Seabirds Birds Britannia


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Britain is an island nation.

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The sea is in our history and in our blood.

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The British have a great affection for the sea, of course. A seafaring nation,

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we go to the seaside for our holidays.

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People are drawn to the sea just to look at it.

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For centuries, Britons have travelled the oceans, as fishermen, explorers and traders.

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This brought us into contact with sea birds,

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both on the high seas and around our coasts.

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Coastal communities established deep relationships with these birds, living off their meat,

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their eggs and a host of other vital commodities.

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Even in the middle of the 20th century, sea birds were still being exploited for food.

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There was a sense that this was something that was given to them

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in a bountiful providence, and it was there to harvest, and it would be wasteful not to harvest them.

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Sea birds slipped into our literature

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and our fashion.

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They transformed Victorian agriculture

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and created monumental family fortunes.

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But how much longer will they shape our culture?

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The story of our relationship with sea birds is an ancient and turbulent one,

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like our relationship with the sea itself.

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It's an untold chapter in the history of our rise and fall as a seafaring people.

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Of all our birds, sea birds are the most enigmatic, the most remote from our daily lives.

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There is something

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remarkable, wonderful and extraordinary about sea birds.

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I think it's to do with mystery.

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So birds that inhabit the sea

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acquire something of the...charisma of the sea.

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A lot of them make a noise that sounds like something the other side of the world that we know.

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Extremely lonely,

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extremely beautiful,

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with a kind of forlornness about it.

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BIRD CRIES

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Much of this wild magic comes from the way they live their lives.

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I think there's a powerful sense of the other about sea birds.

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For most of the year, they're out at sea, and then for a period from...

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April through till early July they're breeding on cliffs, sometimes extremely remote.

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Britain's 12,000 miles of coastline

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are one of the best environments for sea birds anywhere in the world.

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Because of the North Atlantic drift and the continental shelf

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and our rich seas, our sea birds are spectacular.

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This is really our sort of Serengeti.

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Some seven million sea birds,

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of two dozen different species, nest on our coasts.

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They do have these phenomenal sea bird cities on our towering sea cliffs.

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They're bustling with activity,

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marvellous smell comes wafting up the cliff,

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which bowls people over when they first come to the edge of the cliff.

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One can probably see ten to a hundred thousand birds

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at every moment of the day,

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and it's a kind of overwhelming abundance of life,

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and that's part of the British landscape.

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Today, these wonders are largely out of sight and out of mind.

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But it was the sheer abundance of our sea bird colonies that

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originally made them so important and irresistible to our ancestors.

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That story starts on the remotest islands in the British Isles.

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St Kilda.

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It's a place that looms out of nowhere for you.

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You've got all this empty ocean, and suddenly there it is, Atlantis.

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This cluster of islands and stacks lies off the Outer Hebrides,

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far out in the Atlantic Ocean.

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Every summer more than a million sea birds

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come ashore to these rocky outcrops to breed.

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St Kilda is a particular stronghold for our largest sea bird, the gannet.

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It could have been designed by an Ancient Egyptian.

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It looks like an Egyptian god.

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It's just the most magnificent, beautiful, elegant bird.

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And in the air it's a war machine.

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It has this incredible way of fishing,

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which is suddenly to dive vertically downwards,

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and plunge into the sea for herring or mackerel.

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And once one goes in, and if there is a shoal of fish,

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then they all come piling in.

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It was these sea birds that sustained a unique population,

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known as the "bird people of St Kilda".

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Their lifestyle was captured on film in the 1920s.

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The most remarkable hunter-gatherer community in the UK,

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until the middle of the 20th century, was the inhabitants of St Kilda.

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A small, Gaelic-speaking community that lived in crofts

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on the edge of this huge mountain on Hirta.

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Essentially, their entire lives were bound up in what they could harvest

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of wild birds from the cliffs and ledges

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around this incredible set of islands.

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St Kildans looked to sea birds

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to meet almost all their subsistence needs.

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They wore gannet necks and body parts as shoes, very short-lived shoes.

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Their medicine was derived from the oil found in the stomach of the young fulmars.

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They stored eggs in peat ash, which would last for months at a time.

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And the St Kildans had to find ways to preserve the eggs and meat,

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because the birds were only ashore for a few months each spring and summer.

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Islanders from Lewis were still using similar preserving techniques in the 1960s.

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They would take the corpses of these things

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and keep them in little stone bothies called cleats.

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And the wind would blow through and dry this meat to a type of biltong.

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And that would see them through the lean times, until they could

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start harvesting the birds again in the spring.

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The meat of the young gannet, known as the guga,

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was a staple part of their simple diet.

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I would describe guga as almost the food of the gods.

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There's something wonderful about it.

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The only way to properly cook it is to boil it.

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You know, mainlanders would probably deplore the taste of the food.

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It tastes like a piece of chamois leather dipped in oil,

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but I think it tastes like salt-mackerel-flavoured chicken.

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Although thousands of birds were killed each year,

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this had little or no effect on their populations,

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because the islanders took only what they needed to survive.

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None of the species which they harvested,

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as far as we know, ever went extinct.

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In a curious way, they were custodians.

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They had a deep impulse to preserve the goose that laid the golden egg,

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and...and they did.

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Ultimately the modern world encroached on St Kilda,

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undermining the hunter-gatherer tradition.

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The population declined due to disease and emigration.

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So in 1930 the surviving islanders decided to evacuate,

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abandoning St Kilda to the birds.

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It was only the remoteness of St Kilda

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that allowed the bird people's culture to survive for so long.

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Other coastal communities had given up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle centuries earlier,

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heralding a long, dark chapter in our dealings with sea birds.

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Those who went out to sea to make their living as fishermen and seafarers

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encountered sea birds in their true element, the open ocean.

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Here, far from home,

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one bird in particular made a deep and lasting impression on them.

