A sky full of Storm Swallows
‘Okay, I think we go now’ exclaims Jógvan as our late evening coffee is finished and a glance through the wooden-framed window reveals the slowly diminishing light levels of a northern summer’s night outside.
We slip on our shoes, don our rucksacks and begin the evening’s pilgrimage towards the looming buttress of Eggjaklettur – a long ridge of basalt rock that makes up the humpback figure of this small Faroese island.
The track leads us out of the picturesque coastal village of Nólsoy, with its colourful tapestry of houses and turf roofs, and onto a rugged and exposed land of sheep-grazed pasture, rocky outcrops and strewn boulders. The burbling cries of breeding Whimbrel echo across the open terrain, as these handsome wading birds flutter overhead in protest of our passage through their territory.
It is 1130pm. In late July, the light levels are still bright enough to see our way along the faint sheep track. It is a calm evening, and a bulbous cap of mist envelops the upper reaches of the impressive hill above us. We skirt along the base of the layered, basalt cliff, where a confusion of tumbled boulders lies waste as its base from millennia of weathering and glacial forces. This is the domain of the creatures we have come to see, and which have brought me northward for the summer’s research work.
A late evening chorus of birdlife fills the air: Puffins high above us in the cliffs announce the fall of night with long, drawn-out ‘oooooOOOOOOH-OOOOOOohhhhhhhh’ calls, echoing out from the cliffs which act as an amphitheatre about us; guttural croaking cries of Fulmars stutter out from their nesting ledges; a Faroese Snipe begins its evening display, letting forth creaking sounds reminiscent of a squeaking wheel in repetitive sequence; and the evocative, piercing calls of Oystercatchers – the Faroes’ national bird – drift across from along the coastline.
Jógvan eases his rucksack onto the ground and announces that we have arrived. It is close to midnight, yet the twilight around us would suggest otherwise. We unpack our gear and begin setting up a single, fine-meshed net strung between two aluminium poles. The net exudes a pungent odour of fishy oil as it unfolds, remnant from the previous session a few days earlier. We tighten the poles and the net hangs taught, standing some two metres high and nine metres in length. The stage is now set.
We sit nearby and wait.
Odd, hiccupping calls are now emanating from the boulder scree all around us – ‘like a fairy being sick’ as it’s sometimes described – and these cries are accompanied by long, purring sequences reminiscent of a creaking fishing rod slowly being wound in. And now their ghostly shapes begin to emerge: bat-like in form, following fast and erratic flight paths as they wind around the scree and commute between sea and shore. A gentle flutter of wings from the nearby net announces our first capture. Jógvan carefully lifts the bird out from the net and unpicks some mesh from its wings. Placid in the hand, the true beauty of this incredible and elusive seabird can finally be admired.
It is the Storm-petrel, or Drunnhviti in local Faroese (meaning ‘rump’ - ‘white’ in reference to a bright white patch at the base of their tail). One of the smallest seabirds in the World, this relative of the magnificent Albatrosses spends almost all its life at sea, returning to a scattering of islands across north Atlantic shores to breed. This particular far-flung island happens to play host to the greatest breeding colony known, estimated at some 300,000 breeding pairs.
The bird’s eyes glint in the twilight of dusk (now 12.30am), its tiny tube-nosed bill still moist from feeding at sea earlier in the evening; zooplankton, squid, crustaceans and isopods being its favoured prey. We carefully pluck a numbered metal ring from our box of research equipment and Jógvan deftly fits the new bling to its right leg. The bird now has an individually-unique code (9AV5789 to be precise), which will allow any subsequent capture to reveal important information on its origin, its age and its survival. Every individual bird has its own story to tell, and these rings help to reveal some remarkable pieces of these birds’ lives that otherwise would remain mystery.
No sooner has the ring been fitted than two more fluttering shapes appear in the net behind us. I hold our first bird to the sky on the palm of my hand (my favourite part of the procedure) and it lifts off into the night, floating off on silent wings and with the grace of an owl. Time to appreciate this first-comer is cut short by the steady arrival of birds filling our net. We extract four more, placing some in cotton bags in wait of ringing whilst we process the others; more hit the net, and then more. It’s going to be a busy night.
Two hours pass quickly; the overcast sky remaining a darkened blue-grey - a level of darkness I know only from those nights lit with a full moon back home in Wales. Yet this twilight is sufficient for these nocturnal creatures to return to the colony, like some ghostly fairies descending upon an enchanted land. A flurry of activity is packed into these brief northern nights: breeding birds are returning to their nest sites, swapping incubation duties with their partner as they take turns sitting on their single, white egg; immature birds seek out their own rocky hideouts where they may begin breeding in coming years; male birds sing away with purring calls to attract a mate to such an abode, with a hiccup-like pause in the song as you picture birds taking a breath.
My trousers are now a pungent odour of fish oil, with the occasional bird vomitting a fishy, oily residue in defence of the ringing procedure. A small price to pay to see these remarkable birds up close, although my tent will be akin to a seabird colony if this work continues. We’ve now passed 180 new birds, and have captured several already bearing rings from previous sessions – most from here in the colony on Nólsoy. The cloudy skies above are beginning to lighten already, as we pass 2.30am, and the Faroese Snipe begins its squeaky-wheel clucking call to welcome dawn for another day.
We catch our 200th bird for the night, and then the stream of these fluttering ‘Storm Swallows’ eases, a few stragglers tracing erratic flight paths across the skyline as they head out to sea. I gaze to the east after one bird’s white rump disappears from view: where will its next stop be? How far will its black, rounded wings take it before it stops to patter the sea surface for a meal? Will it be back tomorrow night, or return in a week after crossing half of the North Sea?
These are questions we hope to answer over the course of the coming summer, and in years to come. Numbered rings can tell us only so much: merely snippets of these birds’ lives, but our hope to deploy GPS tags on breeding birds here in the Faroes will provide some fascinating insights into the birds’ oceanic lives.
Jógvan eases the net down from the pole. Another night is over. We pack the odorous mist net back into its bag, strap the remaining gear onto our rucksacks and begin the hike back to the village. We walk largely in silence – my mind is mostly fixed on collapsing into my sleeping bag and drifting off to sleep. Jógvan may well be pondering more intellectual thoughts, or perhaps the coming week’s events: there’s hay to be harvested and sheep to be sheared. Spongy grassland underfoot gives way to rocky, volcanic gravel as we leave the hillside and arrive on a track leading to the harbour. I stumble to my tent and thank Jógvan for the night’s work. A Whimbrel bursts into burbling song nearby as I settle into my bed, and I smile at the unusual lives we researchers often lead. Not your average Saturday night’s activities.
