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Britain is an island nation. | 0:00:05 | 0:00:08 | |
The sea is in our history and in our blood. | 0:00:08 | 0:00:12 | |
The British have a great affection for the sea, of course. A seafaring nation, | 0:00:12 | 0:00:17 | |
we go to the seaside for our holidays. | 0:00:17 | 0:00:19 | |
People are drawn to the sea just to look at it. | 0:00:19 | 0:00:23 | |
For centuries, Britons have travelled the oceans, as fishermen, explorers and traders. | 0:00:23 | 0:00:29 | |
This brought us into contact with sea birds, | 0:00:31 | 0:00:35 | |
both on the high seas and around our coasts. | 0:00:35 | 0:00:40 | |
Coastal communities established deep relationships with these birds, living off their meat, | 0:00:42 | 0:00:47 | |
their eggs and a host of other vital commodities. | 0:00:47 | 0:00:51 | |
Even in the middle of the 20th century, sea birds were still being exploited for food. | 0:00:53 | 0:00:58 | |
There was a sense that this was something that was given to them | 0:00:58 | 0:01:02 | |
in a bountiful providence, and it was there to harvest, and it would be wasteful not to harvest them. | 0:01:02 | 0:01:08 | |
Sea birds slipped into our literature | 0:01:08 | 0:01:12 | |
and our fashion. | 0:01:12 | 0:01:14 | |
They transformed Victorian agriculture | 0:01:14 | 0:01:18 | |
and created monumental family fortunes. | 0:01:18 | 0:01:21 | |
But how much longer will they shape our culture? | 0:01:21 | 0:01:25 | |
The story of our relationship with sea birds is an ancient and turbulent one, | 0:01:26 | 0:01:32 | |
like our relationship with the sea itself. | 0:01:32 | 0:01:35 | |
It's an untold chapter in the history of our rise and fall as a seafaring people. | 0:01:35 | 0:01:42 | |
Of all our birds, sea birds are the most enigmatic, the most remote from our daily lives. | 0:01:53 | 0:02:01 | |
There is something | 0:02:01 | 0:02:04 | |
remarkable, wonderful and extraordinary about sea birds. | 0:02:04 | 0:02:07 | |
I think it's to do with mystery. | 0:02:07 | 0:02:10 | |
So birds that inhabit the sea | 0:02:13 | 0:02:15 | |
acquire something of the...charisma of the sea. | 0:02:15 | 0:02:19 | |
A lot of them make a noise that sounds like something the other side of the world that we know. | 0:02:22 | 0:02:28 | |
Extremely lonely, | 0:02:28 | 0:02:30 | |
extremely beautiful, | 0:02:30 | 0:02:33 | |
with a kind of forlornness about it. | 0:02:33 | 0:02:36 | |
BIRD CRIES | 0:02:36 | 0:02:38 | |
Much of this wild magic comes from the way they live their lives. | 0:02:39 | 0:02:44 | |
I think there's a powerful sense of the other about sea birds. | 0:02:45 | 0:02:49 | |
For most of the year, they're out at sea, and then for a period from... | 0:02:49 | 0:02:55 | |
April through till early July they're breeding on cliffs, sometimes extremely remote. | 0:02:55 | 0:03:01 | |
Britain's 12,000 miles of coastline | 0:03:11 | 0:03:13 | |
are one of the best environments for sea birds anywhere in the world. | 0:03:13 | 0:03:18 | |
Because of the North Atlantic drift and the continental shelf | 0:03:18 | 0:03:22 | |
and our rich seas, our sea birds are spectacular. | 0:03:22 | 0:03:27 | |
This is really our sort of Serengeti. | 0:03:27 | 0:03:30 | |
Some seven million sea birds, | 0:03:37 | 0:03:39 | |
of two dozen different species, nest on our coasts. | 0:03:39 | 0:03:43 | |
They do have these phenomenal sea bird cities on our towering sea cliffs. | 0:03:55 | 0:04:01 | |
They're bustling with activity, | 0:04:01 | 0:04:04 | |
marvellous smell comes wafting up the cliff, | 0:04:04 | 0:04:07 | |
which bowls people over when they first come to the edge of the cliff. | 0:04:07 | 0:04:12 | |
One can probably see ten to a hundred thousand birds | 0:04:14 | 0:04:19 | |
at every moment of the day, | 0:04:19 | 0:04:22 | |
and it's a kind of overwhelming abundance of life, | 0:04:22 | 0:04:26 | |
and that's part of the British landscape. | 0:04:26 | 0:04:29 | |
Today, these wonders are largely out of sight and out of mind. | 0:04:40 | 0:04:44 | |
But it was the sheer abundance of our sea bird colonies that | 0:04:44 | 0:04:48 | |
originally made them so important and irresistible to our ancestors. | 0:04:48 | 0:04:52 | |
That story starts on the remotest islands in the British Isles. | 0:04:56 | 0:05:00 | |
St Kilda. | 0:05:02 | 0:05:03 | |
It's a place that looms out of nowhere for you. | 0:05:05 | 0:05:08 | |
You've got all this empty ocean, and suddenly there it is, Atlantis. | 0:05:08 | 0:05:14 | |
This cluster of islands and stacks lies off the Outer Hebrides, | 0:05:14 | 0:05:18 | |
far out in the Atlantic Ocean. | 0:05:18 | 0:05:20 | |
Every summer more than a million sea birds | 0:05:20 | 0:05:23 | |
come ashore to these rocky outcrops to breed. | 0:05:23 | 0:05:26 | |
St Kilda is a particular stronghold for our largest sea bird, the gannet. | 0:05:26 | 0:05:32 | |
It could have been designed by an Ancient Egyptian. | 0:05:42 | 0:05:45 | |
It looks like an Egyptian god. | 0:05:45 | 0:05:46 | |
It's just the most magnificent, beautiful, elegant bird. | 0:05:46 | 0:05:52 | |
And in the air it's a war machine. | 0:05:52 | 0:05:56 | |
It has this incredible way of fishing, | 0:05:57 | 0:06:00 | |
which is suddenly to dive vertically downwards, | 0:06:00 | 0:06:04 | |
and plunge into the sea for herring or mackerel. | 0:06:04 | 0:06:07 | |
And once one goes in, and if there is a shoal of fish, | 0:06:09 | 0:06:12 | |
then they all come piling in. | 0:06:12 | 0:06:15 | |
It was these sea birds that sustained a unique population, | 0:06:20 | 0:06:24 | |
known as the "bird people of St Kilda". | 0:06:24 | 0:06:26 | |
Their lifestyle was captured on film in the 1920s. | 0:06:29 | 0:06:34 | |
The most remarkable hunter-gatherer community in the UK, | 0:06:34 | 0:06:37 | |
until the middle of the 20th century, was the inhabitants of St Kilda. | 0:06:37 | 0:06:42 | |
A small, Gaelic-speaking community that lived in crofts | 0:06:42 | 0:06:47 | |
on the edge of this huge mountain on Hirta. | 0:06:47 | 0:06:52 | |
Essentially, their entire lives were bound up in what they could harvest | 0:06:53 | 0:07:00 | |
of wild birds from the cliffs and ledges | 0:07:00 | 0:07:04 | |
around this incredible set of islands. | 0:07:04 | 0:07:07 | |
St Kildans looked to sea birds | 0:07:07 | 0:07:10 | |
to meet almost all their subsistence needs. | 0:07:10 | 0:07:13 | |
They wore gannet necks and body parts as shoes, very short-lived shoes. | 0:07:13 | 0:07:20 | |
Their medicine was derived from the oil found in the stomach of the young fulmars. | 0:07:20 | 0:07:26 | |
They stored eggs in peat ash, which would last for months at a time. | 0:07:26 | 0:07:32 | |
And the St Kildans had to find ways to preserve the eggs and meat, | 0:07:35 | 0:07:39 | |
because the birds were only ashore for a few months each spring and summer. | 0:07:39 | 0:07:44 | |
Islanders from Lewis were still using similar preserving techniques in the 1960s. | 0:07:44 | 0:07:51 | |
They would take the corpses of these things | 0:07:51 | 0:07:54 | |
and keep them in little stone bothies called cleats. | 0:07:54 | 0:07:58 | |
And the wind would blow through and dry this meat to a type of biltong. | 0:07:58 | 0:08:04 | |
And that would see them through the lean times, until they could | 0:08:04 | 0:08:07 | |
start harvesting the birds again in the spring. | 0:08:07 | 0:08:10 | |
The meat of the young gannet, known as the guga, | 0:08:11 | 0:08:14 | |
was a staple part of their simple diet. | 0:08:14 | 0:08:17 | |
I would describe guga as almost the food of the gods. | 0:08:18 | 0:08:22 | |