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The albatross.

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I think when you're sailing,

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when one of these magnificent birds with a seven-foot wingspan,

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an albatross, suddenly appears,

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and it appears out of the sky,

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and it doesn't move its wings.

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I mean, it just tilts, glides,

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and it's exploiting the up currents from surface of the sea and so on.

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So just occasionally one little flap, and then it's off again.

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All those explorers who set off from Britain

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on sailing boats going around the world,

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in these vast areas where they saw nothing,

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suddenly this incredible bird appeared on their horizon

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and came up beside their boats and followed them through the storms.

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And they must have felt a real attachment, I think, to albatross

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and would have come home and told about this bird that tracked the oceans with them.

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This mysterious tendency for the albatross to track sailing vessels

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gave rise to the pivotal scene in a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

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a poem that has entrenched the albatross in our popular culture.

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The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner is certainly one of the most famous poems in the English language.

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Which is a very interesting thing to say for one reason immediately,

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which is that it's a very long poem.

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The poem describes a relationship of a seaman with an albatross.

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The Mariner's ship is blown off course in a huge storm,

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ending up in the icy wastes of Antarctica.

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Then, miraculously, an albatross appears.

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At length did cross an Albatross,

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Through the fog it came

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As it had been a Christian soul

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We hailed it in God's name.

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It's a symbol of whiteness,

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of conscience, of souls, of Christianity.

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And it's big, like an angel.

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It's more than a bird, it's a flying symbol.

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This enigmatic bird leads the ship back into warmer waters,

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saving the sailors from certain death.

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Then, inexplicably, the Mariner shoots the bird with his cross-bow.

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His shipmates are horrified.

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One of the common bits of folklore about all maritime sea-going communities

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was that the souls of lost mariners entered the bodies of sea birds

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such as petrels, albatross, shearwaters.

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And so killing these birds was in some sense taboo.

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Thus the Mariner brought bad luck upon his shipmates.

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The wind dropped and the ship was becalmed for days on end.

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Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink

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Water, water, every where

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Nor any drop to drink.

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It's about the needless nihilism of the Mariner himself,

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who slays the albatross and brings disaster on his boat and his crew,

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all of whom die except himself.

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And he is destined to travel throughout the rest of his life,

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repenting and telling the tale of his terrible destruction of this bird.

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The poem speaks to the casual destructiveness that would characterise

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our relationship with sea birds until the late 19th century.

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Coleridge's Mariner was a familiar figure during Britain's heyday as a maritime power.

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At its height, thousands of ships were travelling the trade routes of the North Atlantic.

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These mariners drove to extinction an extraordinary, flightless bird,

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the great auk, Britain's equivalent of the dodo.

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Alas, I've never seen a great auk,

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but I imagine it as a huge, northern hemisphere penguin

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with an upright posture.

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And the two most striking features are the white splash on the face

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and that very large daggered bill.

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It was the largest of the auk family.

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Puffins are auks, puffins, razorbills, guillemots.

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And it is really, was, a giant razorbill.

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The great auk bred across the North Atlantic in an ark of islands from Newfoundland

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through to Iceland and Greenland and further south to Orkney and Shetland.

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It was perhaps, at one stage,

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one of the commonest birds that has ever lived on the planet.

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Common it may have been, but the great auk had one major disadvantage over other sea birds.

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They didn't need to fly,

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and through the years their wings became small,

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so that made them very vulnerable to predation by people.

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This vulnerability became all too apparent

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when the trade routes opened across the North Atlantic, between Britain and her colonies in the New World.

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When the first whalers and fishermen went to the Davis Strait,

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between Greenland and Newfoundland,

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they were living on cod, because that's what they were catching all day.

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It must have been wonderful to be able to take a nice, big, fat, juicy bird like a great auk.

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Hungry mariners, based on the British colony of Newfoundland,

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sailed out to sea bird islands where the great auks bred alongside their smaller relatives, guillemots,

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which still survive today.

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Here they found huge numbers of great auks, there for the taking.

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It was perfectly possible to put a sail down, get your men ashore,

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get them to drive the birds onto the sail

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and then just tip them into the boat

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and have people in the boat to club them.

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Then you could salt them and that would keep you going for the rest of the time you were out there.

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However many they killed, there were masses of others there.

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Over time, the great auk became even more valuable as a commodity for its feathers,

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which were used to stuff pillows and bedding.

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The feather bed industry, in really quite a short space of time,

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caused such huge destruction amongst those populations

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with these birds just being rounded up,

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driven into stone enclosures and then just pulled out, clubbed,

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dumped into boiling water to get the feathers off quickly.

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And this was done on a huge, industrial scale.

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By the end of the 18th century, the great auk population

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was in a state of collapse on its main breeding grounds.

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As a result, great auks were very rarely seen

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at the edge of their range, in places like St Kilda.

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There's a horrifying account of three men in St Kilda,

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who went out to a small island just off St Kilda.

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They came round a corner and saw this huge bird.

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That was the last auk in Britain.

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And the St Kildans caught and captured it.

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They had never seen such a bird before, and they believed it to be a witch.

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And they decided, instead of eating it, to imprison it for a couple of days.

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On about the third day, lo and behold, a mighty storm arose.

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And the bird shrieked continuously.

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The men became convinced that the bird had supernatural powers.

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And that it had brought the storm and they would never get off the islet as long as the bird was alive.

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So they went out and bashed it, clubbed it to death.

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Such was the demise of Britain's last great auk,

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the only British bird to go extinct in historical times.

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And yet Victorian bird experts could not accept that this was really happening

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to a once abundant species.

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It is a measure of a kind of senseless abuse of the sea.

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It's the way in which we think the sea is limitless.

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And therefore we cannot believe that these resources are finite.

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We now know that the world's last great auk was killed in Iceland, in June 1844.

