The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives And Loves Of Puffins, Gannets And Other Ocean Voyagers

By Adam Nicolson

William Collins, £16.99

Review by Peter Ross

IT was when Adam Nicolson was 10 years old, sailing from Tarbert to the Shiants, three small Hebridean islands owned by his father, that he first heard the tale of the gannet’s fatal dive. Sometime in the 17th century, the story goes, a small boat was crossing from Harris to St Kilda, a westward journey of 40 miles, and the herring were so thick in the water that any sailor could have stepped out and walked the silver path of their backs. Gannets plunged into this gleaming shoal, filling their guts and gullets. But one bird, perhaps confused in its greed, arrowed straight down into the boat itself, its great blue-grey beak driving deep into the bottom strakes. It died on impact. A hole in the hull should have meant the end for the crew, but the beak acted as a bung, preventing water from flooding in, and the ship sailed on to Hirta. The gannet’s great wings stretched from gunwale to gunwale, as fierce and proud in death as any Viking laid out on his funeral ship.

That story is in Sea Room, the 2001 account of the life and history of the Shiants which made Nicolson’s name and is now regarded as something of a classic. The tale shocked him as a boy, has always stayed with him, and contains within it themes, and a mood, which run right through this new book. The Seabird’s Cry – its title taken from a Seamus Heaney poem – is full of wonder and guilt, life and death; it is a threnody sounding from cliff to cliff.

Ten of the 12 chapters are each devoted to a different seabird: fulmar, puffin, kittiwake, gull, guillemot, shag, shearwater, gannet, razorbill, and that restless ghost, the albatross. Of these, we learn, seven are in decline, and – thanks to global warming and pollution and the rest of it – that is our fault. Over the last 60 years, the global population of seabirds has dropped by two-thirds; there are now one billion fewer than in 1950; the graph, Nicolson claims, trends to zero by 2060.

“We are the holocaust,” he writes, “the destroyers of what we come to live with.” He has this self-denunciation in common with JA Baker, the modish author of The Peregrine, who wrote that: “We are the killers. We stink of death.” Again like Baker, Nicolson’s strong imaginative identification with birds leads him to a “longing to be what they are”. The Inuit people on the Bering coast of Alaska strive, he tells us, to achieve “birdness”, a total immersion in the identity of these creatures. Nicolson, one senses, feels similar urges in writing this book. He wants to be up and out, gliding the thermals and nesting in the overcrowded cliff-top slums, and he wants to take us with him through sheer force of language.

It isn’t sufficient to say that Nicolson writes well about birds. He is dizzyingly, dazzlingly good. A passage on Isle of May herring gulls eating their own chicks draws on Greek myth. His descriptions of the Bass Rock – “this stinking, death-encrusted, vivid, howling, all-life gathering of gannets and their offspring” – are enough to make those of us who have tried to write about that place and those birds feel utterly bested. In an account of a July afternoon spent watching a razorbill chick being menaced by a hungry cormorant, he even gives us a dreadful little horror story worthy of Edgar Allan Poe: the pit and the predator.

Nicolson is a classy, elegant writer; his pen portraits are always colourful, rarely purple. He lingers over a guillemot skull, careful as any vanitas painter. He isn’t above anthropomorphism – his puffins carry themselves with “Edwardian propriety” – but he never stoops to cheap lols. He either does not notice, or chooses not to say, that puffins oohing and aahing in their burrows sound exactly like Frankie Howerd, and he never even cracks a smile when describing the habits of the shag. Personally, I was amused to learn that those birds are serial monogamists, remaining faithful to each partner for about three years. So much for nominative determinism.

The aim of this book, which Nicolson certainly achieves, is to bring together man’s ancient, instinctual understanding and appreciation of seabirds with the latest scientific accounts of their behaviour, the latter having progressed enormously in the last few years thanks to lightweight monitoring technology which the birds can wear without difficulty. As he observes, however, there is a bitter irony: “the very civilisation that created the instruments by which we can now track the birds – technological, industrial, energy-consuming, satellite-launching – is at the source of the changes which are making life on the ocean difficult and hostile for them”.

In the last few pages, Nicolson attempts to strike a hopeful note, but it rings false. This book is unsentimental about the lives of seabirds, pessimistic about their ultimate fate, and better for both those attitudes. The chapter on kittiwakes describes the cliffs of Nicolson’s beloved islands in those occasional summers when the birds, for lack of food, have abandoned their nests. They are brown and lifeless, a Cassandra glimpse of a not-so-distant extinction, and they brought to my mind another line from Sea Room that finds an echo in The Seabird’s Cry: “I sometimes dream of the Shiants without the birds and it is like finding a child dead.”