Living with the Birds The Last Seabird Summer?

This film contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

Just off the west coast of Scotland in the Outer Hebrides

is a little known cluster of islands called the Shiants.

The name means haunted, or enchanted,

and while the last people left over a century ago,

every summer these deserted shores become the stage

for an extraordinary show.

Great waves of seabirds return here from far out in the Atlantic,

coming back to mate and breed.

For many of us, the seabird is a noisy scavenger,

gulls that plague our seafronts,

but these annual visitors to the Shiants

are altogether more mysterious and surprising.

I'm Adam Nicolson, a writer,

and for summer after summer,

I've been able to witness this great spectacle,

ever since my father first brought me here as boy 50 years ago.

The more you get to know about these birds

the more extraordinary they are.

Any idea that somehow we have a monopoly on ingenuity

or resilience or persistence in the face of difficulty

absolutely goes out of the window.

But now, despite this resilience,

there's a crisis.

In Scotland alone 40% of our seabirds have already been lost.

There is apparently no food for them to bring back to the chicks,

let alone feed themselves.

This year, for the first time, I'm going to immerse myself

in the lives of the birds,

to try and understand what's happening.

It would be such a catastrophe if they weren't here.

They're as much part of this place as the grass.

I'll explore man's part in their decline.

How our lives were once intertwined with theirs.

How we used to depend on them for food.

It was like a carnival.

If you can imagine a carnival where people queued

and got buckets of seabirds.

I'll go to Iceland, a seabird stronghold,

where puffin-hunting is still part of every day life.

But where the crisis has hit even harder,

with some colonies all but wiped out.

In some cases we come to a colony which all the chicks died

within framework of a few days. 130,000-some dead chicks everywhere.

I need to know if this catastrophe will come to the Shiants.

Is there a wave of extinction sweeping the north Atlantic?

Could we really be facing the last of our great seabird summers?

Set in a stretch of sea called the Minch,

the Shiants are actually three separate islands.

Their cliffs and rock-strewn slopes

make up one of the most important bird places of Europe.

Over 150,000 puffins make their home here every summer.

They're joined by a whole cast of other characters.

The sleek, stylish razorbill,

and elegant chocolaty guillemot,

who, together with the puffin,

make up a family of deep-diving birds called Auks.

They share this rocky home

with the bigger and more aggressive shag,

a close cousin of the cormorant.

The fulmar, a relative of the albatross,

cuts graceful circles in the air,

and the kittiwake, named after its distinctive call,

makes its nest clinging to the cliff face.

Together they all bring a pulsating life to the islands.

I'm going to spend the summer with the birds

and follow their fascinating story,

while trying to understand

the crisis that threatens to end this remarkable show.

For thousands of years the birds have shared the Shiants

with families of shepherds and farmers,

who've left their mark on the landscape.

But the last of them left over 100 years ago,

when the pull of the modern world became too strong.

Today the one remaining house is used for visitors only,

and life here is unchanged.

There's no electricity, no loo,

and no running water.

What I am doing, well, if you forgive plastic

and modern saucepans...

What I'm doing is exactly what people would have been doing here

since the Bronze Age.

And it's delicious, pure water,

just seeping down through the hillside.

I did once come and there was a dead sheep lying in this,

which wasn't so brilliant.

This simple existence makes it easy to become embedded

in the natural world of the Shiants.

And for last 50 years I've been able to witness the life of the islands,

all thanks to a decision made by my father, Nigel, also a writer.

In 1937, when my dad was a student at Oxford

and his mother saw an ad in the paper saying,

"Islands for sale, early lambs, 1,200 quid."

So he came up here for the day and fell in love with them,

and bought them there and then.

He brought a visitors book,

and this is the first visitors book.

And it's very, very much like my dad,

because everyone else writes screeds and screeds in these things,

and he says "Nigel Nicolson,

"a month alone with a dog."

And that's it.

For me, coming here year after year

has meant spending time on the islands

both with and without the birds.

I've been here late in the year when the birds aren't here,

and that is really curious. It's like a cemetery.

There is plenty of Scottish coastline,

not unlike this, which has no birds.

And I go there and I think,

'It's a book with half the alphabet missing.'

It's almost as if the whole meaning has dropped out,

if the birds aren't there.