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But a decade later, two egg collectors still harboured the hope

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that a few individuals may have survived.

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A couple of British ornithologists,

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John Whalley and his friend, Alfred Newton,

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decided to make an expedition to Iceland to try to settle the question either way.

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The Iceland trip was fruitless, and the men returned home empty-handed.

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Later, Alfred Newton wrote an article on the great auk,

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which caught the eye of the well-known novelist, the Reverend Charles Kingsley.

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He actually read Newton's very poignant account of the destruction of these birds,

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and the hope expressed by Alfred Newton that there might still just be a few pairs alive.

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It was a vain hope, but it provided the inspiration

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for a memorable scene in Kingsley's most famous book, The Water-Babies.

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The child hero, Tom, encounters the last great auk,

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or as it was also known, the garefowl...

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And there he saw the last of the garefowl, standing upon the all alone stone, all alone.

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Perched on a rocky outcrop, the elderly bird recounts the story of her species' demise.

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"If you had only had wings", said Tom, "then you might have all flown away too."

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Kingsley was writing in the midst of an unprecedented population explosion.

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So to keep pace with demand for food, Britain's farmers needed to dramatically increase production.

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Remarkably,

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it was sea birds that would fuel this agricultural revolution.

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At this point,

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in the mid-19th century,

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there was a fairly severe shortage of fertilisers.

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We just weren't keeping enough cattle

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to fertilise the land sufficiently, just with dung.

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So you needed to try to find other sources.

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Whoever came up with a solution to the fertiliser shortage was going to make a fortune.

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That man was a merchant called William Gibbs.

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Gibbs sunk much of his wealth into the Tyntesfield estate, on the outskirts of Bristol,

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turning it into one of the grandest houses of the Victorian age.

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The source of Gibbs' fertile fortune was far less glamorous, according to a rhyme of the day:

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"Mr Gibbs made his tibbs, selling the turds of foreign birds."

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Tyntesfield was built on a foundation of guano - the droppings of millions of sea birds.

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Of all the stories of abuse of a natural resource,

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guano is probably the most extreme.

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The guano didn't come from British sea bird colonies,

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but from thousands of miles away, off the coast of Peru.

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The particular feature of Peru was that the Humboldt current,

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coming up from the south, was a very cold current,

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with upwellings of cold water.

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And this supported a huge plankton population.

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That then supported a huge fish population, in particular anchovies.

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And the fish population then supported this absolutely gigantic bird population.

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And millions of birds just on the one island at any particular time.

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The main guano-producing birds were the Guanay cormorant and the brown pelican.

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Over centuries, their droppings had accumulated to extraordinary depths,

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forming mineral-rich mountains.

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Peruvian guano was widely recognised at the time as certainly the best fertiliser anywhere.

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Because it was a natural product, and it had all the main plant foods,

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nitrogen, potash, and phosphate.

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Gibbs had negotiated a deal with the Peruvian government, giving him a monopoly on the guano trade.

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But he still faced a problem - how to get the stuff back to Britain.

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In many respects, it was an extraordinary thing to do.

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You were taking guano, literally from the other side of the world,

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very dangerous and difficult voyage,

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around some of the stormiest seas in the world, Cape Horn, of course, and then right across the Atlantic.

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Once the guano arrived in Britain, Gibbs sold it in vast quantities

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to farmers desperate for an efficient fertiliser.

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Guano gave a massive boost to the nation's agricultural output.

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And it made William Gibbs the wealthiest commoner in England.

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This was in sharp contrast to the men actually mining the guano in Peru.

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The workforce was organised by Peruvian landowners,

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and relied on slaves, convicts and, by the 1850s,

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foreign indentured labour.

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They took Chinese coolies from the Far East,

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building them into contracts they knew nothing about.

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They got to these desolate equatorial islands,

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and the conditions were completely appalling.

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There are few photographs of this period, but an impression of the environment the coolies worked in

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can be gained from early 20th-century footage of Peruvian labourers.

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And the guano, once it was loosened up from the solid rock that it formed on the island itself,

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became a noxious powder that blistered your lungs and your nose.

0:25:450:25:49

The normal amount the Chinese labourer had to remove was about five tonnes,

0:25:530:25:57

but sometimes eight tonnes a day, and he had to do everything from the original pickaxe,

0:25:570:26:03

separating the manure from stones,

0:26:030:26:05

carrying the stuff to the edge of the cliffs, and then great canvas chutes into the boats below.

0:26:050:26:12

Given the lack of regard for the human labourers, it's not surprising that there was no concern at all

0:26:200:26:26

for the birds producing the guano.

0:26:260:26:27

Their nest sites were destroyed by the mining, and they were subject to continual disturbance.

0:26:270:26:33

The birds disappear from the islands.

0:26:330:26:36

The whole question of conservation, of holding on to the bird population

0:26:360:26:40

didn't really come until the 20th Century.

0:26:400:26:42

They were typical of the boom-bust pattern of maritime harvest.

0:26:440:26:47

It was one of the most grotesque dashes for growth,

0:26:470:26:51

regardless of the consequences, that there has ever been.

0:26:510:26:54

The wanton destruction to man and bird in South America went largely unnoticed back in Britain.

0:26:570:27:03

But by the 1860s, the welfare of sea birds at home could not be so easily ignored.

0:27:090:27:16

For the first time, voices were about to be raised

0:27:160:27:19

against the unbridled exploitation of British sea birds.

0:27:190:27:23

The majority of our sea bird colonies are on remote rocky islands,

0:27:270:27:32

like the Bass Rock, off the east coast of Scotland...

0:27:320:27:36

..and the Farne Islands, off Northumberland.

0:27:390:27:42

The isolation of these places offers the birds some protection

0:27:440:27:48

from terrestrial predators, both man and beast.

