After last year’s visit to Orkney- a week which swept by in a whirlwind of sunshine and seabirds and curlews- I knew that we wanted to go back. But I didn’t think that almost a year to the day we left I’d be touching down in Kirkwall again, to spend two weeks back on the Mainland. The reason for our efficiency was the other half of Stripy Tapir, who, lucky sod that he is, was on sabbatical as a seabird surveyor. Not happy about all those puffins he’d be seeing in my absence I booked some time off work, packed my binoculars, and headed up after him.
We spent two glorious weeks perching on cliffs and systematically keeping an eye on over 400 seabird nests- everything from guillemots and razorbills raising their young on the tiniest of ledges to kittiwakes with their well constructed nest cups. If you asked me what my favourite thing to survey was, though, it’s got to be these guys. I feel that shags often get forgotten about when other seabirds enter the picture. And yes, I do get that they aren’t as comically ungainly on land as the auks, and they don’t ride the wind currents as dramatically as the fulmars. But there’s something vaguely Jurrasic Park about them- something in the pale eyes of the chicks with their patterned backs that almost look like scales, that reminds you of their ancestry. Plus they’re pretty messy, and as someone who’s currently blogging instead of unpacking a suitcase that has been sat on my bedroom floor for two weeks this speaks to me.
More from Orkney coming right up- but if you can’t wait till then you can see what we got up to last time here, here and here.