There's something wonderful about it. | 0:08:22 | 0:08:25 | |
The only way to properly cook it is to boil it. | 0:08:25 | 0:08:29 | |
You know, mainlanders would probably deplore the taste of the food. | 0:08:29 | 0:08:33 | |
It tastes like a piece of chamois leather dipped in oil, | 0:08:33 | 0:08:37 | |
but I think it tastes like salt-mackerel-flavoured chicken. | 0:08:37 | 0:08:44 | |
Although thousands of birds were killed each year, | 0:08:44 | 0:08:47 | |
this had little or no effect on their populations, | 0:08:47 | 0:08:51 | |
because the islanders took only what they needed to survive. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:55 | |
None of the species which they harvested, | 0:08:55 | 0:08:58 | |
as far as we know, ever went extinct. | 0:08:58 | 0:09:01 | |
In a curious way, they were custodians. | 0:09:01 | 0:09:04 | |
They had a deep impulse to preserve the goose that laid the golden egg, | 0:09:04 | 0:09:10 | |
and...and they did. | 0:09:10 | 0:09:12 | |
Ultimately the modern world encroached on St Kilda, | 0:09:17 | 0:09:20 | |
undermining the hunter-gatherer tradition. | 0:09:20 | 0:09:23 | |
The population declined due to disease and emigration. | 0:09:23 | 0:09:28 | |
So in 1930 the surviving islanders decided to evacuate, | 0:09:28 | 0:09:33 | |
abandoning St Kilda to the birds. | 0:09:33 | 0:09:36 | |
It was only the remoteness of St Kilda | 0:09:48 | 0:09:51 | |
that allowed the bird people's culture to survive for so long. | 0:09:51 | 0:09:55 | |
Other coastal communities had given up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle centuries earlier, | 0:09:56 | 0:10:02 | |
heralding a long, dark chapter in our dealings with sea birds. | 0:10:02 | 0:10:06 | |
Those who went out to sea to make their living as fishermen and seafarers | 0:10:08 | 0:10:12 | |
encountered sea birds in their true element, the open ocean. | 0:10:12 | 0:10:17 | |
Here, far from home, | 0:10:18 | 0:10:20 | |
one bird in particular made a deep and lasting impression on them. | 0:10:20 | 0:10:26 | |
The albatross. | 0:10:26 | 0:10:27 | |
I think when you're sailing, | 0:10:32 | 0:10:34 | |
when one of these magnificent birds with a seven-foot wingspan, | 0:10:34 | 0:10:38 | |
an albatross, suddenly appears, | 0:10:38 | 0:10:40 | |
and it appears out of the sky, | 0:10:40 | 0:10:43 | |
and it doesn't move its wings. | 0:10:43 | 0:10:45 | |
I mean, it just tilts, glides, | 0:10:45 | 0:10:50 | |
and it's exploiting the up currents from surface of the sea and so on. | 0:10:50 | 0:10:54 | |
So just occasionally one little flap, and then it's off again. | 0:10:54 | 0:10:58 | |
All those explorers who set off from Britain | 0:11:00 | 0:11:03 | |
on sailing boats going around the world, | 0:11:03 | 0:11:06 | |
in these vast areas where they saw nothing, | 0:11:06 | 0:11:09 | |
suddenly this incredible bird appeared on their horizon | 0:11:09 | 0:11:14 | |
and came up beside their boats and followed them through the storms. | 0:11:14 | 0:11:18 | |
And they must have felt a real attachment, I think, to albatross | 0:11:18 | 0:11:23 | |
and would have come home and told about this bird that tracked the oceans with them. | 0:11:23 | 0:11:28 | |
This mysterious tendency for the albatross to track sailing vessels | 0:11:30 | 0:11:35 | |
gave rise to the pivotal scene in a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, | 0:11:35 | 0:11:39 | |
a poem that has entrenched the albatross in our popular culture. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:44 | |
The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner is certainly one of the most famous poems in the English language. | 0:11:46 | 0:11:50 | |
Which is a very interesting thing to say for one reason immediately, | 0:11:50 | 0:11:54 | |
which is that it's a very long poem. | 0:11:54 | 0:11:57 | |
The poem describes a relationship of a seaman with an albatross. | 0:11:57 | 0:12:01 | |
The Mariner's ship is blown off course in a huge storm, | 0:12:03 | 0:12:07 | |
ending up in the icy wastes of Antarctica. | 0:12:07 | 0:12:10 | |
Then, miraculously, an albatross appears. | 0:12:10 | 0:12:14 | |
At length did cross an Albatross, | 0:12:15 | 0:12:18 | |
Through the fog it came | 0:12:18 | 0:12:20 | |
As it had been a Christian soul | 0:12:20 | 0:12:23 | |
We hailed it in God's name. | 0:12:23 | 0:12:26 | |
It's a symbol of whiteness, | 0:12:27 | 0:12:29 | |
of conscience, of souls, of Christianity. | 0:12:29 | 0:12:32 | |
And it's big, like an angel. | 0:12:32 | 0:12:34 | |
It's more than a bird, it's a flying symbol. | 0:12:34 | 0:12:37 | |
This enigmatic bird leads the ship back into warmer waters, | 0:12:40 | 0:12:44 | |
saving the sailors from certain death. | 0:12:44 | 0:12:48 | |
Then, inexplicably, the Mariner shoots the bird with his cross-bow. | 0:12:48 | 0:12:53 | |
His shipmates are horrified. | 0:12:53 | 0:12:56 | |
One of the common bits of folklore about all maritime sea-going communities | 0:12:57 | 0:13:03 | |
was that the souls of lost mariners entered the bodies of sea birds | 0:13:03 | 0:13:10 | |
such as petrels, albatross, shearwaters. | 0:13:10 | 0:13:13 | |
And so killing these birds was in some sense taboo. | 0:13:13 | 0:13:17 | |
Thus the Mariner brought bad luck upon his shipmates. | 0:13:17 | 0:13:21 | |
The wind dropped and the ship was becalmed for days on end. | 0:13:21 | 0:13:25 | |
Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink | 0:13:25 | 0:13:31 | |
Water, water, every where | 0:13:31 | 0:13:33 | |
Nor any drop to drink. | 0:13:33 | 0:13:36 | |
It's about the needless nihilism of the Mariner himself, | 0:13:43 | 0:13:49 | |
who slays the albatross and brings disaster on his boat and his crew, | 0:13:49 | 0:13:54 | |
all of whom die except himself. | 0:13:54 | 0:13:56 | |
And he is destined to travel throughout the rest of his life, | 0:13:56 | 0:14:01 | |
repenting and telling the tale of his terrible destruction of this bird. | 0:14:01 | 0:14:06 | |
The poem speaks to the casual destructiveness that would characterise | 0:14:13 | 0:14:17 | |
our relationship with sea birds until the late 19th century. | 0:14:17 | 0:14:21 | |
Coleridge's Mariner was a familiar figure during Britain's heyday as a maritime power. | 0:14:24 | 0:14:30 | |
At its height, thousands of ships were travelling the trade routes of the North Atlantic. | 0:14:30 | 0:14:35 | |
These mariners drove to extinction an extraordinary, flightless bird, | 0:14:35 | 0:14:41 | |
the great auk, Britain's equivalent of the dodo. | 0:14:41 | 0:14:46 | |
Alas, I've never seen a great auk, | 0:14:49 | 0:14:52 | |
but I imagine it as a huge, northern hemisphere penguin | 0:14:52 | 0:14:59 | |
with an upright posture. | 0:14:59 | 0:15:01 | |
And the two most striking features are the white splash on the face | 0:15:01 | 0:15:07 | |
and that very large daggered bill. | 0:15:07 | 0:15:10 | |
It was the largest of the auk family. | 0:15:10 | 0:15:14 | |
Puffins are auks, puffins, razorbills, guillemots. | 0:15:14 | 0:15:17 | |
And it is really, was, a giant razorbill. | 0:15:17 | 0:15:20 | |
The great auk bred across the North Atlantic in an ark of islands from Newfoundland | 0:15:21 | 0:15:26 | |
through to Iceland and Greenland and further south to Orkney and Shetland. | 0:15:26 | 0:15:30 | |
It was perhaps, at one stage, | 0:15:30 | 0:15:33 | |
one of the commonest birds that has ever lived on the planet. | 0:15:33 | 0:15:37 | |
Common it may have been, but the great auk had one major disadvantage over other sea birds. | 0:15:37 | 0:15:44 | |
