Friends,
It’s cold here. Winter seems to have bypassed autumn and I’m writing this, sitting in my studio, wearing multiple layers, a wooly hat and flicking between browser windows to research room heaters. This ancient little building has no double glazing, no insulation, and the wind keeps blowing the doors open. Brrrrrrrrr!
This week’s story is all about Arctic Terns, and their long distance migrations, which I’ve been reading about lately. Miraculous little birds, perhaps the most resilient of all species.
This is a free post, available to all subscribers and shareable with friends and colleagues. If you like what you read please consider upgrading to a paid subscription which gives you access to all the content in the archive (which at the last count was about 90 stories, several podcasts, a few videos and loads of my artwork.
Hope you enjoy this week’s episode.
Strange how memories appear from nowhere. Stranger still for someone who has so few memories. When they do come, they’re vivid, I’m almost back there.
It was May. We were on the Isle of Skye, a week of torrential rain, almost non-stop, trying to keep two small boys from catching hypothermia. They always wanted to swim in those freezing waters. We were driving back to my sister’s cottage to dry out, the single track road winding between stumps of mountains, bronze to black. Below were Eilean Dubh, Eilean Mor, Eilean Glas, the sparking water of Loch Dunvegan either side. I spotted shadows in the water, moving, a splash, a dark triangle rise from the surface, then fall beneath it. Dolphins. We parked the old Renault on a muddy bank, got out and scrambled down the slope to a little grassy platform overlooking the loch. We counted them. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. They were gliding towards each other, coming in from every direction, forming a rough circle. In between them the water was boiling, and as they got closer, little fish began to leap into the air, flapping and wriggling, before landing with tiny silver splashes. The dolphins closed the circle, feeding easily. Our youngest asked when the whale would come - that huge open mouth rising from the deep to swallow the shoal completely, and the dolphins, and maybe a couple of the islands. The whale didn’t come. But the arctic terns did.
Little forks of white light, black hooded, blood beaked. They swooped over the fins of the dolphins, arriving in numbers, twenty, thirty birds. They rose against the wind, then folded and plunged. They wriggled free of the water, fought back into the air, rose again, dived. This continued for several minutes as the shoal of fish shrank to almost nothing, the dolphins eventually breaking the circle and beginning to swim parallel, out to the wide jaw of the loch where it met the open sea. The terns continued to dive for the stragglers, their frenzy trailing off. Our boys wanted crisps.
I read recently that Arctic terns have been added to the red list of birds in the UK. They are now endangered on these islands, along with skuas, greater black-backed gulls, puffins, kittiwakes - many of my favourite creatures. Though I’ve only spent a few minutes of my life in their presence this feels like a profound loss. Arctic terns have always seemed miraculous to me, so tiny, so perfect, crafted by the gods’ favourite smith. For such long distance journeyers they look so glass fragile, sharing none of, for instance, a swift’s muscularity and blade-like ability to cut through the wind. When I’ve encountered them they seemed to lurch and toss like leaky rowing boats fighting a big sea.
The migratory journeys of Arctic terns were unknown until fairly recently and there are still gaping holes in our scientific knowledge, even with the use of geo-tracking devices. Only small numbers of birds have been tracked to date and the routes they take are complex and diverse. Generally speaking an Arctic tern’s yearly journey, if we take their nesting sites in Scotland as the starting place, follow the western seaboard of Europe and Africa down to the cape, then track east into the Indian Ocean, sometimes travelling as far as the Tasman Sea before heading south to the Antarctic coast where they spend most of the southern hemisphere summer. They disperse widely there, the Ross Sea and Weddell Sea being two of their feeding grounds, where krill are present in large numbers. In the early northern hemisphere spring they head back to the Cape of Good Hope to travel along the edges of the continent, or use the mid-Atlantic low pressure zones to begin their northward journey to the breeding grounds. This though, is just a generalisation. There are arctic tern nesting sites all along the northern land edge, from Siberia and Alaska, to Greenland, Norway, and the Baltic, and each colony will take a slightly different route. Greenland birds head south weeks after European birds and may be present off the coast of Wales and Ireland as late as mid-September. Alaskan and Eastern Siberian birds fly to the Antarctic along the western edge of Canada, the USA and the South American continent. Some of those birds will decide not to follow the coast all the way and will cross the Andes and Patagonia to arrive in the Atlantic, before their polar travels. Arctic terns have been found in Argentina, Chile, even Australia. What they all have in common though, is distance travelled - 40,000km each year seems to be the average - which is equal to the whole circumference of the earth.
