The gull’s way

In 1978, Adam Nicolson received three Hebridean islands as a 21st birthday present from his father, Nigel. The Shiants, each about a mile long, were uninhabited, with just one rat-infested bothy: not everyone’s idea of paradise. But, precisely because human beings had neglected them, wild life flourished — the islands were ‘thick with the swirl of existence’, thrumming with life and death, suffering and triumph, ferocity and conquest. Sea Room (2002) is Nicolson’s rousing love lilt to the Shiants, for him the most beautiful place on earth. In The Seabird’s Cry he homes in on their seabirds, and the tiny islands become a microcosm from which he moves from the particular — lying on the cliffs, looking a fulmar dead in the eye — to the panoramic. Driven by an almost obsessive desire to understand the birds, he travels to St Kilda, Orkney, Shetland, the Faroes and Norway, to Newfoundland, Ascension, the Falklands and South Georgia, the Canaries and the Azores.

We are living in the Anthropocene — the epoch during which the Earth’s geology and ecosystems are shaped by the activities of man. It is a ‘literal truth’, Nicolson claims, that every fulmar and albatross has eaten plastic. And by 2050, almost all seabird species will have plastic in their stomachs. Nicolson is keen to put man in his place. Seabirds inhabited the earth 100 million years ago. By comparison, human beings, at 50,000 to 60,000 years old, are latecomers.

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And it’s not just the birds’ longevity that should give us pause for thought. Nicolson has been deeply influenced by the work of Jakob von Uexküll, a German Baltic biologist born in Estonia in 1864.