They didn't need to fly, | 0:15:44 | 0:15:45 | |
and through the years their wings became small, | 0:15:45 | 0:15:50 | |
so that made them very vulnerable to predation by people. | 0:15:50 | 0:15:55 | |
This vulnerability became all too apparent | 0:15:55 | 0:15:59 | |
when the trade routes opened across the North Atlantic, between Britain and her colonies in the New World. | 0:15:59 | 0:16:06 | |
When the first whalers and fishermen went to the Davis Strait, | 0:16:06 | 0:16:11 | |
between Greenland and Newfoundland, | 0:16:11 | 0:16:13 | |
they were living on cod, because that's what they were catching all day. | 0:16:13 | 0:16:17 | |
It must have been wonderful to be able to take a nice, big, fat, juicy bird like a great auk. | 0:16:17 | 0:16:22 | |
Hungry mariners, based on the British colony of Newfoundland, | 0:16:22 | 0:16:26 | |
sailed out to sea bird islands where the great auks bred alongside their smaller relatives, guillemots, | 0:16:26 | 0:16:34 | |
which still survive today. | 0:16:34 | 0:16:36 | |
Here they found huge numbers of great auks, there for the taking. | 0:16:36 | 0:16:40 | |
It was perfectly possible to put a sail down, get your men ashore, | 0:16:40 | 0:16:46 | |
get them to drive the birds onto the sail | 0:16:46 | 0:16:49 | |
and then just tip them into the boat | 0:16:49 | 0:16:52 | |
and have people in the boat to club them. | 0:16:52 | 0:16:54 | |
Then you could salt them and that would keep you going for the rest of the time you were out there. | 0:16:54 | 0:16:59 | |
However many they killed, there were masses of others there. | 0:16:59 | 0:17:04 | |
Over time, the great auk became even more valuable as a commodity for its feathers, | 0:17:04 | 0:17:12 | |
which were used to stuff pillows and bedding. | 0:17:12 | 0:17:14 | |
The feather bed industry, in really quite a short space of time, | 0:17:14 | 0:17:20 | |
caused such huge destruction amongst those populations | 0:17:20 | 0:17:25 | |
with these birds just being rounded up, | 0:17:25 | 0:17:29 | |
driven into stone enclosures and then just pulled out, clubbed, | 0:17:29 | 0:17:32 | |
dumped into boiling water to get the feathers off quickly. | 0:17:32 | 0:17:36 | |
And this was done on a huge, industrial scale. | 0:17:36 | 0:17:41 | |
By the end of the 18th century, the great auk population | 0:17:41 | 0:17:44 | |
was in a state of collapse on its main breeding grounds. | 0:17:44 | 0:17:47 | |
As a result, great auks were very rarely seen | 0:17:47 | 0:17:51 | |
at the edge of their range, in places like St Kilda. | 0:17:51 | 0:17:55 | |
There's a horrifying account of three men in St Kilda, | 0:17:58 | 0:18:04 | |
who went out to a small island just off St Kilda. | 0:18:04 | 0:18:08 | |
They came round a corner and saw this huge bird. | 0:18:08 | 0:18:11 | |
That was the last auk in Britain. | 0:18:11 | 0:18:13 | |
And the St Kildans caught and captured it. | 0:18:16 | 0:18:19 | |
They had never seen such a bird before, and they believed it to be a witch. | 0:18:19 | 0:18:26 | |
And they decided, instead of eating it, to imprison it for a couple of days. | 0:18:27 | 0:18:33 | |
On about the third day, lo and behold, a mighty storm arose. | 0:18:34 | 0:18:40 | |
And the bird shrieked continuously. | 0:18:42 | 0:18:46 | |
The men became convinced that the bird had supernatural powers. | 0:18:48 | 0:18:52 | |
And that it had brought the storm and they would never get off the islet as long as the bird was alive. | 0:18:52 | 0:18:58 | |
So they went out and bashed it, clubbed it to death. | 0:18:58 | 0:19:02 | |
Such was the demise of Britain's last great auk, | 0:19:06 | 0:19:09 | |
the only British bird to go extinct in historical times. | 0:19:09 | 0:19:13 | |
And yet Victorian bird experts could not accept that this was really happening | 0:19:13 | 0:19:18 | |
to a once abundant species. | 0:19:18 | 0:19:22 | |
It is a measure of a kind of senseless abuse of the sea. | 0:19:22 | 0:19:27 | |
It's the way in which we think the sea is limitless. | 0:19:27 | 0:19:30 | |
And therefore we cannot believe that these resources are finite. | 0:19:30 | 0:19:34 | |
We now know that the world's last great auk was killed in Iceland, in June 1844. | 0:19:37 | 0:19:43 | |
But a decade later, two egg collectors still harboured the hope | 0:19:44 | 0:19:48 | |
that a few individuals may have survived. | 0:19:48 | 0:19:50 | |
A couple of British ornithologists, | 0:19:50 | 0:19:54 | |
John Whalley and his friend, Alfred Newton, | 0:19:54 | 0:19:57 | |
decided to make an expedition to Iceland to try to settle the question either way. | 0:19:57 | 0:20:03 | |
The Iceland trip was fruitless, and the men returned home empty-handed. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:10 | |
Later, Alfred Newton wrote an article on the great auk, | 0:20:10 | 0:20:14 | |
which caught the eye of the well-known novelist, the Reverend Charles Kingsley. | 0:20:14 | 0:20:18 | |
He actually read Newton's very poignant account of the destruction of these birds, | 0:20:20 | 0:20:25 | |
and the hope expressed by Alfred Newton that there might still just be a few pairs alive. | 0:20:25 | 0:20:32 | |
It was a vain hope, but it provided the inspiration | 0:20:32 | 0:20:37 | |
for a memorable scene in Kingsley's most famous book, The Water-Babies. | 0:20:37 | 0:20:41 | |
The child hero, Tom, encounters the last great auk, | 0:20:41 | 0:20:45 | |
or as it was also known, the garefowl... | 0:20:45 | 0:20:48 | |
And there he saw the last of the garefowl, standing upon the all alone stone, all alone. | 0:20:49 | 0:20:56 | |
Perched on a rocky outcrop, the elderly bird recounts the story of her species' demise. | 0:20:58 | 0:21:04 | |
"If you had only had wings", said Tom, "then you might have all flown away too." | 0:21:04 | 0:21:10 | |
Kingsley was writing in the midst of an unprecedented population explosion. | 0:21:20 | 0:21:25 | |
So to keep pace with demand for food, Britain's farmers needed to dramatically increase production. | 0:21:26 | 0:21:32 | |
Remarkably, | 0:21:32 | 0:21:33 | |
it was sea birds that would fuel this agricultural revolution. | 0:21:33 | 0:21:37 | |
At this point, | 0:21:37 | 0:21:39 | |
in the mid-19th century, | 0:21:39 | 0:21:41 | |
there was a fairly severe shortage of fertilisers. | 0:21:41 | 0:21:43 | |
We just weren't keeping enough cattle | 0:21:43 | 0:21:45 | |
to fertilise the land sufficiently, just with dung. | 0:21:45 | 0:21:50 | |
So you needed to try to find other sources. | 0:21:50 | 0:21:53 | |
Whoever came up with a solution to the fertiliser shortage was going to make a fortune. | 0:21:53 | 0:22:00 | |
That man was a merchant called William Gibbs. | 0:22:00 | 0:22:03 | |
Gibbs sunk much of his wealth into the Tyntesfield estate, on the outskirts of Bristol, | 0:22:10 | 0:22:16 | |
turning it into one of the grandest houses of the Victorian age. | 0:22:16 | 0:22:21 | |
The source of Gibbs' fertile fortune was far less glamorous, according to a rhyme of the day: | 0:22:21 | 0:22:28 | |
"Mr Gibbs made his tibbs, selling the turds of foreign birds." | 0:22:28 | 0:22:32 | |
Tyntesfield was built on a foundation of guano - the droppings of millions of sea birds. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:42 | |
Of all the stories of abuse of a natural resource, | 0:22:44 | 0:22:49 | |
guano is probably the most extreme. | 0:22:49 | 0:22:51 | |
The guano didn't come from British sea bird colonies, | 0:22:57 | 0:23:02 | |
but from thousands of miles away, off the coast of Peru. | 0:23:02 | 0:23:06 | |
The particular feature of Peru was that the Humboldt current, | 0:23:06 | 0:23:11 | |