It's early May,

and after spending nearly eight months

dispersed throughout the North Atlantic,

the puffins and razorbills

are making their first tentative appearance

in the seas around the Shiants.

They've been out there, you know, in the wild Atlantic,

no landmarks in sight.

It's pure open ocean, totally alone.

But you can't lay an egg in the sea,

and so they've got to come back here.

It's rock that brings them here.

And so spring comes on, and the days lengthen

then they're back here, finding their wife,

with this desperate and fierce urgency to breed.

Although puffins and razorbills can live for 30 years or more,

every summer they return to the same partner,

and set about getting reacquainted.

Kissing.

It's all display. It's all,

"Come on. Come on, sweetheart."

As the puffins arrive for the summer breeding season,

they change from their grey, winter appearance,

to this flamboyant orange bill and eye make-up,

advertising their health to their mate.

These early signs of life on the Shiants are promising,

particularly with so many reported declines elsewhere.

And I didn't have to wait long to be reassured

that the birds would return en masse.

It's puffins! They're all puffins in that.

It's a giant wheel of them.

It's so astonishing, these birds that have been dispersed

across literally millions of square miles of ocean

are now gathering here again to make the next generation.

They're just circulating like that, over and along the colony there.

It's phenomenal.

I find it very moving.

One of the reasons the birds come to the Shiants in such numbers

is that the islands provide a safe haven.

There's no people here

and no predators like foxes or stoats.

But there is one extremely unwelcome resident,

an invasive non-native that lives in every nook and cranny.

The black rat.

There was a wreck in 1740s, and the rats on the wreck,

it was on the very outer most rock over there,

and they swam ashore and have colonised every island since.

It's now thought that the rat population here swells

to as many as 10,000 every summer.

The rats prey on the seabirds.

They eat the eggs, they eat the chicks.

It certainly means that there are fewer seabirds here

than there would otherwise be if there weren't any rats.

The argument is that seabirds across the whole of this ocean

are in an increasingly desperate condition.

And so, if we could do something for them here,

if we can just relieve a local burden,

then that can only be a good thing.

The continued health of the Shiants colonies is considered vital

to the future of Britain's seabirds by the RSPB.

Hello, hello!

And as part of their response to the wider crisis, they've committed to

a major plan to eradicate the rats,

costing nearly a million pounds.

Hi, nice to see you again, how are things?

It's meant that this year the Shiants have never been busier,

playing host to groups of bird lovers and donors to the project.

The RSPB in Scotland is headed by Stuart Housden.

I wondered, with birds on the Shiants apparently doing so well,

what he thought the project could achieve.

Some man in Tarbert said to me the other day,

"Haven't you got enough?

"What are you on about? You've got plenty of birds now."

What's the answer?

Well, I think the answer is we want a colony that's exporting more,

-and growing more, that's the point.

-Exporting, yeah, exactly.

As a kind of seed bank.

I am with that 100%.

It's an ambitious plan, not just to protect the birds already here,

but to strengthen and grow the colonies,

as a kind of insurance for what might lie ahead.

The eradication itself has to wait until the winter

when the rat population is at its lowest.

And it's not going to be easy -

if one pregnant rat is missed the whole project could fail.

An RSPB team led by ecologist Davide Scridel has started to survey

the islands for rat activity.

How do you know that the rats are actually here?

Is there any sign?

We found presence of rats throughout the island,

not just along the seabird colonies.

When we, for example, survey on the boulder field,

we will surround the area of interest with some chocolate wax,

which is a well-known method of proving.

And this is a rat nibble?

-This is a rat being very...

-Rat nibble.

-Loving the chocolate,

coming to nibble, you can see the clear incisors.

So they're not far away?

No, they are there.

But rats are not an issue everywhere.

In colonies where the seabirds are being hit hardest,

the problem seems to be out at sea where they find their food.

This is shown most clearly

by the noisiest summer visitor to the Shiants - the kittiwake.

Unlike the auks, the puffins, guillemots and razorbills,

which can dive as deep as 100 metres or more to catch fish,

the kittiwake, seen here feeding,

can only forage near the surface,

making it more vulnerable to changes in the marine environment.

The key thing about the kittiwake

is that it's quite a specialist, you know.

