting the population of that vast remote puffinry; and has several times threaded the maze of the Sound of Harris, and eight times has been to St. Kilda, whose unsurpassed cliffs and towering stacks have to be seen to be believed (and are sometimes then not believed). We have traversed the Long Isle—North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist and Barra—and many of its attendant isles, and carried on to sail close under the cliffs of Mingulay and Berneray, which for remoteness, grandeur and personality are rivals—much overlooked rivals—to those mighty precipices of St. Kilda, Conachair, Soay and Boreray.

One hundred and ninety-one miles west of St. Kilda, and about three hundred miles from the mainland of Scotland, lies a tiny rock which has been a magnet for us both—not only because of its bird-problems, but because it is a tiny remote rock! Fisher flew over Rockall in 1947. In 1948 Lockley spent twelve days in a trawler fishing within sight of, and on occasion very close to it. In 1949 Fisher sailed there in H. G. Hasler’s sixteen-ton yawl Petula, and spent some time investigating it at close quarters.

One of us has visited Sule Stack, the lonely gannetry thirty miles west of Orkney; and we have enjoyed nearly every island, from North to South Ronaldsay, from Eynhallow to Hoy, and have seen sea-birds in a great range of surroundings. Neither of us is a stranger to the well-named Fair Isle, a great migration and sea-bird station. We know the Shetland gannetries of Noss and Hermaness, where thousands nest—though forty years ago there was none. We have stood at the top of Foula’s Kame, and gazed twelve hundred and twenty feet to the auk-scattered sea below. We have sailed in and out, and round about, the stacks and rocks and skerries, and voes and geos of straggling Shetland, and seen many a fine cliff, from Sumburgh in the south to Saxa Vord in the north; from Noss on east to Papa Stour on west. We are no strangers to Fitful Head, or Hillswick, or Ronas Voe, or Burra Firth; or to Hascosay, the bonny isle of Whalsay, Fetlar, Bressay or Mousa; or to the Out Skerries, nearest British land to Norway.

Perhaps in Ireland we have not seen all we should; but one of us knows the windy corner of Kerry, the end of the world, where the pure Irish survives on the Blasket, and where the fulmars now glide and play round Inishtearaght, Inish-na-Bro, and Inishvickillaun; and where the gannets mass white on the serrated pinnacles of the Little Skellig, second gannetry of the world. He knows, too, the little gannetry of the Bull, and its neighbour the Cow, and other crags of Cork from Cape Clear Island and Dursey Island east to Great Newtown Head. In Clare the cliffs of Moher bring sea-birds to nest among many beautiful flowers. We have seen the bird-colony of the Great Saltee in Wexford, and that of Lambay not far from Dublin. One of us knows the many fine, high cliffs of Mayo and Sligo, and some headlands of the maze-coast of Donegal; the other has watched fulmars haunting the curious inland cliffs of Binevenagh in Derry, and hunted out the basalt coast of Antrim and the Giant’s Causeway.

Between us, then, we have seen much of the coast of our glorious islands; but we have not seen nearly enough, and we hope to see what we have already seen, all over again. And we would see the west side of the ocean we have grown to love, and compare it with the Britain we know, and other sea-bird countries we have seen—the tuff and lava and basalt of Iceland, the basalt crags of Faeroe, the dissected plateaux of Spitsbergen, the misty cliffs of Bear Island, the drowned coast of Norway with snow-coated Lofotens and dark fjords like corridors, the friendly limestone of Sweden’s Gotland, the skerry-guard of Stockholm and Uppland, the dunes of Denmark and the Dutch islands, the red sandstone cliffs of Heligoland (the only cliffs in western Germany), the chalk and granite of north France, and the islets of Brittany; the benign, sunny slopes and little scarp-precipices of the Channel Islands where one of us lived for a while; the warm, shearwater islands of the Portuguese Berlengas, the Madeiran Desertas, and the Salvages; and the gulleries and terneries of the Camargue, within the Mediterranean.

This book is not a comprehensive survey of a problem based upon a lifetime’s experience nor yet a full bibliographical compilation. We have paused in field-work simply to offer this book as a stimulant, which we hope very much it will be. We intend it as no more. It is a statement of some of the facts concerning the wonderful sea-birds of the North Atlantic, and of some of the interesting problems connected with their lives and their evolution. It is intended to exhibit the ignorance of ornithology as much as its knowledge, and to draw attention to what needs doing as much as to what has been done. It is our wish, we must also add, not only to take the reader with us—if he will come—to the east side of the North Atlantic where the sea-birds are more in our personal experience, but also to the western seaboard, which is zealously worked by the ornithologists of the United States and Canada and described by them with such enthusiasm and thoroughness in numerous books and journals. One of us has corrected the galley proofs of this book in an aircraft bound for North America, on the beginning of a journey among the sea-birds of that continent; as he left Britain, Ailsa Craig flashed white with gannets in an April evening sun, and the first bird he saw in the New World, through Newfoundland clouds next morning, was a gannet.

For help, encouragement and information we have more friends to thank than we can mention. Our search of the literature has been chiefly pursued in books belonging to the Zoological Society of London, the Alexander Library at Oxford, the Royal Geographical Society and the London Library, and we thank G. B. Stratton and W. B. Alexander particularly. Among those who have given us valuable help or information (they have no responsibility for the use we have made of it) are B. M. Arnold, R. Atkinson, J. Buxton, T. Cade, F. Darling, E. A. G. Duffey, A. Ferguson, Finnur Guðmundsson, H. G. Hasler, P. A. D. Hollom, J. S. Huxley, the late P. Jespersen, G. T. Kay, Miss J. Keighley, T. C. Lethbridge, H. F. Lewis, C.–F. Lundevall, S. Marchant, R. C. Murphy, E. M. Nicholson, R. S. Palmer, R. Perry, R. T. Peterson, L. E. Richdale, M. Romer, F. Salomonsen, H. N. Southern, D. Surrey-Dane, N. Tinbergen, L. Tuck, L. S. V. Venables, H. G. Vevers, K. Williamson and V. C. Wynne-Edwards. Mrs. E. Marshall patiently typed several drafts of most of this book. J. F. Trotter prepared the final copies of most of the maps. One of these is on a mapnet invented by the late Professor C. B. Fawcett and is used with his permission and that of the Royal Geographical Society (e.g. Fig. 24). Another mapnet, devised by one of us (J.F.) is used for the first time in this book; it is based on the South Pole with the oceans in three petals, and is useful for showing the range of the many sea-birds that have a primarily southern distribution (e.g. Fig. 22). J. Fisher’s fellow New Naturalist editors have been encouraging; and Eric Hosking in particular has found us many unique photographs. R. Trevelyan, of Messrs. Collins, has been most ingenious and helpful. The American Ornithologists’ Union, who published our frontispiece first in the Auk, have very kindly allowed us the use of it; this fine painting by Roger Peterson of the interesting cahow, long thought to be extinct, embellished the paper by R. C. Murphy and L. S. Mowbray on their recent rediscovery of its breeding-grounds.

Ornithologists’ wives do many (if not most) of the chores that husbands normally do. We thank ours for more things than they probably remember.

JAMES FISHER

R. M. LOCKLEY