coming up from the south, was a very cold current, | 0:23:11 | 0:23:15 | |
with upwellings of cold water. | 0:23:15 | 0:23:17 | |
And this supported a huge plankton population. | 0:23:17 | 0:23:20 | |
That then supported a huge fish population, in particular anchovies. | 0:23:20 | 0:23:24 | |
And the fish population then supported this absolutely gigantic bird population. | 0:23:24 | 0:23:29 | |
And millions of birds just on the one island at any particular time. | 0:23:29 | 0:23:34 | |
The main guano-producing birds were the Guanay cormorant and the brown pelican. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:42 | |
Over centuries, their droppings had accumulated to extraordinary depths, | 0:23:42 | 0:23:47 | |
forming mineral-rich mountains. | 0:23:47 | 0:23:49 | |
Peruvian guano was widely recognised at the time as certainly the best fertiliser anywhere. | 0:23:51 | 0:23:57 | |
Because it was a natural product, and it had all the main plant foods, | 0:23:57 | 0:24:01 | |
nitrogen, potash, and phosphate. | 0:24:01 | 0:24:03 | |
Gibbs had negotiated a deal with the Peruvian government, giving him a monopoly on the guano trade. | 0:24:06 | 0:24:11 | |
But he still faced a problem - how to get the stuff back to Britain. | 0:24:11 | 0:24:15 | |
In many respects, it was an extraordinary thing to do. | 0:24:15 | 0:24:20 | |
You were taking guano, literally from the other side of the world, | 0:24:20 | 0:24:23 | |
very dangerous and difficult voyage, | 0:24:23 | 0:24:25 | |
around some of the stormiest seas in the world, Cape Horn, of course, and then right across the Atlantic. | 0:24:25 | 0:24:31 | |
Once the guano arrived in Britain, Gibbs sold it in vast quantities | 0:24:33 | 0:24:37 | |
to farmers desperate for an efficient fertiliser. | 0:24:37 | 0:24:40 | |
Guano gave a massive boost to the nation's agricultural output. | 0:24:42 | 0:24:45 | |
And it made William Gibbs the wealthiest commoner in England. | 0:24:45 | 0:24:50 | |
This was in sharp contrast to the men actually mining the guano in Peru. | 0:24:53 | 0:24:59 | |
The workforce was organised by Peruvian landowners, | 0:24:59 | 0:25:03 | |
and relied on slaves, convicts and, by the 1850s, | 0:25:03 | 0:25:07 | |
foreign indentured labour. | 0:25:07 | 0:25:10 | |
They took Chinese coolies from the Far East, | 0:25:10 | 0:25:14 | |
building them into contracts they knew nothing about. | 0:25:14 | 0:25:17 | |
They got to these desolate equatorial islands, | 0:25:17 | 0:25:21 | |
and the conditions were completely appalling. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:25 | |
There are few photographs of this period, but an impression of the environment the coolies worked in | 0:25:25 | 0:25:32 | |
can be gained from early 20th-century footage of Peruvian labourers. | 0:25:32 | 0:25:35 | |
And the guano, once it was loosened up from the solid rock that it formed on the island itself, | 0:25:40 | 0:25:45 | |
became a noxious powder that blistered your lungs and your nose. | 0:25:45 | 0:25:49 | |
The normal amount the Chinese labourer had to remove was about five tonnes, | 0:25:53 | 0:25:57 | |
but sometimes eight tonnes a day, and he had to do everything from the original pickaxe, | 0:25:57 | 0:26:03 | |
separating the manure from stones, | 0:26:03 | 0:26:05 | |
carrying the stuff to the edge of the cliffs, and then great canvas chutes into the boats below. | 0:26:05 | 0:26:12 | |
Given the lack of regard for the human labourers, it's not surprising that there was no concern at all | 0:26:20 | 0:26:26 | |
for the birds producing the guano. | 0:26:26 | 0:26:27 | |
Their nest sites were destroyed by the mining, and they were subject to continual disturbance. | 0:26:27 | 0:26:33 | |
The birds disappear from the islands. | 0:26:33 | 0:26:36 | |
The whole question of conservation, of holding on to the bird population | 0:26:36 | 0:26:40 | |
didn't really come until the 20th Century. | 0:26:40 | 0:26:42 | |
They were typical of the boom-bust pattern of maritime harvest. | 0:26:44 | 0:26:47 | |
It was one of the most grotesque dashes for growth, | 0:26:47 | 0:26:51 | |
regardless of the consequences, that there has ever been. | 0:26:51 | 0:26:54 | |
The wanton destruction to man and bird in South America went largely unnoticed back in Britain. | 0:26:57 | 0:27:03 | |
But by the 1860s, the welfare of sea birds at home could not be so easily ignored. | 0:27:09 | 0:27:16 | |
For the first time, voices were about to be raised | 0:27:16 | 0:27:19 | |
against the unbridled exploitation of British sea birds. | 0:27:19 | 0:27:23 | |
The majority of our sea bird colonies are on remote rocky islands, | 0:27:27 | 0:27:32 | |
like the Bass Rock, off the east coast of Scotland... | 0:27:32 | 0:27:36 | |
..and the Farne Islands, off Northumberland. | 0:27:39 | 0:27:42 | |
The isolation of these places offers the birds some protection | 0:27:44 | 0:27:48 | |
from terrestrial predators, both man and beast. | 0:27:48 | 0:27:53 | |
But there are a few sea bird colonies on the British mainland, | 0:27:53 | 0:27:56 | |
such as the cliffs of Bempton and Flamborough Head, in Yorkshire. | 0:27:56 | 0:28:01 | |
These cliffs are a favourite haunt of the kittiwake. | 0:28:03 | 0:28:07 | |
The kittiwake is a very delicate gull. | 0:28:09 | 0:28:12 | |
It's also a gull which tells you its name - | 0:28:12 | 0:28:15 | |
when you go to the colonies, there it is, shrieking away, "Kittiwake! Kittiwake!" | 0:28:15 | 0:28:21 | |
It has these wings that are black ended, as though they've been dipped in black ink. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:30 | |
The thing that makes kittiwakes different from just about every gull | 0:28:30 | 0:28:36 | |
is that it breeds on narrow cliff ledges, so it's relatively safe from terrestrial predators. | 0:28:36 | 0:28:42 | |
So with a black-headed gull, | 0:28:42 | 0:28:45 | |
if a predator like a fox or hedgehog comes into the colony, | 0:28:45 | 0:28:48 | |
all the birds fly up and mob that predator and try and drive it away. | 0:28:48 | 0:28:52 | |
Kittiwakes, on their narrow cliff ledge, | 0:28:52 | 0:28:56 | |
never do that mobbing because there is no value in it. | 0:28:56 | 0:28:58 | |
This tendency to sit tight made kittiwakes very vulnerable to human hunters. | 0:28:58 | 0:29:05 | |
At Bempton and Flamborough Head, local people had always harvested the sea birds for food. | 0:29:09 | 0:29:14 | |
But by the Victorian period, this had escalated into an intensive, commercial use of birds, | 0:29:14 | 0:29:21 | |
their eggs, and, in the case of kittiwakes, their plumage. | 0:29:21 | 0:29:25 | |
They would catch the bird, presumably with nets, | 0:29:29 | 0:29:32 | |
and they would cut their wings off, the bits that they wanted, | 0:29:32 | 0:29:36 | |
and throw the bird, wingless, back into the water. | 0:29:36 | 0:29:38 | |
The wings were used by hat makers in Paris and London and New York. | 0:29:38 | 0:29:44 | |
The people that were harvesting the sea birds at Flamborough at that time | 0:29:44 | 0:29:48 | |
were doing it for profit. There was a sense of manifest destiny, | 0:29:48 | 0:29:53 | |
that this was something that was given to them in bountiful providence, | 0:29:53 | 0:29:57 | |
and that it was there to harvest, | 0:29:57 | 0:29:59 | |
it would be wasteful not to harvest them. | 0:29:59 | 0:30:02 | |
Harvesting the kittiwakes, though cruel, | 0:30:02 | 0:30:06 | |
was at least commercially justifiable. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:08 | |
