The Seabird's Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers

by Adam Nicolson

Overview

Enter ancient lands of wind and waves where the planet’s greatest flyers battle for survival.

As the only creatures at home on land, at sea, and in the air, seabirds have evolved to thrive in the most demanding environment on Earth.

In The Seabird’s Cry, Adam Nicolson travels ocean paths, fusing traditional knowledge with astonishing facts science has recently learned about these creatures: the way their bodies actually work, their dazzling navigational skills, their ability to smell their way to fish or home and to understand the discipline of the winds upon which they depend.

This book is a paean to the beauty of life on the wing, but, even as we are coming to understand the seabirds, a global tragedy is unfolding. Their numbers are in freefall, dropping by nearly 70 percent in the last sixty years, a billion fewer now than in 1950. Extinction stalks the ocean, and there is a danger that the hundred-million-year-old cries of a seabird colony, rolling around in the bays and headlands of high latitudes, will this century become but a memory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250181596
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	02/05/2019
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Adam Nicolson is the author of many books on history, landscape, and great literature. He is the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, the W. H. Heinemann Award, and the Ondaatje Prize. His books include The Life Between the Tides and Why Homer Matters. He lives on a farm in Sussex.

Table of Contents

Maps

Introduction

1. Fulmar

2. Puffin

3. Kittiwake

4. Gull

5. Guillemot

6. Cormorant and Shag

7. Shearwater

8. Gannet

9. Great Auk and its Cousin Razorbill

10. Albatross

11. The Seabird's Cry

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

Threading together science and poetry with a sense of wonder, Adam Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry reminds us that these birds are always there at the edge of our existence: at once familiar and utterly mysterious . . . The elegance of the writing, and the very human curiosity and compassion for the seabirds themselves, is enthralling . . . A sustained and powerful cry for a greater understanding and empathy of their unique environments.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Wondrous and lyrical, this book swoops and dives into the art and science of natural history with as much grace as the seabirds it examines.”—The Boston Globe (a Best Book of 2018)

“Beautifully written, haunting in imagery and filled with marvels, the book is also a farewell salute to a once teeming dimension of the natural world, now increasingly devastated by human environmental malfeasance.”—Star Tribune (Critics' Choice, Top 10 of 2018)

“Breathtaking . . . Nicolson’s mind is well stocked and acrobatic, and capable of vivid connections . . . He has an intuitive understanding of the birds that feels almost uncanny . . . His gift is to present this research in a way that is not just comprehensible but compelling, even moving, and to intercut it with dazzling description . . . His swithering between the forensic and the poetic creates a sense of wonder.” —The Spectator

“With scientific rigor and a poet’s sense of wonder, Nicolson uncovers the lives of puffins and kittiwakes, fulmars and gulls, all the while investigating the impact of climate change on these seabirds.” —The American Scholar

“Bounteous . . . An Aladdin’s cave of enlightenment.” —London Evening Standard

“Captivating . . . A celebration of these strange and marvelous beings and the forbidding places they call home.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“A beautiful exploration . . . Gorgeous . . . Expansive, generous and beautifully composed.” —The Guardian

“Intimate and engrossing . . . A buoyant celebration of seabirds that serves as an important reminder of nature’s fragility.” —Kirkus Reviews

“An extraordinary hymn to threatened seabirds that breaks down the barriers separating science and poetry . . . Evocative . . . Luminous . . . Nicolson spools outwards from the Shiants, building in the reader’s mind a richly interconnected world of birds on their cliffs and crags, or gliding over endless oceans, all of it described in the most lustrous, lucid prose. I filled the back of the book with quotes I copied down, little sparks of recognition and delight.” —Financial Times

“A moving exploration . . . Demonstrates that wonder about the natural world can be deepened by increasing one’s knowledge of it and that emotional wisdom can be reinforced by the acquisition of practical information. He blends insightful ethological observations with elements of the mythical and peppers his delivery of practical, premodern knowledge with poetic imagery . . . whimsical . . . appeals to both the mind and the heart . . . Nicolson combines a huge amount of scientific information with deeply emotional content and the net effect is moving and quietly profound.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The Seabird’s Cry . . . is full of wonder and guilt, life and death; it is a threnody sounding from cliff to cliff . . . dizzyingly, dazzlingly good.” —The Herald Scotland

“This isn’t just about ‘seabirds.’ It’s about the living poetry of winged beings who share our planet as though inhabiting another world.” —Carl Safina, author of Song for the Blue Ocean and Beyond Words.