It doesn't go very far and it can't fish very deep.

So, if there is a slight variation in the conditions,

then it'll read straight away into kittiwake chick production.

And so, they are, in a way, a barometer of how things are.

The kittiwake colony here on the Shiants is as good as I remember,

suggesting the seas around here are providing enough fish for the birds.

But it's not like that everywhere in Scotland.

To try and understand why, I'm leaving the islands to go

and see for myself.

Less than a 150 miles north-east of the Shiants,

at Marwick Head on Orkney,

there are kittiwake colonies in steep decline.

These cliffs have been part of an RSPB reserve since the 1970s.

To find out what's happened here, I've come to see Phil Taylor,

who's in charge of the RSPB seabird recovery programme for Scotland.

Bloody hell, look at that.

That is incredible down there.

The cliffs here are undoubtedly spectacular

and at first sight all seems well.

What we're looking at here is still a lot of birds,

but it's not what it once was.

How many kittiwakes were there here? On this whole headland?

On this whole headland there was about 5,500.

And now how many are there?

500.

-A 90% decline.

-A 90% decline, yep.

A tenth of the birds that were here in 2000 or 1999

are now breeding here.

The birds here haven't been able

to raise enough young to replace themselves.

So we have got an ageing population all the way along these cliffs.

So you start to see something that's hollow...

I mean, it looks good but there is a sort of failure going on

inside what you are seeing?

Yeah, that's right.

Just around the corner, Phil takes me to a spot

where the evidence of decline is much more graphic.

This is a photo taken back in the '80s of this exact same cliff.

And you can see this entire centre section here,

in the photo full of birds,

an entire high rise flat of kittiwake nests.

And in this area here...

There are hardly any, that's incredible.

What explains that?

Why should there be a failure here?

One thing about kittiwakes is that they are a great indicator

of the health of the sea around.

We've got a full cliff of seabirds and some healthy sea out there.

And now in front of us we have quite a bare cliff,

showing that actually what we're looking at out here,

this big blue mass that we can't really see into,

isn't in the condition it should be.

You could not think about protecting that bit of cliff there

and the birds that live on it,

without also thinking about how

we protect and recover that bit of sea there.

The sea provides all the food for our seabirds.

In the North Atlantic and North Sea,

their staple diet is the sand eel,

a tiny fish that grows to no more than six inches long

but is intensely rich in oil and packed with nutrients.

They spend most of the year buried in the sandy bottom

emerging in May or June to spend the summer feeding on plankton,

in the upper ocean layers, where the birds can get at them.

Sand eels have been exploited on an industrial scale,

turned into pig food and fertilizer,

and even used to fuel a Danish power station.

Bob Furness, a leading ornithologist,

sees the relationship between sand eels and seabirds

as key to their future.

It's absolutely clear that an excessive harvest of sand eels

reduces the breeding success of the kittiwakes.

So for Shetland, when the sand eel stock

falls below a certain threshold

the breeding success goes down dramatically.

So the breeding success is nearly zero with low abundance.

This is what led to the closure of the sand eel fishery

off the east coast of Scotland.

When the sand eel fishing stopped in the year 2000,

to start with the bird numbers rose,

but after that the declines continued.

Over on the Shiants and the rest of the west coast,

the birds haven't suffered as much,

suggesting local factors must be critical.

The sea around the islands benefits from notoriously powerful tides

forcing the water over rough seabeds,

stirring up nutrients

that feed the plankton the sand eels depend on.

And this could be one of the reasons

the Shiants birds continue to do well.

It's mid-June now.

The main seabird colonies on the Shiants

are among these boulder fields and grassy slopes.

I'm hoping that the birds will have laid their eggs

and that some of the chicks might have started to hatch.

There's nowhere on the Shiants that's thicker with birds than this.

This is like the absolutely concentrated nub of it.

It's not really zoned, they are all in with each other.

Puffin, shag, guillemot and razorbill are all together here.

It's a pretty hard and uncompromising place,

but it does provide all kinds of different opportunities

for the birds to nest and breed.

The grassy slopes next to the boulders are perfect for puffins.

They make their home in burrows,

and although there is some infidelity in the puffins' world,

most return with the same mate to the same burrow every year.