But now they became targets for a very different element of British society. | 0:30:08 | 0:30:13 | |
HORN BLOWS | 0:30:13 | 0:30:15 | |
The burgeoning middle classes, who aspired to the leisure activities of the aristocracy. | 0:30:15 | 0:30:21 | |
Once the railways made access to these coastal locations easier, | 0:30:21 | 0:30:26 | |
hunting parties came to these sea bird colonies to shoot these birds, | 0:30:26 | 0:30:33 | |
which were so easy to shoot, because they sat so tightly on the nest. | 0:30:33 | 0:30:37 | |
Boarding so-called pleasure boats in Scarborough, groups of men would sail towards the colonies of birds. | 0:30:37 | 0:30:45 | |
And then they would be taken underneath the cliffs, | 0:30:45 | 0:30:49 | |
and would blaze away at the parent birds, sitting on eggs... | 0:30:49 | 0:30:54 | |
GUNFIRE | 0:30:54 | 0:30:57 | |
..killing as many as they could, because the size of the bag | 0:30:59 | 0:31:03 | |
was presumably the measure of the success of the sport. | 0:31:03 | 0:31:05 | |
And it was having a devastating effect on breeding numbers. | 0:31:05 | 0:31:08 | |
But the activities of these shooting parties didn't go unnoticed. | 0:31:08 | 0:31:15 | |
And it was the sight of large numbers of dead, dying birds, | 0:31:15 | 0:31:19 | |
and chicks whose parents had been killed left in the nest, | 0:31:19 | 0:31:23 | |
that started to upset people. | 0:31:23 | 0:31:25 | |
One person who took exception to this slaughter was the ornithologist Alfred Newton - the same man | 0:31:25 | 0:31:33 | |
who 13 years earlier had searched unsuccessfully for the last great auk. | 0:31:33 | 0:31:39 | |
By the late 1860s, | 0:31:40 | 0:31:41 | |
Alfred Newton was Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge. | 0:31:41 | 0:31:46 | |
He'd realised what had happened to the great auk a generation earlier, | 0:31:46 | 0:31:52 | |
he saw that there was a danger of it happening again. | 0:31:52 | 0:31:55 | |
To publicise his concerns, | 0:31:55 | 0:31:58 | |
in 1868 he made a calculatedly emotional speech | 0:31:58 | 0:32:01 | |
to the British Society for the Advancement of Science. | 0:32:01 | 0:32:06 | |
At the present time, I believe there is no class of animal so cruelly persecuted | 0:32:06 | 0:32:12 | |
as the sea-fowl - that a stop should be put to this wanton and atrocious destruction of a species | 0:32:12 | 0:32:18 | |
I think none of my audience will deny. | 0:32:18 | 0:32:21 | |
Just as Newton had hoped, his sensational speech was picked up by the press and widely reported. | 0:32:22 | 0:32:30 | |
And for the first time, the issue touched a nerve with the British public. | 0:32:30 | 0:32:35 | |
There was a sense developing that this slaughter | 0:32:35 | 0:32:38 | |
on the cliffs was somehow to Yorkshire's shame. | 0:32:38 | 0:32:41 | |
And a combination of local landowners and MPs | 0:32:41 | 0:32:46 | |
and members of the clergy got together | 0:32:46 | 0:32:48 | |
and in 1868, formed an association for the protection of sea birds. | 0:32:48 | 0:32:53 | |
As a result of their work, a bill for the preservation of sea birds | 0:32:53 | 0:32:58 | |
was presented to Parliament the following year. | 0:32:58 | 0:33:01 | |
And they came up with a fascinating strategy, and it is based on utilitarianism, | 0:33:01 | 0:33:07 | |
in a way, this idea that the birds were useful. | 0:33:07 | 0:33:11 | |
They did two things - when the fishermen of Bridlington were coming home on foggy days, | 0:33:11 | 0:33:15 | |
and they couldn't see the cliffs, the cries of the sea birds alerted them to the presence | 0:33:15 | 0:33:20 | |
of the cliffs. The birds were, in other words, the Flamborough pilots. | 0:33:20 | 0:33:24 | |
And the second argument was that the sea birds flew inland | 0:33:27 | 0:33:31 | |
and harvested pests on agricultural land. | 0:33:31 | 0:33:35 | |
And those two arguments carried the day. | 0:33:35 | 0:33:38 | |
The Sea Birds Preservation Act came into law in June 1869 - the very first act of Parliament | 0:33:42 | 0:33:50 | |
protecting British birds. | 0:33:50 | 0:33:52 | |
This marked a turning point in the history of our relationship with sea birds. | 0:33:52 | 0:33:57 | |
By the late Victorian era, a new sensibility towards birds and other wildlife was beginning to emerge. | 0:33:57 | 0:34:03 | |
We had finally begun to appreciate birds | 0:34:03 | 0:34:06 | |
not just for how we could exploit them, but for their beauty, and for our delight in them. | 0:34:06 | 0:34:11 | |
And yet where sea birds were concerned, we still knew so little about their real lives. | 0:34:16 | 0:34:24 | |
One of the wonderful things about sea birds | 0:34:24 | 0:34:26 | |
is that they are essentially very mysterious. | 0:34:26 | 0:34:29 | |
Aspects of their behaviour are very, very little understood. | 0:34:29 | 0:34:32 | |
Although much was already known about the birds of our countryside, | 0:34:32 | 0:34:37 | |
it was only in the 20th century that science would | 0:34:37 | 0:34:41 | |
begin to unravel some of the mysteries of sea birds. | 0:34:41 | 0:34:44 | |
One man who pioneered their study was the Welsh naturalist Ronald Lockley. | 0:34:44 | 0:34:50 | |
As a young man, he hadn't set out to be a sea bird scientist. | 0:34:50 | 0:34:55 | |
In fact he was rather a dreamer, with an entrepreneurial streak. | 0:34:55 | 0:34:59 | |
In 1926, Lockley took a lease on an uninhabited island called Skokholm, | 0:35:05 | 0:35:10 | |
off the southwest coast of Wales. | 0:35:10 | 0:35:13 | |
When Lockley turned up on Skokholm, | 0:35:14 | 0:35:18 | |
his initial plan was to make a lot of money. | 0:35:18 | 0:35:20 | |
And he wanted to do this by | 0:35:20 | 0:35:22 | |
breeding giant chinchilla rabbits, | 0:35:22 | 0:35:25 | |
which are a sort of giant, fluffy version of a wild rabbit. | 0:35:25 | 0:35:29 | |
Unfortunately, there was an indigenous rabbit population eating the grass | 0:35:29 | 0:35:34 | |
required by his chinchillas. | 0:35:34 | 0:35:37 | |
He tried to exterminate all the rabbits on Skokholm and failed. | 0:35:37 | 0:35:40 | |
He tried all sorts of ways. In fact, he tried cyanide gas, | 0:35:40 | 0:35:43 | |
it is all quite a grim story. | 0:35:43 | 0:35:46 | |
His experiment failed completely, | 0:35:46 | 0:35:49 | |
because the market for rabbit skins for fashion completely crashed during the Depression. | 0:35:49 | 0:35:54 | |
But Lockley's interest in sea birds was directly born out of this failure. | 0:35:54 | 0:35:59 | |
While trying to trap the indigenous rabbits in their warrens, | 0:35:59 | 0:36:02 | |
he kept catching a strange, burrow-nesting bird instead - the Manx shearwater. | 0:36:02 | 0:36:09 | |
The Manx shearwater is like a tiny albatross. | 0:36:09 | 0:36:13 | |
It's a true sea bird, spending most of its life on the sea. | 0:36:13 | 0:36:18 | |
It's a bird that needs to come ashore only to breed, | 0:36:19 | 0:36:23 | |
and it lays a single white egg in a burrow, like a rabbit hole, that it digs itself. | 0:36:23 | 0:36:29 | |
And it comes ashore just at night. | 0:36:29 | 0:36:31 | |
Under the cover of darkness, these ungainly creatures feed their young, | 0:36:31 | 0:36:38 | |
calling to each other all the while. | 0:36:38 | 0:36:41 | |
When he first heard this strange cacophony, it took Lockley by surprise. | 0:36:42 | 0:36:46 | |
BIRDS CALL | 0:36:46 | 0:36:49 | |
Until this time, no-one had attempted to study the behaviour of Manx shearwaters, | 0:36:54 | 0:37:00 | |
or indeed any other sea birds, in detail. | 0:37:00 | 0:37:03 | |
Lockley became enthralled with these mysterious creatures, and devised | 0:37:03 | 0:37:07 | |