“This marvellous book inhabits with graceful ease both the mythic and the scientific, and remains alert to the vulnerability of these birds as well as to their wonder. It is a work that takes wing in the mind.” —Robert Macfarlane, award-winning author of Landmarks, The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind

“The Seabird’s Cry is a magnificent book and takes its place all at once among the greatest of modern bird books; page after page of extraordinary power, amazing mastery of the science, scintillating and muscled retelling of countless maps and graphs, Nicolson has got the truth better even than those who dug it up; an imaginative reach and original inhabiting of what he has seen, the birds themselves; so enamoured of life it makes you cry; so big with the bigness it finds; and quite wonderful; no one else is doing this or has; it is utterly brilliant.” —Tim Dee, author of The Running Sky and Poetry for Birds

From the Publisher

I was going to the United Kingdom and expecting to do a couple of serious hikes that would deliver me by night to a town for food and a bed, and each morning let me loose into the wilds, wilds with nicely worn paths. My guide and companion was The National Trust Book of Long Walks, a volume that has both the specific gravity and value of gold, for its author, Adam Nicolson, gave me new eyes with which to see the countryside (and a new back and legs from lugging the guide's tonnage).

Nicolson is an old-school geographer/naturalist, one who wants to know the big picture of a place: where it is relative to other places and its relation to them, sure, but also its flora, fauna, and folktales; its architecture and street plans; its political, cultural, and social history; its music, literature, and art; the evolution of its economy and class system; why its air and light are distinctive; why it grows rutabagas instead of turnips. He has brought this Panavision not only to places -- the Somerset Levels, Windsor Castle, Britain's untamed coastlines, his family's storied gardens at Sissinghurst -- but also people and events: the Battle of Trafalgar, the English gentry, the earls of Pembroke, the birth of Arcadianism, the making of the King James Bible. In The Seabird's Cry, he brings that rangy curiosity to a dozen water-loving birds, providing the lenses with which to see them closely, though not so much that we pretend to know all their secrets. Each bird retains a dark side to its moon.

When he was a boy, in 1971, his father had some extra coin and bought a group of islands, called the Shiants, in the channel known as the Minch, running between the Isle of Lewis and far mainland Scotland. The Shiants are a gathering of small Hebridean islands and sea stacks, just what the doctor ordered for colonies of puffins, gannets, and other seabirds. It is not overmuch to say that the Shiants directed Nicolson's life: his love of birds and the wild ocean, a fascination with the elements and with the old, elemental way of life in that part of the world. He let his wonderment blossom, not just to the seabirds on his little patch but to others that would take him throughout the world's oceans: fulmars, kittiwakes, gulls and guillemots, cormorants and shags, shearwaters, gannets, albatross, razorbills -- not to mention the extinct great auk.

Tales -- stories, anecdotes, yarns -- are an important part of this book, for this is a communing with these creatures as much as a marveling at how they live. He brings the outdoors to inside your head. As a youngster, on his first visit to the Shiants: "I had never seen this scale of things before: tall, cliffed, remote, fierce, beautiful, harsh and difficult but, for all that, dazzlingly and almost overwhelmingly thick with the swirl of existence, lichened, the rocks glowing saffron orange on that summer morning, the air and the sea around us filled with 300,000 birds, a pumping, raucous polymorphous multiversity in with everything was alive and nothing refined." The Seabird's Cry -- "an exploration of the ways in which seabirds exert their hold on the human imagination" -- seems to have been inevitable.

He devotes a chapter to each of the birds above, some delicate as china and some ruffians, all bewitching in some fashion -- from the, let's face it, adorable puffins to the real bullies on the block: the gannets, the chapter on which reads like something dreamed up by a feverish Edgar Allan Poe -- and all brought close to the reader without losing its wildness.

"This is the first lesson of the seabirds . . . the revelation of the actual, the undressed and naked presence of hidden principle -- in this case the profound rivalry between parent and child [here he is referring to "a gull Lear, a gull Pol Pot"] -- which the Greeks could allow to surface only in myth and which in our culture is scarcely allowed a presence at all." The seabird life is rough-and-tumble, with siblings shoving younger brothers and sisters out of the nest, gulls reaching across to munch on a neighbor's babies. "The whole population of Nazca boobies were destined to suffer cruelty and abuse as nestlings until the end of time."

But look over here, to this "army of town criers, every puffin dressed in a near-identical herald's tabard, bright with maquillage and eyeliner, all saying Here I am, look at me . . . On landing, each puffin bows and humbles itself, wings up, head down: no threat, no aggression." This little puffin has surfaced from a dive from 50 to 220 feet, between 600 and 1,500 times a day, to feed little puffins back at the nest. Then there are the guillemots -- "from Gull Island east of Witless Bay in Newfoundland . . . and Funk Island out in the Atlantic" -- that dive to 600 feet for their supper, staying underwater for four and a half minutes. (Ha! said the great auk. I could dive 2,000 feet and go breathless for twenty minutes. Alas.) Or the sooty shearwater that flies 40,000 round-trip miles each year in migration, or the extraordinary sense of smell the group of seabirds known as the tubenoses use for navigation (forget the stars; just give me that whiff of phytoplankton).