0:27:480:27:53

But there are a few sea bird colonies on the British mainland,

0:27:530:27:56

such as the cliffs of Bempton and Flamborough Head, in Yorkshire.

0:27:560:28:01

These cliffs are a favourite haunt of the kittiwake.

0:28:030:28:07

The kittiwake is a very delicate gull.

0:28:090:28:12

It's also a gull which tells you its name -

0:28:120:28:15

when you go to the colonies, there it is, shrieking away, "Kittiwake! Kittiwake!"

0:28:150:28:21

It has these wings that are black ended, as though they've been dipped in black ink.

0:28:240:28:30

The thing that makes kittiwakes different from just about every gull

0:28:300:28:36

is that it breeds on narrow cliff ledges, so it's relatively safe from terrestrial predators.

0:28:360:28:42

So with a black-headed gull,

0:28:420:28:45

if a predator like a fox or hedgehog comes into the colony,

0:28:450:28:48

all the birds fly up and mob that predator and try and drive it away.

0:28:480:28:52

Kittiwakes, on their narrow cliff ledge,

0:28:520:28:56

never do that mobbing because there is no value in it.

0:28:560:28:58

This tendency to sit tight made kittiwakes very vulnerable to human hunters.

0:28:580:29:05

At Bempton and Flamborough Head, local people had always harvested the sea birds for food.

0:29:090:29:14

But by the Victorian period, this had escalated into an intensive, commercial use of birds,

0:29:140:29:21

their eggs, and, in the case of kittiwakes, their plumage.

0:29:210:29:25

They would catch the bird, presumably with nets,

0:29:290:29:32

and they would cut their wings off, the bits that they wanted,

0:29:320:29:36

and throw the bird, wingless, back into the water.

0:29:360:29:38

The wings were used by hat makers in Paris and London and New York.

0:29:380:29:44

The people that were harvesting the sea birds at Flamborough at that time

0:29:440:29:48

were doing it for profit. There was a sense of manifest destiny,

0:29:480:29:53

that this was something that was given to them in bountiful providence,

0:29:530:29:57

and that it was there to harvest,

0:29:570:29:59

it would be wasteful not to harvest them.

0:29:590:30:02

Harvesting the kittiwakes, though cruel,

0:30:020:30:06

was at least commercially justifiable.

0:30:060:30:08

But now they became targets for a very different element of British society.

0:30:080:30:13

HORN BLOWS

0:30:130:30:15

The burgeoning middle classes, who aspired to the leisure activities of the aristocracy.

0:30:150:30:21

Once the railways made access to these coastal locations easier,

0:30:210:30:26

hunting parties came to these sea bird colonies to shoot these birds,

0:30:260:30:33

which were so easy to shoot, because they sat so tightly on the nest.

0:30:330:30:37

Boarding so-called pleasure boats in Scarborough, groups of men would sail towards the colonies of birds.

0:30:370:30:45

And then they would be taken underneath the cliffs,

0:30:450:30:49

and would blaze away at the parent birds, sitting on eggs...

0:30:490:30:54

GUNFIRE

0:30:540:30:57

..killing as many as they could, because the size of the bag

0:30:590:31:03

was presumably the measure of the success of the sport.

0:31:030:31:05

And it was having a devastating effect on breeding numbers.

0:31:050:31:08

But the activities of these shooting parties didn't go unnoticed.

0:31:080:31:15

And it was the sight of large numbers of dead, dying birds,

0:31:150:31:19

and chicks whose parents had been killed left in the nest,

0:31:190:31:23

that started to upset people.

0:31:230:31:25

One person who took exception to this slaughter was the ornithologist Alfred Newton - the same man

0:31:250:31:33

who 13 years earlier had searched unsuccessfully for the last great auk.

0:31:330:31:39

By the late 1860s,

0:31:400:31:41

Alfred Newton was Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge.

0:31:410:31:46

He'd realised what had happened to the great auk a generation earlier,

0:31:460:31:52

he saw that there was a danger of it happening again.

0:31:520:31:55

To publicise his concerns,

0:31:550:31:58

in 1868 he made a calculatedly emotional speech

0:31:580:32:01

to the British Society for the Advancement of Science.

0:32:010:32:06

At the present time, I believe there is no class of animal so cruelly persecuted

0:32:060:32:12

as the sea-fowl - that a stop should be put to this wanton and atrocious destruction of a species

0:32:120:32:18

I think none of my audience will deny.

0:32:180:32:21

Just as Newton had hoped, his sensational speech was picked up by the press and widely reported.

0:32:220:32:30

And for the first time, the issue touched a nerve with the British public.

0:32:300:32:35

There was a sense developing that this slaughter

0:32:350:32:38

on the cliffs was somehow to Yorkshire's shame.

0:32:380:32:41

And a combination of local landowners and MPs

0:32:410:32:46

and members of the clergy got together

0:32:460:32:48

and in 1868, formed an association for the protection of sea birds.

0:32:480:32:53

As a result of their work, a bill for the preservation of sea birds

0:32:530:32:58

was presented to Parliament the following year.

0:32:580:33:01

And they came up with a fascinating strategy, and it is based on utilitarianism,

0:33:010:33:07

in a way, this idea that the birds were useful.

0:33:070:33:11

They did two things - when the fishermen of Bridlington were coming home on foggy days,

0:33:110:33:15

and they couldn't see the cliffs, the cries of the sea birds alerted them to the presence

0:33:150:33:20

of the cliffs. The birds were, in other words, the Flamborough pilots.

0:33:200:33:24

And the second argument was that the sea birds flew inland

0:33:270:33:31

and harvested pests on agricultural land.

0:33:310:33:35

And those two arguments carried the day.

0:33:350:33:38

The Sea Birds Preservation Act came into law in June 1869 - the very first act of Parliament

0:33:420:33:50

protecting British birds.

0:33:500:33:52

This marked a turning point in the history of our relationship with sea birds.