imaginative experiments to study the most intriguing aspects of their behaviour. | 0:37:07 | 0:37:13 | |
One of the things he was fascinated by was the navigational | 0:37:13 | 0:37:17 | |
capacity of the shearwaters. And in one of these experiments, he took a bird from Skokholm to Devon, | 0:37:17 | 0:37:24 | |
and released it, and within a few hours, the bird | 0:37:24 | 0:37:27 | |
was back in its nest burrow. | 0:37:27 | 0:37:29 | |
And then he took this further, and they took a bird to Venice... | 0:37:29 | 0:37:34 | |
And it was about a 900-kilometre journey overland. | 0:37:39 | 0:37:42 | |
But of course a sea bird such as a Manx shearwater would almost certainly | 0:37:42 | 0:37:46 | |
have taken a sea route, which was a hugely circuitous route | 0:37:46 | 0:37:51 | |
through the Straits of Gibraltar, and then up through the Atlantic, | 0:37:51 | 0:37:55 | |
and I think it took 17 days, and a journey of something in the region of 4,000 kilometres. | 0:37:55 | 0:38:00 | |
What it reveals is the puniness of human travel efforts. | 0:38:03 | 0:38:10 | |
You know, this is a bird that has to find its way | 0:38:10 | 0:38:13 | |
across the open ocean, by itself, feeding and travelling for days. | 0:38:13 | 0:38:18 | |
I think that's what captivates us in part about sea birds in general, | 0:38:18 | 0:38:24 | |
is the way in which they treat the open ocean, this featureless landscape, as home. | 0:38:24 | 0:38:30 | |
Ronald Lockley's legacy goes beyond his discoveries about shearwaters. | 0:38:32 | 0:38:38 | |
On Skokholm he also created the UK's first bird observatory, in 1933. | 0:38:38 | 0:38:44 | |
But he had to leave his island paradise after the outbreak of the Second World War, | 0:38:45 | 0:38:50 | |
when it was commandeered by the armed forces. | 0:38:50 | 0:38:54 | |
The sea blockade and food shortages of wartime | 0:38:57 | 0:39:01 | |
meant that despite protection laws, sea birds were back on the menu | 0:39:01 | 0:39:04 | |
for the first time in a generation. | 0:39:04 | 0:39:07 | |
Shags were eaten in the war, and cormorants were eaten in the war. | 0:39:09 | 0:39:13 | |
In fact, most birds would have been eaten in the wartime. | 0:39:13 | 0:39:16 | |
They shot shags on Fair Isle, and they sent them to London for food. | 0:39:16 | 0:39:22 | |
But instead of shags, they called them black ducks. | 0:39:22 | 0:39:25 | |
So, by the end of the war, shags were very scarce, and as | 0:39:25 | 0:39:30 | |
soon as they saw a boat, they were in flight. | 0:39:30 | 0:39:32 | |
But this use of sea birds for meat was short-lived. | 0:39:34 | 0:39:38 | |
In the post-war period, our contact with ocean-going sea birds would diminish. | 0:39:38 | 0:39:43 | |
Gradually, Britain's maritime power waned, | 0:39:43 | 0:39:47 | |
and fewer people made their living at sea. The end of the war | 0:39:47 | 0:39:52 | |
also brought a scientist to Britain who would demystify our commonest | 0:39:52 | 0:39:56 | |
sea birds - Niko Tinbergen. | 0:39:56 | 0:39:59 | |
Tinbergen is one of the great pioneers of animal behaviour studies in the field. | 0:39:59 | 0:40:05 | |
He saw that the kinds of experiments that had been going on, which involved | 0:40:05 | 0:40:09 | |
looking at animals in cages, and in captivity, was pretty pointless, because he thought that animals | 0:40:09 | 0:40:15 | |
in captivity would not display the kind of behaviours that they would in the wild. So, what he did was | 0:40:15 | 0:40:20 | |
take animal behaviour studies into the field, and it was very ground-breaking. | 0:40:20 | 0:40:24 | |
For this kind of work, it is not enough to pay occasional visits to the birds. | 0:40:24 | 0:40:29 | |
We must live with our animals literally day and night. | 0:40:29 | 0:40:33 | |
Tinbergen grew up in the Netherlands, | 0:40:33 | 0:40:36 | |
where, as a teenager, he became interested in nature study. | 0:40:36 | 0:40:41 | |
But his career as a zoologist was interrupted by Nazi occupation of his homeland, | 0:40:41 | 0:40:46 | |
and he was imprisoned in a concentration camp for his political views. | 0:40:46 | 0:40:52 | |
This experience was to shape his later research. | 0:40:52 | 0:40:55 | |
Having been kept in prison left its mark on him, because he was so passionate | 0:40:55 | 0:41:02 | |
about getting out onto the cliff tops, getting away from | 0:41:02 | 0:41:06 | |
his Oxford laboratory | 0:41:06 | 0:41:09 | |
then getting out into the field. | 0:41:09 | 0:41:12 | |
Leaving the dark memories of the Netherlands behind, Tinbergen moved to England after the war. | 0:41:12 | 0:41:18 | |
And he came to Oxford and set up an animal behaviour study group here. | 0:41:18 | 0:41:23 | |
I was lucky to be one of the first members of that group. | 0:41:23 | 0:41:25 | |
Gulls became the major focus of his study group at Oxford. | 0:41:25 | 0:41:31 | |
One of Niko's principles in studying birds was to always go for the most common birds. | 0:41:31 | 0:41:38 | |
The more common and populous a bird is, the easier it is to study. | 0:41:38 | 0:41:44 | |
And he loved gulls because they were common. | 0:41:44 | 0:41:47 | |
GULLS CALL | 0:41:47 | 0:41:50 | |
Tinbergen's research on gulls was popularised through a bestselling book, | 0:41:50 | 0:41:56 | |
The Herring Gull's World, and a successful TV film made with broadcaster Hugh Falkus. | 0:41:56 | 0:42:01 | |
The beginning of it is great. | 0:42:01 | 0:42:03 | |
He starts off shaking his fist at the camera and scowling to show aggression, | 0:42:03 | 0:42:07 | |
which everyone understands. | 0:42:07 | 0:42:09 | |
When I do this, | 0:42:09 | 0:42:10 | |
you know at once what I mean - the angry face, | 0:42:10 | 0:42:15 | |
the clenched fist convey a mood of aggression. | 0:42:15 | 0:42:18 | |
It's a simple form of communication. | 0:42:18 | 0:42:22 | |
It's about a gull colony, | 0:42:22 | 0:42:24 | |
and how gull colonies are always just at the edge of chaos | 0:42:24 | 0:42:26 | |
and aggression. | 0:42:26 | 0:42:28 | |
There's murder, there are chicks being eaten, it's just a complete disaster zone. | 0:42:28 | 0:42:32 | |
This is a great bird city. | 0:42:32 | 0:42:35 | |
This is a city of thieves and murderers. | 0:42:35 | 0:42:38 | |
There are all potential killers and eaters of their neighbours' chicks. | 0:42:38 | 0:42:42 | |
But social life in bird city is made possible | 0:42:44 | 0:42:46 | |
by a highly complex system of communication - | 0:42:46 | 0:42:48 | |
a language comprising posture, movement, colour and sound. | 0:42:48 | 0:42:54 | |
He showed that there were very, | 0:42:54 | 0:42:57 | |
very precise patterns of behaviour and signals, | 0:42:57 | 0:43:00 | |
which gulls knew and understood, which basically kept the | 0:43:00 | 0:43:03 | |
colony from tipping into total chaos. | 0:43:03 | 0:43:05 | |
And I think if you look at the way in which this is presented in the programme, | 0:43:05 | 0:43:09 | |
it's very clear that Tinbergen himself was very worried | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
about the way that humans were going, and he thought that in the future, overpopulation, crowding, | 0:43:12 | 0:43:17 | |
it was all a bit like a gull colony, it was going to be a disaster for us. | 0:43:17 | 0:43:22 | |
So he saw this as being a kind of lesson for humanity - how to negotiate these primal instincts. | 0:43:22 | 0:43:27 | |
By the late '60s, the way we thought about the natural world was changing. | 0:43:28 | 0:43:34 | |
Tinbergen's work reflected the ecological anxieties of the era, | 0:43:34 | 0:43:38 | |
as well as revealing the habits of sea birds to the viewing public. | 0:43:38 | 0:43:45 | |