There is a beautiful image of puffins flying into a wind "almost at the same speed the wind is blowing them back, and they hang in front of you, 10 feet away, busy, looking resolutely forward and then sideways to see what you are." So it is a stab to read that "over the past sixty years, the world population of seabirds has dropped by over two-thirds . . . The graph trends to zero by about 2060." Why? Overfishing; caught in fishing gear; introducing rats ("albatross chicks on Gough Island in the South Atlantic are being eaten by giant mice"), cats, and dogs to breeding places; oil, plastic, and other toxins; human development of nesting sites; climate change; acidification. We have met the enemy and it is the usual cast of characters.

Still, seabirds are adaptable and resourceful, and humans could help by simply being bit more careful: protecting breeding places and winter feeding grounds, instituting tighter controls on long-line fishing vessels, and making efforts to avert the human impact of climate change and acidification. Why? Because seabirds are the rarest of creatures, the only animals at home in the sea, on the sea, in the air, and on land -- perfectly adapted to flux and change. Given the ecological turmoil to come, we could do worse than emulate such mastery.

Peter Lewis is the director of the American Geographical Society in New York City. A selection of his work can be found at writesformoney.com.

Reviewer: Peter Lewis

The Barnes & Noble Review

Sounding appropriately David Attenborough-esque, Dugald Bruce-Lockhart narrates this in-depth look at the lives of 10 species of seabirds. Part natural history and part history of how humans have interacted with and been captivated by puffins, gannets, albatrosses, and more, Nicolson’s lyrical book is well served by Bruce-Lockhart’s steady reading. In fact, it’s easy to imagine that he is the author relating stories of his own travels and interactions with the birds and their researchers. There’s plenty to both fascinate and repel here, from violence among seabirds and between birds and humans, to the Victorian preoccupation with the extinct great auk. One missed opportunity: Audio would have been the ideal medium to actually hear examples of the cries and calls of the birds that are described in the text. J.M.D. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile

Sounding appropriately David Attenborough-esque, Dugald Bruce-Lockhart narrates this in-depth look at the lives of 10 species of seabirds. Part natural history and part history of how humans have interacted with and been captivated by puffins, gannets, albatrosses, and more, Nicolson’s lyrical book is well served by Bruce-Lockhart’s steady reading. In fact, it’s easy to imagine that he is the author relating stories of his own travels and interactions with the birds and their researchers. There’s plenty to both fascinate and repel here, from violence among seabirds and between birds and humans, to the Victorian preoccupation with the extinct great auk. One missed opportunity: Audio would have been the ideal medium to actually hear examples of the cries and calls of the birds that are described in the text. J.M.D. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile

2017-11-26
At home on sea, land, and in air, seabirds demonstrate grace, power, and amazing ingenuity.Naturalist, essayist, and historian Nicolson (Why Homer Matters, 2014, etc.) offers intimate, engrossing portraits of 10 seabirds, based on abundant scientific research as well as firsthand observation in the birds' natural habitats: the Shiants islands in the Outer Hebrides, Orkney, the Faeroes, Iceland, Norway, the coasts of Maine and Ireland, the Falklands, South Georgia, the Canaries, and the Azores. Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and Ondaatje Prize, among other accolades, the author conveys with grace and precision the birds' "life-habits and body-shapes, their various forms of adaptation, their ways of conquest and triumph." Seabirds are ancient: fossil evidence dates some nesting sites at 44,000 years old. "The great cave paintings of the paleolithic are not as old" as a snow petrel's fossilized stomach oil; penguins "were doing what they do now well before humankind was in Europe or the Americas." Their survival strategies are astonishing. To feed their chicks, for example, puffins fly hundreds of miles to capture high-energy oily fish, each diving between 600 and 1,150 times daily to provide 8 to 10 feeds. A herring gull, noticing that humans were tossing bread to ducks in a pond, grabbed a piece, broke the bread into small pieces, and caught the goldfish that came up to nibble on the crumbs. Gulls, Nicolson observes, "are opportunistic omnivores," but this one seemed uncommonly clever, although not as clever as crows, ravens, and parrots. Nurturing chicks does not always result in benevolence. Nicolson reminds readers of the "rawness" of animals, such as the "extraordinarily aggressive" gannet the Nazca booby, which lays two eggs a few weeks apart. If both hatch, the elder chick pushes its sibling out of the nest to its death by starvation or dehydration. Despite their resilience and adaptability, seabirds are vulnerable to climate change and pollution, such as rubbish and plastics, which shearwaters, fulmars, petrels, and albatrosses often mistake for food.A buoyant celebration of seabirds that serves as an important reminder of nature's fragility.

Kirkus Reviews