“Place and mind may interpenetrate till
the nature of both is altered. I cannot tell what this movement is except by
recounting it.” (Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain).
Every year great shearwaters circle the
Atlantic like an ocean current. When the temperature on Tristan da Cunha — the
remotest permanently settled island in the world — dips in autumn, they head to
the Atlantic coast of South America, turn north, cross the doldrums and keep on
heading north until they reach the north-east tip of North America. As the
northern summer turns, they circle across, passing Britain on their way down
the eastern Atlantic, back to find spring on a wet speck of rock in
the south Atlantic. Stop. Breed. Repeat.
I was last amongst them in 2014. Not on
land but in a RIB — a boat that’s several feet too small in every direction to
be comfortable — floating for 30 hours, five miles out in the Atlantic. Several
thousand miles in front of me was the American coast: behind me the jagged
peaks of Madeira, the tips hiding in clouds of their own making. Around me,
great and Cory’s shearwaters sat on the sea, waiting. The birder term for it is
rafting — when they look like oversize ducks on the biggest of ponds. They took
off, unfurling their wings, slapping feet on sea, and transformed. Their wings
are long, thin and stiff. With them they catch the breeze like sails, and skim
across the tops of waves. A stray wave, something irregular could wash them
away, yet it never seems to happen.
 |
| Great (front left) and Cory's (front right) shearwaters |
The meaning of trip’s experiences are
still slowly unfurling, like a shearwater’s wings, over time.
***
Pterodroma petrels are birds of myth and mystery:
what is not known about them vastly outstrips what is. The English name for the
family is the “gadfly” petrels, which my dictionary says means “a person who
annoys”. Though flippantly truthful, I prefer Pterodroma: ancient Greek
for “winged runner”. Both capture the essence of the family, fleeting, elusive,
frustrating.
Fea’s petrels were discovered in 1899 by
Leonardo Fea. Not long afterwards, Zino’s petrel was first found — unknowingly
— by Ernest Schulz. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Paul and Frank Zino
rediscovered them breeding on the third highest of the Madeiran peaks, the Pico
do Arieiro, where their mournful wailing haunts the high peaks. They sing
slightly differently to the Fea’s which breed on the Desertas Islands and Cape
Verde*. Both species are rare: there are over a thousand individual Fea’s
petrels. There are somewhere between 100-200 Zino’s petrels depending on how
successful the breeding season is, and where the wild fires that strike Madeira
burn. In 2010 only one chick survived: thirty-eight others and four adults were
burnt alive.
I saw my first Fea’s distantly, briefly,
underwhelmingly. It was an encounter loaded with an excitement that the
sighting — fleeting, distant, disappearing in the gaps between waves — couldn’t
satisfy. Like meeting a childhood hero. The second, several hours later, was
better.
Seabirds harness the wind to fly. Shearwaters
sail elegantly, slowly. Pterodromas spiral up, hit their apex, dip a
wing and shoot seawards at a shallow angle, like following waves through the
air. We saw this Fea’s coming from far off, stitching sea to sky. It is a fast
flight. Deceptively so. In seconds it was beside us, arcing up, wings flexed
forward. Dove-grey back and a fainter black line, zigzagging down the wings.
Its tail is paler — the bird fading out. It’s head darker — black-eyed, black
blunt bill. It dipped its wing and vanished.
I have a video of that encounter: ten
seconds of meeting a mythical seabird. It still sends bolts of excitement
through my nervous system.
It wasn’t until the second afternoon at
sea that Catarina, behind the boat’s engines, spotted a Zino’s. She shouted:
all idle chat stopped. A boat full of binoculars all drawn to one bird. It is
essentially identical to a Fea’s. It swung up, reached its apex, and sheered
down alongside the boat. It took all I could remember and all I could see to
note the differences. The whiter underwing, the thin black bar running up it.
The smaller, lighter size, the bill not so brutishly big, the flight that feels
slower. It sheered behind the boat, between us and the high Picos of Madeira,
before flying away over the waves. We all watched it until it disappeared over
the edge. And as it disappeared the feeling was part relief — the trip a
success, the birds still in existence — and part awe that they exist at all.
Yet. As I look back on it now it all seems
tainted with metrics. It is not because of their essential similarity to the
Fea’s petrel — the two species have a very different essences — but because
rarity is a fact that conquers all. Fea’s may thrill but the experience of a
Zino’s is difficult to separate out from their sheer vulnerability of their
numbers.
***
The third day at sea. Both Pterodromas
encountered, we sailed to a different spot. This time in the shadow of the
Desertas Islands: two great lumps of abandoned rock that intervene into the
sea’s horizon. We sailed out there with a super pod of more than 100 Atlantic
spotted dolphins bow-riding, accompanying the boat down the coast of Madeira. A
flying fish leapt in front of the boat, wings shining blue-green, tail-slapping
the water as it went, as though it had evolved legs as well as wings and could
never decide which it would rather use.
 |
| Bulwer's petrel |
The day was hot and long. Birds were
scarce but for the Bulwer's petrels — bat-like in flight, impossibly slender,
and much smaller than they look in the book — that were regularly flying laps
around the boat. But it didn't need to be a productive day. It felt
valedictory: like we were content (smug) enough with what we had seen. Maybe it
was the heat but I realised then that what I'd miss most from this was a
three-quarter horizon of sea, rolling away until the edge of vision,
essentially to infinity. A horizon of freedom, no obstacles and nothing hemming
in. I felt then the urge coming over me that nothing would give me greater
pleasure than to dive headlong over it; to be a great shearwater, always
heading over endless empty horizons.
I resisted. If only because I can't swim.
***
We stayed out until sundown. Behind the
Desertas we were unaware that a fierce breeze had sprung up. We headed directly
into it.
Waves thump into the boat and the spray
breaks over us. Lips burn, eyes sting. The rolling crests of grey waves turn
peach in the light. There is another type of wave: one we don't crash over, but
one we pitch into and skid over, with a momentary feeling of helplessness. A
feeling of being suddenly at the mercy of the sea. The sun sets completely.
Night unfurls. The boat has a tiny light, enough to make out the edges but not
quite enough to see the next wave until it hits and I have to spit out a
mouthful of seawater. I begin to notice other lights. Either side. Trawlers and
small fisherman and buoys. The spray of a vicious wave. The lighthouse on the
edge of the island. A plane's headlights breaking through the night. A galaxy
of streetlights strung out from Funchal to Canical, along the populated coast.
The football stadium and the fish factories. The harbours and bars. The plane
landing at Funchal international airport. I take my hat off and lean back and a
voice whispers in my ear of the plough and other constellations. I see Madeira
reflected in the sky. An unfathomable sky of distant stars and the smudge of
Milky Way. I don't want explanations. A dolphin breaches as we enter the
harbour. A Cory's shearwater circles under streetlights, calling, louder than
the throb of distant parties. Spontaneous applause. Handshakes and smiles.
*A note
about taxonomy. The Fea’s petrels of Cape Verde are the original Pterodroma
feae. Those breeding on the Desertas Islands are thought by some to be a
third species, Pterodroma desertas. Desertas differs only from feae
in the measurements of its bill length and depth, tarsus, and, marginally, in
the length of their wings. If desertas is proven to be a separate
species, its population of 150 breeding pairs makes it eye-wateringly rare (and
yet twice as common as Zino’s).