And yet, as we became a nation of land lovers, | 0:43:45 | 0:43:48 | |
sea birds became even more remote from our daily lives. | 0:43:48 | 0:43:53 | |
They were increasingly out of sight and out of mind. | 0:43:53 | 0:43:57 | |
Overnight, one event would change all this. | 0:43:59 | 0:44:03 | |
If there was one moment in our history when sea birds truly invaded the national consciousness, | 0:44:08 | 0:44:14 | |
it was the Torrey Canyon disaster of March 1967, off the end of Land's End. | 0:44:14 | 0:44:21 | |
'Saturday March 18th, and the Torrey Canyon, a giant tanker on charter to British Petroleum, | 0:44:21 | 0:44:28 | |
'goes aground on the treacherous Seven Stone Rocks between the Isles of Scilly and Land's End. | 0:44:28 | 0:44:34 | |
'On board, 120,000 tonnes of crude oil.' | 0:44:34 | 0:44:37 | |
The Torrey Canyon was the 13th largest ship in the world | 0:44:40 | 0:44:44 | |
and she was rushing to get the tide at Milford Haven, | 0:44:44 | 0:44:47 | |
and Captain Rugiati decided - against all established thinking, | 0:44:47 | 0:44:51 | |
which was to go round to the west of the Isles of Scilly and swing round into the Bristol Channel - | 0:44:51 | 0:44:57 | |
to cut the gap between the Scillies and Land's End | 0:44:57 | 0:45:01 | |
and, overnight, he managed to run aground this enormous ship on the Seven Stones reef, | 0:45:01 | 0:45:07 | |
The next morning, the people of Britain woke up | 0:45:07 | 0:45:11 | |
to the first-ever massive environmental catastrophe on their coastline. | 0:45:11 | 0:45:17 | |
'At once, oil began to spew from her. | 0:45:17 | 0:45:20 | |
'In no time, there was an ominous slick of oil eight miles long.' | 0:45:20 | 0:45:23 | |
The Torrey Canyon was the first environmental disaster to unfold in the television era. | 0:45:23 | 0:45:31 | |
Perhaps the most powerful images of the Torrey Canyon disaster were not what we might have expected. | 0:45:32 | 0:45:39 | |
It wasn't the broken ship lying on the Seven Stones reef. | 0:45:39 | 0:45:43 | |
The most powerful images were sea birds covered in oil that were being washed up on Cornish beaches. | 0:45:43 | 0:45:50 | |
These were pitiful images that said an awful lot to us | 0:45:50 | 0:45:54 | |
about our mastery and domination over the natural world. | 0:45:54 | 0:45:59 | |
They certainly were emotive and people reacted to them. | 0:45:59 | 0:46:04 | |
The sea bird centres in Cornwall were inundated with box-load after box-load | 0:46:04 | 0:46:12 | |
of, sadly, doomed-to-die sea birds. | 0:46:12 | 0:46:14 | |
Chief Inspector Gardner, you've got a lot of birds... | 0:46:16 | 0:46:20 | |
One man on the frontline was Tony Soper, a young broadcaster and naturalist. | 0:46:20 | 0:46:27 | |
We had no idea how much damage this was likely to cause, | 0:46:27 | 0:46:30 | |
but in West Cornwall, they had a big problem with guillemots especially. | 0:46:30 | 0:46:36 | |
Any number of outfits were trying to clean these things up. | 0:46:36 | 0:46:40 | |
People were setting up rescue stations right, left and centre - | 0:46:40 | 0:46:44 | |
especially hairdressing salons | 0:46:44 | 0:46:47 | |
because of course they had the little showers for doing people's hair | 0:46:47 | 0:46:51 | |
and they were putting detergent on these birds, | 0:46:51 | 0:46:55 | |
which got the oil off very effectively but left them without any grease and they couldn't fly. | 0:46:55 | 0:47:00 | |
So an awful lot of birds were put back in the sea totally unable to manage. | 0:47:00 | 0:47:06 | |
A disaster on this scale required decisive action from the government | 0:47:06 | 0:47:11 | |
and the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, waded in. | 0:47:11 | 0:47:14 | |
He of course was viewing this not only as our national leader, | 0:47:14 | 0:47:18 | |
but also somebody who was intimately involved with the Isles of Scilly. | 0:47:18 | 0:47:22 | |
He'd holidayed there since the 1950s, it was his own personal paradise. | 0:47:22 | 0:47:28 | |
In an effort to spare the beaches and the sea bird colonies from the oil, | 0:47:28 | 0:47:34 | |
Wilson's government made the controversial decision to bomb the stricken vessel. | 0:47:34 | 0:47:38 | |
Hundreds of bombs, and even napalm, were used to ignite fuel in the hull | 0:47:41 | 0:47:45 | |
in the hope that it would all burn off. | 0:47:45 | 0:47:48 | |
Harold Wilson went to the top of St Martin's, | 0:47:51 | 0:47:55 | |
one of the islands on the Scillies, and stood there with the people of the Isles of Scilly | 0:47:55 | 0:47:59 | |
and watched the aircraft come roaring in and dropping incendiary bombs on this vast supertanker. | 0:47:59 | 0:48:06 | |
But even after the ship was sunk, | 0:48:08 | 0:48:11 | |
large quantities of oil made its way to the shore | 0:48:11 | 0:48:14 | |
and a clean-up effort was required. | 0:48:14 | 0:48:16 | |
It was BP at the time and they poured masses of detergent on the beaches, | 0:48:18 | 0:48:24 | |
right, left and centre, all the way along the beaches on this oil, | 0:48:24 | 0:48:28 | |
which, in the long run, was a mistake. | 0:48:28 | 0:48:31 | |
In the aftermath, the nation reflected on how ill-prepared it had been for such a disaster. | 0:48:31 | 0:48:39 | |
There was a powerful realisation in government that there was no overarching administrative body | 0:48:39 | 0:48:45 | |
to deal with an environmental disaster like this in Britain. | 0:48:45 | 0:48:48 | |
The ensuing Royal Commission on Pollution eventually led to important changes in government. | 0:48:50 | 0:48:56 | |
And in a way, the Torrey Canyon disaster of 1967 | 0:48:58 | 0:49:02 | |
led to the first-ever Department of the Environment within government, | 0:49:02 | 0:49:07 | |
anywhere in the world, here in Britain. | 0:49:07 | 0:49:11 | |
For a few weeks in 1967, environmental disaster | 0:49:11 | 0:49:15 | |
propelled sea birds into our national consciousness. | 0:49:15 | 0:49:19 | |
Soon after, scientists launched the first sea bird census to take stock of Britain's breeding colonies. | 0:49:19 | 0:49:26 | |
But sea birds might easily have slipped from public view once again | 0:49:36 | 0:49:40 | |
were it not for a dramatic change in the behaviour of one group of birds. | 0:49:40 | 0:49:45 | |
For better or worse, this change would bring more of us | 0:49:45 | 0:49:48 | |
into direct contact with sea birds than ever before. | 0:49:48 | 0:49:53 | |
The poor old herring gull. | 0:49:53 | 0:49:55 | |
There's no herring gull that's seen a herring in the last 50 years! | 0:49:55 | 0:50:00 | |
They live off other things now. | 0:50:00 | 0:50:02 | |
Most people encounter sea birds today | 0:50:07 | 0:50:09 | |
because of some shock-horror about | 0:50:09 | 0:50:11 | |
gulls eating the Flake from your ice cream in a city centre. | 0:50:11 | 0:50:15 | |
They're not exotic, they're not the other any more, | 0:50:15 | 0:50:18 | |
and they're a problem when they get out of their own sphere. | 0:50:18 | 0:50:23 | |
Keep to the ocean but don't invade my other territory. | 0:50:23 | 0:50:27 | |
Two species have moved inland - the lesser black-backed gull | 0:50:27 | 0:50:32 | |
and its paler-winged relative, the herring gull. | 0:50:32 | 0:50:35 | |
They're obvious birds, they're big birds, | 0:50:35 | 0:50:38 | |
and they're getting about their business in an obvious way. | 0:50:38 | 0:50:44 | |
We see courtship, we see them nesting, laying eggs, | 0:50:44 | 0:50:48 | |
feeding their young, and during that process they become quite aggressive. | 0:50:48 | 0:50:52 | |