0:33:520:33:57

By the late Victorian era, a new sensibility towards birds and other wildlife was beginning to emerge.

0:33:570:34:03

We had finally begun to appreciate birds

0:34:030:34:06

not just for how we could exploit them, but for their beauty, and for our delight in them.

0:34:060:34:11

And yet where sea birds were concerned, we still knew so little about their real lives.

0:34:160:34:24

One of the wonderful things about sea birds

0:34:240:34:26

is that they are essentially very mysterious.

0:34:260:34:29

Aspects of their behaviour are very, very little understood.

0:34:290:34:32

Although much was already known about the birds of our countryside,

0:34:320:34:37

it was only in the 20th century that science would

0:34:370:34:41

begin to unravel some of the mysteries of sea birds.

0:34:410:34:44

One man who pioneered their study was the Welsh naturalist Ronald Lockley.

0:34:440:34:50

As a young man, he hadn't set out to be a sea bird scientist.

0:34:500:34:55

In fact he was rather a dreamer, with an entrepreneurial streak.

0:34:550:34:59

In 1926, Lockley took a lease on an uninhabited island called Skokholm,

0:35:050:35:10

off the southwest coast of Wales.

0:35:100:35:13

When Lockley turned up on Skokholm,

0:35:140:35:18

his initial plan was to make a lot of money.

0:35:180:35:20

And he wanted to do this by

0:35:200:35:22

breeding giant chinchilla rabbits,

0:35:220:35:25

which are a sort of giant, fluffy version of a wild rabbit.

0:35:250:35:29

Unfortunately, there was an indigenous rabbit population eating the grass

0:35:290:35:34

required by his chinchillas.

0:35:340:35:37

He tried to exterminate all the rabbits on Skokholm and failed.

0:35:370:35:40

He tried all sorts of ways. In fact, he tried cyanide gas,

0:35:400:35:43

it is all quite a grim story.

0:35:430:35:46

His experiment failed completely,

0:35:460:35:49

because the market for rabbit skins for fashion completely crashed during the Depression.

0:35:490:35:54

But Lockley's interest in sea birds was directly born out of this failure.

0:35:540:35:59

While trying to trap the indigenous rabbits in their warrens,

0:35:590:36:02

he kept catching a strange, burrow-nesting bird instead - the Manx shearwater.

0:36:020:36:09

The Manx shearwater is like a tiny albatross.

0:36:090:36:13

It's a true sea bird, spending most of its life on the sea.

0:36:130:36:18

It's a bird that needs to come ashore only to breed,

0:36:190:36:23

and it lays a single white egg in a burrow, like a rabbit hole, that it digs itself.

0:36:230:36:29

And it comes ashore just at night.

0:36:290:36:31

Under the cover of darkness, these ungainly creatures feed their young,

0:36:310:36:38

calling to each other all the while.

0:36:380:36:41

When he first heard this strange cacophony, it took Lockley by surprise.

0:36:420:36:46

BIRDS CALL

0:36:460:36:49

Until this time, no-one had attempted to study the behaviour of Manx shearwaters,

0:36:540:37:00

or indeed any other sea birds, in detail.

0:37:000:37:03

Lockley became enthralled with these mysterious creatures, and devised

0:37:030:37:07

imaginative experiments to study the most intriguing aspects of their behaviour.

0:37:070:37:13

One of the things he was fascinated by was the navigational

0:37:130:37:17

capacity of the shearwaters. And in one of these experiments, he took a bird from Skokholm to Devon,

0:37:170:37:24

and released it, and within a few hours, the bird

0:37:240:37:27

was back in its nest burrow.

0:37:270:37:29

And then he took this further, and they took a bird to Venice...

0:37:290:37:34

And it was about a 900-kilometre journey overland.

0:37:390:37:42

But of course a sea bird such as a Manx shearwater would almost certainly

0:37:420:37:46

have taken a sea route, which was a hugely circuitous route

0:37:460:37:51

through the Straits of Gibraltar, and then up through the Atlantic,

0:37:510:37:55

and I think it took 17 days, and a journey of something in the region of 4,000 kilometres.

0:37:550:38:00

What it reveals is the puniness of human travel efforts.

0:38:030:38:10

You know, this is a bird that has to find its way

0:38:100:38:13

across the open ocean, by itself, feeding and travelling for days.

0:38:130:38:18

I think that's what captivates us in part about sea birds in general,

0:38:180:38:24

is the way in which they treat the open ocean, this featureless landscape, as home.

0:38:240:38:30

Ronald Lockley's legacy goes beyond his discoveries about shearwaters.

0:38:320:38:38

On Skokholm he also created the UK's first bird observatory, in 1933.

0:38:380:38:44

But he had to leave his island paradise after the outbreak of the Second World War,

0:38:450:38:50

when it was commandeered by the armed forces.

0:38:500:38:54

The sea blockade and food shortages of wartime

0:38:570:39:01

meant that despite protection laws, sea birds were back on the menu

0:39:010:39:04

for the first time in a generation.

0:39:040:39:07

Shags were eaten in the war, and cormorants were eaten in the war.

0:39:090:39:13

In fact, most birds would have been eaten in the wartime.

0:39:130:39:16

They shot shags on Fair Isle, and they sent them to London for food.

0:39:160:39:22

But instead of shags, they called them black ducks.

0:39:220:39:25

So, by the end of the war, shags were very scarce, and as

0:39:250:39:30

soon as they saw a boat, they were in flight.

0:39:300:39:32

But this use of sea birds for meat was short-lived.

0:39:340:39:38

In the post-war period, our contact with ocean-going sea birds would diminish.

0:39:380:39:43

Gradually, Britain's maritime power waned,

0:39:430:39:47

and fewer people made their living at sea. The end of the war

0:39:470:39:52

also brought a scientist to Britain who would demystify our commonest

0:39:520:39:56

sea birds - Niko Tinbergen.