This view inside the burrow, filmed on the Shiants,

shows the puffin making preparations for a single egg,

usually laid in early May.

I know that the male does more of the burrow building than

the female and often they come here absolutely

filthy from the dirty winter burrow that they are trying to sort out.

They also nest in hollows and crevices between the rocks.

There's a puffin in there.

Hello, puffin.

A little sad face.

There's an egg in there. I think that's a razorbill egg

and there's a bird in there, there's a razorbill in there.

The parents will incubate the egg for about 35 days,

taking it in turns while the other goes foraging for fish.

A very dirty razorbill egg there.

Another one here.

With me poking about, some of the birds may leave the egg,

but they'll come back when I'm gone.

This is just the one egg that this pair is banking on.

Everything this year on that one egg.

Land birds lay a clutch of eggs each season over their short lives.

Seabirds like razorbills and puffins

lay only one egg each year to ensure one strong chick.

But they do that over a much longer lifespan,

breeding for 20 years or more.

A strategy to carry them through years when fish are scarce.

There's a shag, spitting!

It's kind of this great yell...

HE SQUAWKS

..like that.

Shags are incredibly primitive, you know.

They're 60-million-year-old birds,

and flying dinosaurs, really.

And this is like meeting a pterodactyl.

It's just got everything. It's got this amazing green glamour sheen,

this noise, you know, like a deep sort of voice of the earth voice.

And those eyes! Absolute emerald brilliance in those eyes.

And living in this kind of slum hell hole.

Oh, there are the babies!

Ugly, ugly babies.

Look at them, dirty little things!

Amazing creatures.

Amazing.

I do feel you're meeting life in the raw here,

it's as raw as it gets.

It's so naked and stinking.

And sort of beautiful in an unbelievably hard

and unforgiving way.

This is as good as I've ever seen here.

You know, this density of birds.

I just love this, I love it.

Thousands of birds, they are like little moths,

so all you hear is the wing flutter.

It would be such a catastrophe if they weren't here.

They're as much part of this place as the grass.

For me, the puffins' appearance every year is deeply reassuring.

It says that for now the natural world is working.

But not long ago, for the inhabitants of the Shiants,

this annual re-emergence of the birds

meant something much more fundamental,

more central to their lives -

a welcome end to the hardship of winter.

I often think of the way which people here must have looked forward

to the moment when the seabirds arrived.

Not only as spring coming but as deliciousness arriving,

these two forms of life -

completely imbedded Atlantic creatures

that spend most of the year out in the ocean

and people stuck here on this island

meet for this magical three or four months in summer.

It wasn't just here on the Shiants

that the seabirds were an essential part of life.

The same was true for coastal and island communities

all around Britain.

Particularly in St Kilda, over 40 miles west

of the nearest Scottish coastline, isolated in the Atlantic.

Continuously inhabited since the Bronze Age,

around 100 people lived here until they were evacuated in 1930.

In terms of St Kilda, seabirds and their eggs

were critical to their survival.

They were harvested in huge numbers.

But there's also really quite a high degree of self-regulation.

The St Kildans were allocated shares in the bird cliffs,

and indeed in the species that were taken.

And you generally didn't take the breeding female or the male

when they were feeding the birds,

because otherwise you were going to starve the young.

The harvest was organised in a very formal way.

It was built up

by acute observation,

and the accumulation of knowledge over generations.

I don't think one can emphasise that too much.

But the breakdown of subsistence cultures

means that there is no longer

this intimate relationship with the natural world.

Today communities have ceased to depend on seabirds

for their survival.

But on the Hebridean islands of Lewis and Harris,

there are those who still remember taking birds on the Shiants

as part of everyday life.

Now we used to go out there to get the puffins, you know.

Puffins were a very delicacy then.

You could almost walk across to Mary Island

with how thick they were, you know.

We would have a belt round our waist here.

Once we had the belt full of puffins,

we'd put them in a bag,

and then when we got home with them here,

we plucked them and then they would be roasted in a pot.

A pot roast.

We used to eat the cormorants here.

How often? Maybe twice a week.

Used to be cormorant soup at one time.

But other birds we used to eat as well was guillemots,

and every sea bird you could think of.

