Shear Suicide

An innocent enough looking puffin...

All of a sudden our vessel entered into ornithological air-space. Lancaster gannets hugged the waves whilst miniature messerschmitts and spitfires darted past one another in the guise of razorbills and guillemots. My destination was the mile long island of Skokholm off the south west tip of Pembrokeshire, Wales. My fellow zoologist Theo and I were keen to explore this SSSI, partake in some leisurely wildlife photography and depart, hopefully free of bird poo, five days later.

Home to puffins, peregrines and petrels, ravens, razorbills and wrens, shearwaters, shellduck and shags, gannets, guillemots and gulls it is clear that birds find Skokholm an attractive place to live. Yet despite being thought of as chiefly an avian island we soon discovered many of the other beasts that reside there.

Glistening sea gooseberries, formidable spider crabs and baby pollack navigated the kelp forest in the calm waters of the landing bay. Wearing nothing more than a pair of pink and brown, Hawaiian-style boardies I braced myself and leapt into this cold underwater jungle. Within minutes a curious, young, grey seal began circling beneath me. Through my misted goggles I could just about make out her ghostly, white blotched belly, however, just like females of my own species, she kept her distance from my strange, white, gangly physique.

Clearly a beast of a slow worm!

We found no less than twenty-six individual slow worms tangled up and basking under sheets of corrugated iron near to our camp and I nearly squashed the first recorded cinnabar moth of the year as it dozed in the sun on a clump of wind-swept sea campion. The island was teeming with life of all shapes and sizes.

However, over the course of our visit it felt as though the avian inhabitants of this rocky outcrop were becoming increasingly hostile towards our mammalian invasion. It was on our third day that the first of a trilogy of attacks began.

Perhaps it mistook that hair cut
for a tasty rabbit..?

A rather plump and angry sounding lesser black-backed gull took offence at Theo photographing some razorbills and instantly began mobbing his head. After several gull dive-bombs Theo finally surrendered his position to the enemy, the birds had drawn first blood (metaphorically of course).

The second attack came under the cover of darkness. I had ventured out of my room to answer a call of nature. As I stumbled around I could hear the eerie sound of thousands of Manx shearwaters returning from a day’s fishing over the Atlantic. I had just finished providing the nettles with their periodic dose of nitrates when a kamikaze shearwater flew silently but rapidly into the side of my head. The sensation was not indifferent to the combined shock and pain experienced when walking into a lamp post (trust me I’ve been that victim... twice). I held my, now throbbing, right ear and just about heard the shocked murmurings of an embarrassed Manxie as it crashed into the freshly hydrated nettles. It wasn't there the next morning so I can only hope it found its burrow before the gulls found it.

One sand-eel sticky (and stinky) bomb.

I was starting to recognise that this island truly does belong to the birds, yet on the final evening as I began to photograph the comical yet charismatic puffins at Crab Bay I neglected any threat. As the sun began to set they were still busy ferrying tiny fish back to their hungry chicks which lay hidden in the vast network of burrows beneath our feet. One after another they would flash over my head like miniature clowns being fired from a cannon but as I tried to capture a snapshot of the action I found myself victim to the final bout of bird bullying. Stuck to the inside of my lens hood was no less than a silvery, half-squashed sand eel. One of the ‘charming’ little auks had dropped a fish bomb on me. Alfred Hitchcock eat your heart out!