0:39:560:39:59

Tinbergen is one of the great pioneers of animal behaviour studies in the field.

0:39:590:40:05

He saw that the kinds of experiments that had been going on, which involved

0:40:050:40:09

looking at animals in cages, and in captivity, was pretty pointless, because he thought that animals

0:40:090:40:15

in captivity would not display the kind of behaviours that they would in the wild. So, what he did was

0:40:150:40:20

take animal behaviour studies into the field, and it was very ground-breaking.

0:40:200:40:24

For this kind of work, it is not enough to pay occasional visits to the birds.

0:40:240:40:29

We must live with our animals literally day and night.

0:40:290:40:33

Tinbergen grew up in the Netherlands,

0:40:330:40:36

where, as a teenager, he became interested in nature study.

0:40:360:40:41

But his career as a zoologist was interrupted by Nazi occupation of his homeland,

0:40:410:40:46

and he was imprisoned in a concentration camp for his political views.

0:40:460:40:52

This experience was to shape his later research.

0:40:520:40:55

Having been kept in prison left its mark on him, because he was so passionate

0:40:550:41:02

about getting out onto the cliff tops, getting away from

0:41:020:41:06

his Oxford laboratory

0:41:060:41:09

then getting out into the field.

0:41:090:41:12

Leaving the dark memories of the Netherlands behind, Tinbergen moved to England after the war.

0:41:120:41:18

And he came to Oxford and set up an animal behaviour study group here.

0:41:180:41:23

I was lucky to be one of the first members of that group.

0:41:230:41:25

Gulls became the major focus of his study group at Oxford.

0:41:250:41:31

One of Niko's principles in studying birds was to always go for the most common birds.

0:41:310:41:38

The more common and populous a bird is, the easier it is to study.

0:41:380:41:44

And he loved gulls because they were common.

0:41:440:41:47

GULLS CALL

0:41:470:41:50

Tinbergen's research on gulls was popularised through a bestselling book,

0:41:500:41:56

The Herring Gull's World, and a successful TV film made with broadcaster Hugh Falkus.

0:41:560:42:01

The beginning of it is great.

0:42:010:42:03

He starts off shaking his fist at the camera and scowling to show aggression,

0:42:030:42:07

which everyone understands.

0:42:070:42:09

When I do this,

0:42:090:42:10

you know at once what I mean - the angry face,

0:42:100:42:15

the clenched fist convey a mood of aggression.

0:42:150:42:18

It's a simple form of communication.

0:42:180:42:22

It's about a gull colony,

0:42:220:42:24

and how gull colonies are always just at the edge of chaos

0:42:240:42:26

and aggression.

0:42:260:42:28

There's murder, there are chicks being eaten, it's just a complete disaster zone.

0:42:280:42:32

This is a great bird city.

0:42:320:42:35

This is a city of thieves and murderers.

0:42:350:42:38

There are all potential killers and eaters of their neighbours' chicks.

0:42:380:42:42

But social life in bird city is made possible

0:42:440:42:46

by a highly complex system of communication -

0:42:460:42:48

a language comprising posture, movement, colour and sound.

0:42:480:42:54

He showed that there were very,

0:42:540:42:57

very precise patterns of behaviour and signals,

0:42:570:43:00

which gulls knew and understood, which basically kept the

0:43:000:43:03

colony from tipping into total chaos.

0:43:030:43:05

And I think if you look at the way in which this is presented in the programme,

0:43:050:43:09

it's very clear that Tinbergen himself was very worried

0:43:090:43:12

about the way that humans were going, and he thought that in the future, overpopulation, crowding,

0:43:120:43:17

it was all a bit like a gull colony, it was going to be a disaster for us.

0:43:170:43:22

So he saw this as being a kind of lesson for humanity - how to negotiate these primal instincts.

0:43:220:43:27

By the late '60s, the way we thought about the natural world was changing.

0:43:280:43:34

Tinbergen's work reflected the ecological anxieties of the era,

0:43:340:43:38

as well as revealing the habits of sea birds to the viewing public.

0:43:380:43:45

And yet, as we became a nation of land lovers,

0:43:450:43:48

sea birds became even more remote from our daily lives.

0:43:480:43:53

They were increasingly out of sight and out of mind.

0:43:530:43:57

Overnight, one event would change all this.

0:43:590:44:03

If there was one moment in our history when sea birds truly invaded the national consciousness,

0:44:080:44:14

it was the Torrey Canyon disaster of March 1967, off the end of Land's End.

0:44:140:44:21

'Saturday March 18th, and the Torrey Canyon, a giant tanker on charter to British Petroleum,

0:44:210:44:28

'goes aground on the treacherous Seven Stone Rocks between the Isles of Scilly and Land's End.

0:44:280:44:34

'On board, 120,000 tonnes of crude oil.'

0:44:340:44:37

The Torrey Canyon was the 13th largest ship in the world

0:44:400:44:44

and she was rushing to get the tide at Milford Haven,

0:44:440:44:47

and Captain Rugiati decided - against all established thinking,

0:44:470:44:51

which was to go round to the west of the Isles of Scilly and swing round into the Bristol Channel -

0:44:510:44:57

to cut the gap between the Scillies and Land's End

0:44:570:45:01

and, overnight, he managed to run aground this enormous ship on the Seven Stones reef,

0:45:010:45:07

The next morning, the people of Britain woke up

0:45:070:45:11

to the first-ever massive environmental catastrophe on their coastline.

0:45:110:45:17

'At once, oil began to spew from her.

0:45:170:45:20

'In no time, there was an ominous slick of oil eight miles long.'

0:45:200:45:23

The Torrey Canyon was the first environmental disaster to unfold in the television era.