Donald Morrison, whose father was born on the Shiants in the 1890s,

also remembers when eating seabirds was common place.

The catching and eating of gannets, our largest seabird,

is a tradition stretching back through the centuries.

Bass Rock, just a mile off the east coast of Scotland,

has the largest colony of northern gannets in the world,

and a long history of their predation.

I mean, it's completely raw life and death...

'Maggie Sheddan has been bringing visitors here

'for the last ten years.'

I mean they were so desired.

This was money, this was a prime crop to have.

From about the 13th century, this was the industry.

Across here in Kantra bay,

this was very much were the birds were taken to,

so the innkeepers there, they would have their boats,

they would come out and collect the birds.

They were then roasted, often wrapped in rhubarb leaves,

and from there, the oil drained off as they were roasting.

Now that was gathered cause it was thought to be medicinal.

What would they use the gannet oil for?

It was thickened and made into a salve,

so I think it was a cure-all -

rheumatism, gout, you name it, cuts, bruises.

But if you think about it, it's incredibly rich in fish oil,

because their source is generally very oily fish.

-He came right down.

-He did.

Did they take eggs as well?

Yes, eggs have been on Buckingham Palace dining table.

So they really were... this was luxury food.

For centuries people managed to harvest seabirds sustainably.

But when they began to exploit them on industrial levels

the effect was disastrous.

Here at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow,

there's a potent reminder of a time

when greed pushed our relationship with the birds too far,

and drove to extinction

a creature once found throughout the North Atlantic.

Oh, fantastic.

The great auk.

Look at him. He's huge, like a giant razorbill.

Imagine that stomping round the place.

This is the very first time

I've ever looked a great auk in the eye.

It looks amazingly alive.

You can just imagine it. Aach!

These were the birds that people called the penguin first

and what we now know as penguins

were only called penguins

because when people went to the Southern Ocean, to Antarctica,

they reminded them, the birds they saw there, of these.

And flightless. You see its little wings

are obviously no good for flying. They are just swimming wings.

And this fantastic

thick, matted, feathery chest.

That's one of the reasons that they're gone,

that people killed them,

because of that huge mass of feathers.

You wouldn't need many great auks for a pillow.

There's no doubt that in the 19th century

people went for these things in the most rapacious,

greedy, thoughtless way.

They literally herded them into their ships.

They tied the sails from the sides of the boat onto the rock

and then herded the great auks into the hold across the sails.

Incapable of escape,

couldn't fly away,

just knocked on the head.

The nail in the coffin as far as the great auk are concerned

would appear to be feather companies having exhausted

supplies of eiderdown, taking the great auk for feathers.

And the harvests were phenomenal,

it would seem, year upon year,

and it would appear that was the end of the great auk.

Its feathers were mainly used for bedding,

but at the same time as the last great auk was killed

in the middle of the 19th century,

another market was growing that spread the net much wider.

The millinery trade was becoming far more important.

In other words, it was fashionable for females

to wear feathers in their hats, one way or another.

The numbers involved were staggering.

More than five million birds were killed each year

to satisfy the American trade alone,

with a story from the end of the 19th century

of one enterprising business

killing 40,000 sea birds to meet the demands of a single hat-maker.

This led to an absolutely massive slaughter of sea birds.

The best known example, perhaps, is at Bempton in East Yorkshire,

where the birds were shot,

the wings were removed

and the carcasses were simply thrown into the sea.

And it was also shooting for sport,

going out in boats and taking pot shots at the birds,

so there is a revulsion that begins to emerge

and this quite rightly, quite understandably,

was seen as unacceptable

and it led to the formation of the first, as it were,

bird protection society, I think in Bridlington,

which in turn led to the first of the sea bird preservation acts.

The act was a turning point, the beginning of the end

of thousands of years of harvesting sea birds.

The moment when our relationship with the birds started to shift

from consumption to conservation.

But there is one place in the British Isles

where the old relationship has endured.

-NEWSREEL NARRATOR:

-At midnight on this last day of summer,

12 men of Ness will sail north for 40 miles

to an isolated, cruel Atlantic Rock called Sulasgier.

That lonely rock has attracted the Ness men for centuries past.

They go there every year for a strange September harvest.

This ancient tradition, first recorded here in the 16th century,

is the taking for food of young gannets known as gugas.