And that's a shock to us because in our little lives in the cities, we don't expect that sort of behaviour. | 0:50:52 | 0:50:59 | |
That doesn't happen here, it happens on TV or out in the country. | 0:50:59 | 0:51:03 | |
As a young sea bird researcher, Tim Birkhead had first-hand experience of a gull attack. | 0:51:03 | 0:51:11 | |
This gull came down, | 0:51:11 | 0:51:13 | |
making this terrible wheezing noise, | 0:51:13 | 0:51:16 | |
put both feet out, | 0:51:16 | 0:51:17 | |
hit me on the back of the head, | 0:51:17 | 0:51:19 | |
and vomited and defecated simultaneously, | 0:51:19 | 0:51:23 | |
-so I got vomit down the front of my head and gull -BLEEP -down the back of my neck. | 0:51:23 | 0:51:29 | |
It left me feeling sick for the whole day. | 0:51:29 | 0:51:32 | |
Not the defecation bit, just the whack on the back of the head was so unexpected. | 0:51:32 | 0:51:38 | |
Nesting seagulls will attack any bird or mammal | 0:51:42 | 0:51:46 | |
that invades their territory because they're protecting their young. | 0:51:46 | 0:51:50 | |
Our contemporary dislike for gulls in our towns and cities is in stark contrast | 0:51:50 | 0:51:57 | |
to the way we used to feel about them when they lived at the coast. | 0:51:57 | 0:52:01 | |
If you think of the opening signature music to Desert Island Discs, | 0:52:11 | 0:52:16 | |
the wailing of gulls is the soundtrack of the sea. | 0:52:16 | 0:52:19 | |
The child with their bucket and spade, the sound of seagulls in the background - | 0:52:19 | 0:52:24 | |
it's part of a repertoire of recreational holiday life in Britain. | 0:52:24 | 0:52:28 | |
That wonderful laughing call of the herring gull, | 0:52:28 | 0:52:33 | |
throwing back its head and making that extraordinary noise. | 0:52:33 | 0:52:37 | |
That's the image most people have of gulls. | 0:52:37 | 0:52:41 | |
Or at least, it used to be. | 0:52:47 | 0:52:49 | |
Ironically, our efforts to solve a major pollution problem inadvertently created the conditions | 0:52:49 | 0:52:56 | |
that would encourage gulls to settle inland. | 0:52:56 | 0:53:00 | |
The Great Smog of 1952 killed many thousands of people. | 0:53:00 | 0:53:06 | |
The government's response was the 1956 Clean Air Act, | 0:53:06 | 0:53:10 | |
which prevented the burning of household waste. | 0:53:10 | 0:53:14 | |
So in the following decades, ever-increasing quantities of rubbish | 0:53:16 | 0:53:22 | |
were hauled off to landfill sites, providing a bonanza for the gulls. | 0:53:22 | 0:53:26 | |
We've got massive landfill sites on the edges of our cities, | 0:53:26 | 0:53:31 | |
which is a great food source for them and they've taken advantage of that. They're victims of our excess. | 0:53:31 | 0:53:38 | |
Gulls are the most adaptable of all sea birds | 0:53:38 | 0:53:42 | |
with extraordinarily catholic tastes, but their scavenging behaviour doesn't endear them to us. | 0:53:42 | 0:53:48 | |
The gulls are exploiting as a food supply human waste, | 0:53:50 | 0:53:55 | |
to which we ourselves feel some feelings of disgust. | 0:53:55 | 0:53:58 | |
They became in a sense a kind of metaphor for human waste | 0:53:58 | 0:54:02 | |
and I think that's part of why they attracted so much hostility. | 0:54:02 | 0:54:06 | |
Gull populations in some British cities have grown to the point where they are now considered vermin. | 0:54:06 | 0:54:13 | |
And yet we only see part of the picture. | 0:54:13 | 0:54:17 | |
We have a sense of gulls being ubiquitous and commonplace but in fact, | 0:54:17 | 0:54:24 | |
one of the most frequent nesters on people's roofs has declined substantially. | 0:54:24 | 0:54:29 | |
Up to 50% of all herring gulls have gone in the last 50 years. | 0:54:29 | 0:54:33 | |
This is because the original, coastal colonies of herring gulls have collapsed due to lack of food. | 0:54:35 | 0:54:42 | |
Fishermen no longer lay out their catches on the harbour side, nor gut fish at sea. | 0:54:42 | 0:54:49 | |
Over-fishing has also reduced the gulls' food supply. | 0:54:49 | 0:54:53 | |
Herring gulls have survived until now because they are truly exceptional. | 0:54:53 | 0:54:57 | |
They've adapted from being sea birds into urban birds. | 0:54:57 | 0:55:02 | |
But other species of sea birds may not be so lucky. | 0:55:02 | 0:55:06 | |
We are not managing the marine resources in Britain well, or Europe, | 0:55:06 | 0:55:12 | |
and the sea birds show us that. | 0:55:12 | 0:55:14 | |
Sadly for us, our best-loved sea bird is one of the species now in decline. | 0:55:14 | 0:55:22 | |
Even though most of us have never seen a puffin, we feel we know this comical little bird. | 0:55:26 | 0:55:32 | |
The model for countless children's toys, and the inspiration | 0:55:32 | 0:55:37 | |
for the world's most celebrated series of children's books. | 0:55:37 | 0:55:40 | |
It's like a toy animal, really. | 0:55:40 | 0:55:43 | |
You just look at it and you simply cannot believe that this is the real thing. It cannot be a real bird. | 0:55:43 | 0:55:49 | |
How can it exist like that? | 0:55:49 | 0:55:51 | |
The puffin's predicament provides a salutary warning for the future of our relationship with sea birds. | 0:55:52 | 0:55:59 | |
The iconic view of a puffin is this bird | 0:55:59 | 0:56:03 | |
with this incredibly bright bill coming ashore, | 0:56:03 | 0:56:07 | |
running up to its burrow with all these little fish, head to tail, arranged through its bill. | 0:56:07 | 0:56:14 | |
Puffins feed these nutritious little fish, sand eels, to their growing chicks. | 0:56:16 | 0:56:22 | |
In recent years, many chicks have starved to death because of a shortage of sand eels. | 0:56:22 | 0:56:29 | |
This is partly due to over-fishing and also down to a more serious long-term problem - climate change. | 0:56:29 | 0:56:36 | |
Sea temperatures are rising and it means that species that support | 0:56:38 | 0:56:42 | |
our sea birds - sand eels - are heading north. | 0:56:42 | 0:56:45 | |
They want that cooler water and what will follow them? Our sea birds. | 0:56:45 | 0:56:49 | |
In the last ten years, climate change has already contributed | 0:56:49 | 0:56:53 | |
to a significant fall in the total number of sea birds breeding in Britain. | 0:56:53 | 0:57:00 | |
And if we lost our sea birds, we would not be just losing | 0:57:00 | 0:57:05 | |
colonies of birds, we'd be losing a whole part of our heritage, a whole part of what makes Britain Britain. | 0:57:05 | 0:57:12 | |
Arguably, we have lost much of this heritage already. | 0:57:14 | 0:57:19 | |
As our dependence on sea birds gradually diminished, | 0:57:19 | 0:57:23 | |
we developed a deeper aesthetic appreciation of them. | 0:57:23 | 0:57:26 | |
But at the same time, their cultural relevance to us began to recede. | 0:57:26 | 0:57:33 | |
We may have protected sea birds and learned more about them, | 0:57:33 | 0:57:37 | |
but now our mismanagement of the seas threatens their very future. | 0:57:37 | 0:57:42 | |
So today, they float in our peripheral vision, | 0:57:43 | 0:57:47 | |
as ghostly reminders of the seafaring people we once were. | 0:57:47 | 0:57:52 | |
Next time, in the final episode of Birds Britannia, we explore the extraordinary impact | 0:58:03 | 0:58:08 | |
the birds of the British countryside | 0:58:08 | 0:58:10 | |
have had on our nation's history and culture. | 0:58:10 | 0:58:14 | |
From nightingales in poetry, to grouse on the Glorious 12th... | 0:58:17 | 0:58:22 | |
..these birds have not only shaped our rural landscape, | 0:58:25 | 0:58:28 | |
but also defined what the countryside really means to us. | 0:58:28 | 0:58:33 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:55 | 0:58:57 |