Gannet

The northernmost point of the British Isles is mostly gannets. Your last footstep, heading north, before you splash off the islands forever and into the grey sea, would be on a gannet, or a gannet chick, or a gannet’s nest; or you would slip on some streak of gannet guano marking like a tramp sign the uttermost doorpost of the land.

From the Mainland of Shetland—itself but a scrap of rock in the great scheme of things—you take a little ferry to the treeless island of Yell, and again a ferry to windy Unst. The land deconstructs itself as you go: trees disappear, fields are unfenced, sheep wander lost alongside the roads, there are tiny wild ponies trotting among the ancient boulders; the world becomes a play of simple yet strange elements.

And so you drive across that island and park some way short of the coast. You then walk up towards the rocks and lighthouse of Muckle Flugga, a lighthouse blinking not for ships but like an imbecile candle at the cold blank universe; and on across a windy heath where the great skua nest; and so you hit the cliff-line and work your way up towards Muckle Flugga and Out Stack. 

...

The air is thick with gannets. It is a day of colossal onshore wind (is there any other sort of day up here, you wonder), where great grey shower-clouds traverse the blue sky at terrific speed; the rain, when it comes, is horizontal, wind-whipped, furious; but it passes in minutes and we are back to the scintillation of gannet guano and the blue sea, the sky thick with birds in every direction.

As my brother and I look, we begin to resolve in the midst of the thousands of gannets, puffins (there are 25000 of them up here) and guillemots, criss-crossing the mayhem like black tracer bullets, and fulmars, most skilled fliers of all, fluttering over the cliff edge or gently reversing with a finesse of feather and wing-angle in the teeth of the gale, into their nesting crevice, dropping into place as though on beautiful hydraulics.

But mostly it is gannets.

And so for an hour we stand and watch the gannets fly up in their thousands like white cinders over hot rocks, as though fuelled not on silver herring but on inanimate matter; or as if the rocks themselves are metamorphosing, fissuring and fragmenting under the pressure of age, of Atlantic, of northernness, of extremity and wildness, into momentarily alive, self-directing particles. It seems that the whole island—or for that matter the whole of the knowable world—is eternally fragmenting up here, breaking up at its northernmost extremity into tiny white volatile particles. Here, at the frayed ends of things. You expect the end of something to be a tailing off, an exhaustion; but it is, on the contrary, a great energy. An escape. 

...

Seabirds are often long-lived, and return, often, to the same nest or nesting site, year on year. Fulmar can live to forty years, puffin to twenty-five. The oldest recorded northern gannet (morus bassanus, named for Bass Rock) was thirty-seven (although a more typical age is seventeen). 

And the colonies themselves have an historical shape. The largest gannet colony in the world, Bass Rock, a lump of black basalt in the Firth of Forth, with more than seventy-five thousand nesting pairs in 2014, was first recorded in 1493. A colony on the remote island of Lundy was first noted in 1274, but had disappeared at some point before 1909. The colony at Hermaness numbers over twenty-five thousand pairs. 

The gannet is a species of least concern.

Outside the breeding season, birds disperse. Gannets are pelagic and mobile. Some winter off the coast of West Africa, some in the western Mediterranean. A bird will usually—once it has bred, almost always—return to the same colony. They are defensive, squabbling creatures (although the disputes and fights, some lasting hours, are almost always between birds of the same sex). Where possible, they position their nests, therefore, out of reach of their shrieking neighbours—an average of 2.3 nests per square metres places each nesting pair at double a gannet-reach from the next, a precarious geometry of tolerance.

Their nests build up and up, year on year, as they chuck guano out, and rebuild; they can reach two metres in height, a stratification of guano, and egg shell, and fish bone, and gannet bone, like Neolithic middens.

...

The gannet psyche is impossible to penetrate. Deeply other they seem, wild-eyed, elemental, living on the edge of the storm, always. They might know something. On the other hand, gannet existence might be a deeply simple affair, an unrelenting lifetime welter of smash, dive, skewer, slash, fight. Protect the eggs. Fish. Resist. Die in a smash-up of blood and feather, somewhere unknowable.

We can speculate, however. The world of the gannet is a world of blank planes on which they inscribe themselves. The sea is a blank grey plane until you plunge, exploring, into it. The land behind the cliffs is a wholly blank plane, as good as invisible, of no use at all.

Birds are occasionally blown off course into the bleak and featureless interior. Thomas Browne describes one caught on marshland near his home in Norfolk in the seventeenth century, noting its 'wild blewe eye'; he tells of another 'kild by a greyhound neere swaffam'. But in general a gannet, unlike the more adaptable gulls, knows nothing of the world this side of the cliff. So there is only the cliff, the colony, and the planes of land, sea, sky. And the feeding grounds. It has emerged that birds from a particular colony, as Adam Nicolson relates, head to the same broad grounds; birds from nearby colonies will head to different grounds, barely overlapping. The gannets have their comity of nations, it seems.

The colony is a more complex place. No simple blank planes here. Only countless thousand of hostile fell0w-gannets. A gannet will not nest in open space. It will seek out a nesting site adjacent to another nest, hard up against the colony, a metre or two from a violent, slashing neighbour. And there it will fight other younger birds for the privilege of the spot. It seems that the nearer a bird can nest to the centre of the colony, the better its chicks will do (although this is a reverse correlation: it is the more mature birds who have the power and the skill to occupy the centre spots, and who also make the best parents). The centre is where the fat birds live.

So a gannet colony is either a squabbling hell, or a richly satisfying geometry, depending on your perspective. Depending on your gannet power.

...

The air around a big colony at the height of the breeding season is thick with gannets, as I have noted; and the thickness and the strangeness of it all lend the zones of approach a dreamlike quality.

At the moment my mother had the fall which led to her death, many hundreds of miles to the south, my brother and I were standing on the cliffs overlooking Muckle Flugga, marvelling at the gannet-thick sky. To a more shamanic soul, they might in retrospect have been spirits in transformation, spiralling off. That was the year before the Covid pandemic, when a great many gannet spirits tumbled upward. How thick and alive the skies must have been then, while we were all locked down.

My brother and I returned in 2021, and found our gannets, sure enough, but this time flying in a serene blue-sky, across a gentle breeze. And so we watched, not the cosmos dissolve into unknowable sky-bound particles, but only the myriad blue-eyed gannets, toughing out their violent existence with good grace.