The oily flesh has always been prized by people here.

It's preserved in salt and boiled before it's eaten

and even today it's thought of as a delicacy.

The hunters all come from a small, remote town called Ness

on the northern tip of the Outer Hebrides.

I wondered why this place and its people had kept the tradition alive.

Donald Murray has written a book about the guga hunt.

He grew up here in Ness

and vividly remembers the atmosphere surrounding the hunters' return.

It was almost the centrepiece of Ness. It was like a carnival,

if you can imagine a carnival where the people queued

and got buckets of sea birds.

And there used to be a queue.

I remember being part of that queue,

waiting for the hallowed bird to arrive, you know?

There was absolutely no doubt it was a thrill

because in some ways it was a statement of your identity.

Did anyone feel, when you were young,

that this wasn't the right thing to be doing?

Nobody. I think there was a kind of uniformity of view.

Nobody questioned the need for it.

And, you know, at a time when I think so much of the identity

of this place was under threat,

you know, you were saying to the rest of the world,

"We dare to be different here."

What was the impact here of the growing movement in England

to conserve these birds,

people feeling that they were under pressure?

We've seen the outsider coming in

and telling us what to do for centuries.

You know, language being banned.

Someone like my grandfather

having to wear a bolt of the wood around his neck

for speaking Gaelic in the playground.

So, in a way, the sea bird you hunt here is basically saying,

"This far and no further.

"We don't want you to take away this.

"We must retain some part of our identity

"because the rest is under threat."

This defiance led to the hunt being officially recognised in 1954

and it is now licensed to take 2,000 gannets each year.

Today, the harvesting of gugas by this group of men,

although rooted in the past,

is not just a ritual.

There is still value in it

and although it doesn't harm the gannet population,

it is an anomaly in modern Britain.

But there is a place where taking birds like this

is still widespread -

Iceland,

the sea bird stronghold of the North Atlantic

and home to over half the world's puffins.

I've come here because I want to understand

how the puffin hunting tradition continues as part of modern life.

My destination is a tiny island called Grimsey,

just on the Arctic Circle,

25 miles off Iceland's north coast.

How nice to see you.

I've never before landed through a cloud of sea birds like that.

There are millions and millions of Arctic terns here.

Beautiful little things, just dancing over the whole airport.

You can hear them just screeching.

Lovely long swallow tails.

In Scotland, Arctic terns are one of the worst hit species.

Over 70% of the birds are gone.

They, like the kittiwakes, are surface feeders,

so they just dabble around in the surface of the sea

picking up sand eels and things like that,

so this is lovely to see this here.

Puffins!

There are Puffins there at the airport.

Oh, look at that. A huge flock of them,

You get out of a plane and literally within seconds

you are surrounded by some of the great birds of the North Atlantic.

People think of the north as sterile and hostile and so cold,

but this is just burgeoning with life.

We shouldn't be amazed by this.

I mean, that's what feels weird about it.

This is what the whole ocean should be like.

It's incredibly exciting to see it.

Even the kittiwake is booming.

The great barometer of the ocean's health,

these teeming clouds of birds

show that here in the north of Iceland,

the marine system is working.

Grimsey was first settled by the Vikings 1,000 years ago

and, today, 77 inhabitants remain.

The islanders are largely supported by the prolific cod

fishery in the surrounding seas,

but fish isn't all they catch.

For Icelanders across the country,

sea bird hunting remains a powerful tradition,

nowhere more than on this island.

Hello there.

I'm here to meet Siggi Henningsson and his wife Harpa.

-Hi.

-Hello.

-How are you? I'm Adam.

-Harpa.

-Very nice to meet you.

Yes, Harpa, so where is your husband?

He is hunting some puffins.

-Is he, actually, now?

-Yeah, look outside the window.

-What? He's out there?

-Yeah.

Can you just literally walk out of the house and hunt puffins?

Yes, you can. There they are.

Coming with a bag full of puffins.

-Ah, no.

-That's my son with the blue hat.

-No.

-He's coming over here with the bags.

-Can I go out there?

-Yeah.

'I'm here to see puffin hunting first hand...

Siggi, hi. I'm Adam.

'..but the matter of fact reality of it comes as a bit of shock.'