Arctic terns have a moult period of around 2 months where they spend most of their time perched on ice floes. Summer air temperatures in Antartica, though variable for each region, are mostly below freezing. Sea temperatures hover around -2 degrees. An arctic tern weighs 100 grams on average and is approximately 30cm long. How many drops of blood are in their veins, how tiny are their hearts? You’d think they’d freeze to their cores within minutes on the ice. Or burn up as they crossed the tropics. Or blow in the wind like dust, which, actually they do, being evolved to find the winds that suit them best, and then to glide.
Surely most Arctic terns meet their ends (which can be as long as 30 years) in the Antarctic wastes, frozen fast to a floe, or rocking gently in the ice rime. Or floating upside down in the frigid sea, their scarlet beaks agape, that last little fish the one that got away.
I’ve been watching a BBC documentary series called “What do artists do all day?”. I still have little idea about this though I am now officially a professional artist. The latest episode introduced the work of artist/taxidermist, Polly Morgan, who owns several freezers filled with dead birds. She plucked a gannet from her chest freezer to show the interviewer, a big bird, rigid as a brick. And she also showed the most moving piece of art I’ve seen in a while, a glass jar containing a tiny, folded bird suspended in space from a helium balloon. The work was called “Still Birth”. I imagine a dead tern would look like that little bird - bedraggled, bowed, rigid as a knuckle bone. That stillness haunts me. A red list categorisation in this country does not mean that a species is about to go extinct. In the case of Arctic terns the global population is still in the millions, but this sudden decline in one location could signal a change in their fortunes in other colonies. Storms coming in. All those tiny birds suspended.
The map that shows the routes of geolocator tagged Arctic terns revealed that at around this date, mid-September, many of the birds are flying along the coast of Angola and Namibia, feeding from the Benguela current which flows up from the cold seas of Antarctica, into the east Atlantic. It’s one of those wild places I’d love to visit, if I had sea legs, which I don’t. Humpback Whales feed there, and African Penguins, Cape Gannets, Haviside’s Dolphins, Crowned Cormorants, vast colonies of Cape Fur Seals. The journeying terns flit amongst them, swoop-diving the boiling waters. It’s one of those areas left on earth where abundance and biodiversity combine to create a symphony of wild life.
Late yesterday, as the sky reddened and the wind that had been clattering the old roofs all day calmed, the rooks and jackdaws gathered in the trees opposite our house. I don’t know why rooks start to collect here at this time of year, but there are at least 50 of them roosting in the oaks now, and a few hundred jackdaws. They seem to revel in the approaching night, jittery, unable to perch for more than a few minutes, dark shapes shoaling out, scattering across the town and quickly returning, a frenzy of creaturely life. We’re lucky to experience it, almost every evening. It’s a glimpse into wild places for me: bird islands, sea sounds, the rush of the Benguela, and that view over the loch on Skye - dolphins - diving terns.
Diving Otters
This week’s featured artwork is my latest otter painting, which is on display in the studio. I’ve also made prints available for this piece as my otters never hang around for long.
I’ve been told that there is a deep pool not far from the studio, where the River Wye meets the River Elan, and this is the favourite haunt of the local otters. So, much of my time will be spent there in the coming months!
You can view all the latest prints on my website via the link below. I’m adding new pieces all the time.
Until next week,
J
We were in Iceland this past July. Saw lots of nesting Arctic terns and fulmars. Also the occasional Arctic skua.
I really appreciate this close-up portrait of Arctic Terns. I have seen them along and off the Oregon coast, “Just passing through, Ma’am!” I looked up their cry, just to remind myself: https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/138235/play