0:45:230:45:31

Perhaps the most powerful images of the Torrey Canyon disaster were not what we might have expected.

0:45:320:45:39

It wasn't the broken ship lying on the Seven Stones reef.

0:45:390:45:43

The most powerful images were sea birds covered in oil that were being washed up on Cornish beaches.

0:45:430:45:50

These were pitiful images that said an awful lot to us

0:45:500:45:54

about our mastery and domination over the natural world.

0:45:540:45:59

They certainly were emotive and people reacted to them.

0:45:590:46:04

The sea bird centres in Cornwall were inundated with box-load after box-load

0:46:040:46:12

of, sadly, doomed-to-die sea birds.

0:46:120:46:14

Chief Inspector Gardner, you've got a lot of birds...

0:46:160:46:20

One man on the frontline was Tony Soper, a young broadcaster and naturalist.

0:46:200:46:27

We had no idea how much damage this was likely to cause,

0:46:270:46:30

but in West Cornwall, they had a big problem with guillemots especially.

0:46:300:46:36

Any number of outfits were trying to clean these things up.

0:46:360:46:40

People were setting up rescue stations right, left and centre -

0:46:400:46:44

especially hairdressing salons

0:46:440:46:47

because of course they had the little showers for doing people's hair

0:46:470:46:51

and they were putting detergent on these birds,

0:46:510:46:55

which got the oil off very effectively but left them without any grease and they couldn't fly.

0:46:550:47:00

So an awful lot of birds were put back in the sea totally unable to manage.

0:47:000:47:06

A disaster on this scale required decisive action from the government

0:47:060:47:11

and the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, waded in.

0:47:110:47:14

He of course was viewing this not only as our national leader,

0:47:140:47:18

but also somebody who was intimately involved with the Isles of Scilly.

0:47:180:47:22

He'd holidayed there since the 1950s, it was his own personal paradise.

0:47:220:47:28

In an effort to spare the beaches and the sea bird colonies from the oil,

0:47:280:47:34

Wilson's government made the controversial decision to bomb the stricken vessel.

0:47:340:47:38

Hundreds of bombs, and even napalm, were used to ignite fuel in the hull

0:47:410:47:45

in the hope that it would all burn off.

0:47:450:47:48

Harold Wilson went to the top of St Martin's,

0:47:510:47:55

one of the islands on the Scillies, and stood there with the people of the Isles of Scilly

0:47:550:47:59

and watched the aircraft come roaring in and dropping incendiary bombs on this vast supertanker.

0:47:590:48:06

But even after the ship was sunk,

0:48:080:48:11

large quantities of oil made its way to the shore

0:48:110:48:14

and a clean-up effort was required.

0:48:140:48:16

It was BP at the time and they poured masses of detergent on the beaches,

0:48:180:48:24

right, left and centre, all the way along the beaches on this oil,

0:48:240:48:28

which, in the long run, was a mistake.

0:48:280:48:31

In the aftermath, the nation reflected on how ill-prepared it had been for such a disaster.

0:48:310:48:39

There was a powerful realisation in government that there was no overarching administrative body

0:48:390:48:45

to deal with an environmental disaster like this in Britain.

0:48:450:48:48

The ensuing Royal Commission on Pollution eventually led to important changes in government.

0:48:500:48:56

And in a way, the Torrey Canyon disaster of 1967

0:48:580:49:02

led to the first-ever Department of the Environment within government,

0:49:020:49:07

anywhere in the world, here in Britain.

0:49:070:49:11

For a few weeks in 1967, environmental disaster

0:49:110:49:15

propelled sea birds into our national consciousness.

0:49:150:49:19

Soon after, scientists launched the first sea bird census to take stock of Britain's breeding colonies.

0:49:190:49:26

But sea birds might easily have slipped from public view once again

0:49:360:49:40

were it not for a dramatic change in the behaviour of one group of birds.

0:49:400:49:45

For better or worse, this change would bring more of us

0:49:450:49:48

into direct contact with sea birds than ever before.

0:49:480:49:53

The poor old herring gull.

0:49:530:49:55

There's no herring gull that's seen a herring in the last 50 years!

0:49:550:50:00

They live off other things now.

0:50:000:50:02

Most people encounter sea birds today

0:50:070:50:09

because of some shock-horror about

0:50:090:50:11

gulls eating the Flake from your ice cream in a city centre.

0:50:110:50:15

They're not exotic, they're not the other any more,

0:50:150:50:18

and they're a problem when they get out of their own sphere.

0:50:180:50:23

Keep to the ocean but don't invade my other territory.

0:50:230:50:27

Two species have moved inland - the lesser black-backed gull

0:50:270:50:32

and its paler-winged relative, the herring gull.

0:50:320:50:35

They're obvious birds, they're big birds,

0:50:350:50:38

and they're getting about their business in an obvious way.

0:50:380:50:44

We see courtship, we see them nesting, laying eggs,

0:50:440:50:48

feeding their young, and during that process they become quite aggressive.

0:50:480:50:52

And that's a shock to us because in our little lives in the cities, we don't expect that sort of behaviour.

0:50:520:50:59

That doesn't happen here, it happens on TV or out in the country.

0:50:590:51:03

As a young sea bird researcher, Tim Birkhead had first-hand experience of a gull attack.

0:51:030:51:11

This gull came down,

0:51:110:51:13

making this terrible wheezing noise,

0:51:130:51:16

put both feet out,

0:51:160:51:17

hit me on the back of the head,

0:51:170:51:19

and vomited and defecated simultaneously,

0:51:190:51:23

-so I got vomit down the front of my head and gull

-BLEEP

-down the back of my neck.

0:51:230:51:29

It left me feeling sick for the whole day.

0:51:290:51:32

Not the defecation bit, just the whack on the back of the head was so unexpected.

0:51:320:51:38

Nesting seagulls will attack any bird or mammal

0:51:420:51:46

that invades their territory because they're protecting their young.