Oh, look. There, if you like,

is the Icelandic tradition made flesh.

-No-one does this, you know, in Scotland any more.

-No. No.

-It's stopped?

-No-one. It's stopped, yes.

And so, it used to be a tradition in Britain to catch them,

but not now.

'Siggi's been puffin hunting since he was 12 years old,

'although he makes his living fishing for cod.'

-How far down is it?

-Just down there.

It must be the only place in the world

you can walk out of your house and catch a puffin just like this.

'These cliffs are owned by the Icelandic government,

'who restrict the puffin hunting to 45 days each summer.'

-So you rent this bit of land here?

-Yeah.

-Does that give you the right to take these puffins?

-Yeah.

And nobody else can come here?

-I always let my friends.

-Friends?

When people ask me if they can catch to eat, no problem.

That's sweet.

-OK. Can I come next to you here?

-Just here.

-Yeah.

-OK, so you have to hide a little bit.

-Yeah.

But you are in orange.

Sometimes it's better to have something like this

-because he is very curious what it is.

-Yeah.

The puffin thinks, "Oh, what is that little thing there?"

-He wants to go closer and see.

-OK.

-You have to look at them when they are coming...

-Yeah.

..and pick one.

-If you look at...

-Too many.

-..five or six,

-then you don't catch anything.

-Right.

Oh, wow!

That's was yards out in the sky.

Wow!

'I'm struck by Siggi's skill,

'but I'm less sure how I feel about witnessing the killing of a puffin.'

Just one twist and he's done.

Is he dead? He's still moving.

-It's just the kick.

-Afterwards, yeah.

He's gone, yes.

He's still flickering, a bit of life.

-That's just the kicks.

-It's just the nerves. Yes, I know.

If we just leave him there for now.

'I want to be OK with this.

'Siggi's certainly retained a connectedness

'to the birds that we've lost,

'but it's much harder than I expected to watch a puffin die.'

You know, a lot of people if they see someone doing this

will think, "How could you?"

Every bird is OK to catch them if you just do it right.

Don't be greedy.

Don't catch too much.

If we saw some change of the puffin here,

I think the men who are catching the puffin would stop.

'Siggi and his fellow hunters are clearly aware of their possible

'impact on the puffins,

'but with looming declines elsewhere,

'I struggle to get behind the killing of any sea birds.'

When you take a bird and you kill a bird like that,

do you feel any sense of it not being the right thing to do?

No.

I think it's just we catch them to eat,

so I don't see any different.

-It's just meat.

-Yep. Yeah.

It is still flickering its life.

It's strange to see the last moments of life

going out of a creature like that.

Yeah.

-Shall we go and...

-Prepare them?

-..take off?

-Yeah.

-Yeah, lovely, let's do that.

'There's certainly nothing antique or nostalgic

about Siggi's harvest.

From his bright orange outfit and now this quad bike,

there's an everyday modernity that I wasn't expecting.

Instead of making a mess in the house,

Siggi prefers to butcher the puffins

in his fish processing shed by the harbour.

And I naively think I can lend a hand.

There they are.

You take it like this

and you can feel his neck.

-Take it like this.

-Ai-ai-ai.

Like this.

And there you have the breast of a puffin.

-Just the meat and the breast.

-You do that as neatly as catching it.

I mean, everything about you, Siggi,

it's done with such economy and precision.

I'm going to leave you to it

cos I will make a horrible mess of it.

'The dexterity with which Siggi deals with the birds is impressive,

'but I still cannot get past my lifetime's love of the puffin.'

When I look at that, I think,

"Wow. You pay quite a high price for this meat."

You know, that is what we are getting,

but this is the price in here and it's quite high.

Have you ever had people here who have had come to tell you

-that doing this is a bad thing?

-Yeah, we have, maybe twice.

One woman asked me how can I kill this bird.

Was she upset?

Yes, she thought we were monsters.

Did you imagine that or did she say that?

She said, "You're a monster."

Really?

'Back at the house I am looking forward to some traditional

'Icelandic cuisine.'

What is the method, Harpa?

What is your method?

There is no method.

No method. It's method free.

-It's a nice bed.

-Mm-hm.

-Then you put sauce in.

