Bird Cliffs in the North Atlantic 1971 and 1972

I graduated from high school in June 1971, I was 18 years old. Because I was chosen to give the Valedictorian speech that year (not because of my good grades, but because of my outspoken views!), I had to stay back for the graduation ceremony; but I didn’t attend any of the wild parties afterwards. As soon as the official graduation ceremony was over I headed north to photograph birds. In the north, the timing for something like this is critical. You have to go while all the breeding birds are in place; and the season is short, from late May until early July, there is really only a two-month window. 

I had been to Lapland in northern Sweden three times by then and wanted a slightly different destination. I had heard of the gigantic bird cliffs in the North Atlantic where pelagic birds land on the cliff faces for a brief few weeks during the summer to raise their young. The rest of the time they spend offshore, totally independent of land. The nearest to where I lived in Denmark was Runde island off Ålesund in western Norway, and that is where I headed in late June. The island is about 3x2 km, in those days you had to take a ferry out from Norway proper. I had arranged (by snail-mail in those days …) to stay at a fisherman’s family on the island, Sverre Valland, he and his wife ran a kind of B&B for tourists. There were some visitors on the island that year apart from me, mainly day-tripper coming out in boats from Ålesund. I was lucky to meet Dr Einar Brun  from the University of Tromsø there (1936-1976), he was the foremost authority on Norwegian marine ecology at the time and also stayed with the Valland family. Dr Brun was conducting a survey of the sea birds on Runde, he counted from the sea using a dinghy he with him on the roof of his car. Today there are a lot fewer birds in Runde, but a lot more people, that is the sad truth; I will cover that later when I get to my 2022 follow-up visit with Bee Choo. In my book, The Ethical Investor’s Handbook (2018), I refer to this event, the decline in the North Atlantic sea bird colonies. I refer to this report in a Norwegian paper from 2014, there is another report here from SEAPOP which basically confirms the trends.

The collapse in the North Atlantic sea bird colonies is not fully understood, but it is believed in the case of the Kittiwake gull that its favorite food, Sand Eel, has declined. More generally, climate change and over-fishing are the main causes of the population decrease. In the case of Greenland specifically, unsustainable hunting by the local Inuit population adds to the problems, as I cover here in my Greenland 2019 tab.

So, on Runde I got great photos of Kittiwakes, Puffins, Fulmars, Razorbills and some of the other sea birds. But some others were harder to get close to. The Gannets at that time only lived on a very inaccessible part of the cliffs as you can see in the photos below. Even Guillemot was a bit tough to get. They were there, but on very steep ledges and it was simply too dangerous for me to venture out there for close-up photos.

The next year, late June 1972, I fixed that problem! I knew there were other bird cliffs around the Atlantic, for instance on Faroe Islands. However, those islands are Danish territory and already visited regularly by Danish birdwatchers and photographers. The Faroe Island culture of catching and eating Puffins (outlawed in Norway since 1957!), other birds and even small whales in grim mass-slaughters also put me off the place. So I travelled to Shetland, Scotland, UK instead. That was a good choice. The Brits in general – and particularly the Scots - are just so much nicer and sweeter people than the Scandinavians. The birds in Shetland are spectacular, and I especially enjoyed the time I spent on the isolated island of Foula in the far west.  

I flew from Copenhagen to Edinburgh, took a train to Aberdeen and from there a ferry to the main town of Shetland, Lerwich; the crossing north was about 13 hours. Lerwich had a youth hostel where I could stay cheaply. My first stop was the small 1x2 km island Isle of Noss near Lerwich. I simply just walked about 4 km across the island east of Lerwich, and then I stood on the beach there and shouted and waved across the narrow straight (about 150 m) to Noss. At that time, a sheep farmer worked days on Noss, he saw me and took me across; otherwise the place was uninhabited. There was no place to stay on the island, so I would just be on my own and sleep rough among the rocks for a couple of nights. Today I think there are organized boat-tours to and around the island. Noss has some 200 m high cliffs to the east that were quite accessible and generally good for photography.

My main target bird was the Gannet; I knew I would see most of the other bird cliff species later on Foula. There were about 20,000 pairs of Gannets breeding on Noss that year. But even then, getting close to them wasn’t that easy. On hindsight, I probably took a bit of a chance. I had to climb down and out on the cliff faces to get eye-level; it was somewhat dodgy, and the ground wasn’t completely stable. But I am here to tell the tale, so obviously I made it.   

But … it was the larger Foula that really captured my imagination; the name is from old Norse Fugløy meaning Bird Island. The island is some 4x6 km, only a few sheep farmers and artisanal fishermen lived there, seven families in all, about 30 souls. When I visited, there was no school on the island, but the post master cum pastor doubled up as a home-schooling teacher. “He teaches and preaches”, the locals would say with a smile! The week+ I stayed there was one of my best trips ever. I rented an old cottage half-way up in the hills behind the boat pier. I paid John G. Holbourn £1 per day in rent; thank you so much John, you and your neighbors were all so nice to me. 

Every day I would walk across the island and along the magnificent cliffs and shorelines to watch and photograph birds. Both Arctic and Great Skua were abundant in the fell; every little lake on the island seemed to have a pair of Red-throated Divers in it, I counted at least eight pairs. The coastal landscape was some of the most dramatic and awesome I have ever seen anywhere. Throughout my stay I never met another person in the backcountry. At night I would relax in the primitive cabin I had and read a book; for dinner I would boil a big pot of local free-range chicken eggs and eat them with salt and a loaf of bread and butter from the small shop in the village, open for a few hours now and then or by appointment. 

When my stay on the island came to an end, the regular little ferry didn’t run that week; the weather was too rough. So I paid an old geezer from the village £10 to take me across to the mainland some 30+ km to the east. We crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny wooden dinghy with a small outboard in heavy seas - an interesting trip indeed! Well off land, the captain and I started on a fifth of Scotch Whiskey, and there wasn’t much left in the bottle by the time we got across!

I haven’t been back to Foula or Shetland for that matter since. It would be interesting to go back and visit and photograph exactly the same places now, almost half a century later. But hey, wait a minute – that has already been done! At this link, you can find A photographic resurvey of seabird colonies on Foula, Shetland comparing 1974 records with the same locations 40 years later, in 2014. The report concludes that the Gannet has increased in numbers (it didn’t even breed on Foula prior to 1976) and has possibly outcompeted the Guillemot for food. Guillemot, Shag, Razorbill have all declined significantly; like on Runde, the Kittiwake population has collapsed. In 1974, the photographs were taken because researchers feared that the Scottish North Sea oil bonanza would threaten seabird breeding colonies. That didn’t turn out to be the case, but other factors caused catastrophic decline instead.

My photographs will tell the rest of the story.