0:51:460:51:50

Our contemporary dislike for gulls in our towns and cities is in stark contrast

0:51:500:51:57

to the way we used to feel about them when they lived at the coast.

0:51:570:52:01

If you think of the opening signature music to Desert Island Discs,

0:52:110:52:16

the wailing of gulls is the soundtrack of the sea.

0:52:160:52:19

The child with their bucket and spade, the sound of seagulls in the background -

0:52:190:52:24

it's part of a repertoire of recreational holiday life in Britain.

0:52:240:52:28

That wonderful laughing call of the herring gull,

0:52:280:52:33

throwing back its head and making that extraordinary noise.

0:52:330:52:37

That's the image most people have of gulls.

0:52:370:52:41

Or at least, it used to be.

0:52:470:52:49

Ironically, our efforts to solve a major pollution problem inadvertently created the conditions

0:52:490:52:56

that would encourage gulls to settle inland.

0:52:560:53:00

The Great Smog of 1952 killed many thousands of people.

0:53:000:53:06

The government's response was the 1956 Clean Air Act,

0:53:060:53:10

which prevented the burning of household waste.

0:53:100:53:14

So in the following decades, ever-increasing quantities of rubbish

0:53:160:53:22

were hauled off to landfill sites, providing a bonanza for the gulls.

0:53:220:53:26

We've got massive landfill sites on the edges of our cities,

0:53:260:53:31

which is a great food source for them and they've taken advantage of that. They're victims of our excess.

0:53:310:53:38

Gulls are the most adaptable of all sea birds

0:53:380:53:42

with extraordinarily catholic tastes, but their scavenging behaviour doesn't endear them to us.

0:53:420:53:48

The gulls are exploiting as a food supply human waste,

0:53:500:53:55

to which we ourselves feel some feelings of disgust.

0:53:550:53:58

They became in a sense a kind of metaphor for human waste

0:53:580:54:02

and I think that's part of why they attracted so much hostility.

0:54:020:54:06

Gull populations in some British cities have grown to the point where they are now considered vermin.

0:54:060:54:13

And yet we only see part of the picture.

0:54:130:54:17

We have a sense of gulls being ubiquitous and commonplace but in fact,

0:54:170:54:24

one of the most frequent nesters on people's roofs has declined substantially.

0:54:240:54:29

Up to 50% of all herring gulls have gone in the last 50 years.

0:54:290:54:33

This is because the original, coastal colonies of herring gulls have collapsed due to lack of food.

0:54:350:54:42

Fishermen no longer lay out their catches on the harbour side, nor gut fish at sea.

0:54:420:54:49

Over-fishing has also reduced the gulls' food supply.

0:54:490:54:53

Herring gulls have survived until now because they are truly exceptional.

0:54:530:54:57

They've adapted from being sea birds into urban birds.

0:54:570:55:02

But other species of sea birds may not be so lucky.

0:55:020:55:06

We are not managing the marine resources in Britain well, or Europe,

0:55:060:55:12

and the sea birds show us that.

0:55:120:55:14

Sadly for us, our best-loved sea bird is one of the species now in decline.

0:55:140:55:22

Even though most of us have never seen a puffin, we feel we know this comical little bird.

0:55:260:55:32

The model for countless children's toys, and the inspiration

0:55:320:55:37

for the world's most celebrated series of children's books.

0:55:370:55:40

It's like a toy animal, really.

0:55:400:55:43

You just look at it and you simply cannot believe that this is the real thing. It cannot be a real bird.

0:55:430:55:49

How can it exist like that?

0:55:490:55:51

The puffin's predicament provides a salutary warning for the future of our relationship with sea birds.

0:55:520:55:59

The iconic view of a puffin is this bird

0:55:590:56:03

with this incredibly bright bill coming ashore,

0:56:030:56:07

running up to its burrow with all these little fish, head to tail, arranged through its bill.

0:56:070:56:14

Puffins feed these nutritious little fish, sand eels, to their growing chicks.

0:56:160:56:22

In recent years, many chicks have starved to death because of a shortage of sand eels.

0:56:220:56:29

This is partly due to over-fishing and also down to a more serious long-term problem - climate change.

0:56:290:56:36

Sea temperatures are rising and it means that species that support

0:56:380:56:42

our sea birds - sand eels - are heading north.

0:56:420:56:45

They want that cooler water and what will follow them? Our sea birds.

0:56:450:56:49

In the last ten years, climate change has already contributed

0:56:490:56:53

to a significant fall in the total number of sea birds breeding in Britain.

0:56:530:57:00

And if we lost our sea birds, we would not be just losing

0:57:000:57:05

colonies of birds, we'd be losing a whole part of our heritage, a whole part of what makes Britain Britain.

0:57:050:57:12

Arguably, we have lost much of this heritage already.

0:57:140:57:19

As our dependence on sea birds gradually diminished,

0:57:190:57:23

we developed a deeper aesthetic appreciation of them.

0:57:230:57:26

But at the same time, their cultural relevance to us began to recede.

0:57:260:57:33

We may have protected sea birds and learned more about them,

0:57:330:57:37

but now our mismanagement of the seas threatens their very future.

0:57:370:57:42

So today, they float in our peripheral vision,

0:57:430:57:47

as ghostly reminders of the seafaring people we once were.

0:57:470:57:52

Next time, in the final episode of Birds Britannia, we explore the extraordinary impact

0:58:030:58:08

the birds of the British countryside

0:58:080:58:10

have had on our nation's history and culture.

0:58:100:58:14

From nightingales in poetry, to grouse on the Glorious 12th...

0:58:170:58:22

..these birds have not only shaped our rural landscape,

0:58:250:58:28

but also defined what the countryside really means to us.

0:58:280:58:33

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

0:58:550:58:57

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