Hunt's Honey Mustard BBQ Sauce. Improved recipe.

-This is not an old Grimsey recipe?

-No.

It comes from, let me have a look. Let's just have a quick look.

Comes from Omaha. Sorry. Omaha.

-Do you want all of this in there?

-Eh, yeah.

-It takes skill to do this.

-Yeah.

-It's years of tradition in action.

So, OK, what do we do? Just lay them out here?

This is quite strange for me, you know?

Because I have loved puffins from afar all my life

and so to see so many of them laid out here

like this, in this foil,

is slightly troubling for me.

I have to admit that.

Is it too hot to handle?

Oi! Careful! Woo!

I've got that. I've got it.

My mouth is watering.

'However conflicted my feelings,

'it's abundantly clear that there's no issue for Harpa and Siggi.

'It's me that brings a hands-off conservationist culture

'that has no place here.

'But even knowing the birds are plentiful

'doesn't make this process any easier for me.'

Come on. Don't be stupid, Adam.

Don't be sentimental.

It's meat.

Here we go.

Very good. Very saucy.

-It tastes very much of the sauce.

-Yeah.

Delicious.

It's like a game bird. It's like a wild duck.

'Siggi, of course, more than anyone

'wants the birds to be here next year.

'Wherever people have hunted sea birds,

'this has nearly always been the case.

'His taking of puffins might be part of modern day-to-day life,

'but is actually rooted in an ancient subsistence relationship.

'I love the idea of this way of being,

'but in truth, in my world the puffin's been so romanticised,

'the possibility of a relationship like Siggi's has long gone.'

Back on the Shiants,

the sharp end of our relationship with the birds

is all about conservation,

although in an echo of Siggi's,

it still involves a form of hunting.

These men are part of a network of volunteers

who monitor bird numbers and movements

for the British Trust for Ornithology.

Jim Lennon and his team come here every year

to ring and recapture as many of the Shiants sea birds as they can.

-It's absolutely stuffed with birds here, isn't it?

-Yes.

'It's now July and, all being well,

'the chicks will be hatched

'and the parents should be bringing in fish for their young.'

You can see that bird up there carrying a lot of sand eels.

Oh, look at that!

Isn't that lovely? That's the first lot I've seen this year.

One, two, three, four, five,

six, seven, eight, nine,

-ten sand eels.

-Yeah.

Fantastic.

'The team will be on the Shiants for two weeks,

'and in that time they'll ring around 2,000 birds of all species.'

-Jim, is this a guillemot?

-Yes.

Oh, look at you.

Quivering. Still got some of the inside of the egg here.

Imagine being born into that. Christ.

That's a sweet thing. Would that be a week old?

-Three weeks.

-Three weeks.

How long before that one heads out to sea?

-Another week or so.

-Right.

-I think it'll be gone before us.

Yeah, OK.

So how old is that one little one?

A week, ten days, I suppose.

-Half the age, then?

-At least, yeah.

-And this growth is entirely fuelled by sand eels.

-Sand eels, yeah.

Look at that chick.

'The shag chicks are the first to hatch,

'but need up to two months in the nest before they can fly.'

This is being in touch with the alien.

Crikey! Hello, hello.

It's all right. No, we're friends, we're friends.

I'm not going to eat you.

There are people alive ten miles from here

who would have done exactly what you've done to eat this.

-The whole idea of eating them is abhorrent.

-Abhorrent, yes.

'Dave's hunting technique is not unlike Siggi's,

'even if the intention here is very different.'

-It's like fishing.

-Yep, it's like fishing.

Bridled guillemot.

That's a lovely, lovely guillemot.

It does a get a bit tangled on the wing.

I've never been so close up to a guillemot as that.

Isn't that beautiful?

What a thing.

That looks incredibly easy.

If you were here catching your dinner,

you could get any number you like, couldn't you?

You really could and if you're reliant on it as a food source

and made the effort, there's no reason you couldn't get

several hundred in a day.

Yep, there you go.

That was niftily done, though.

Look, a lovely razorbill.

OK. Lovely.

I always think their heads look very sort of 1930s Germanic.

A Nazi? Is that what you're trying to say?

Well, that kid of art style, not necessarily the politics.

They're sleek, aren't they? I think they look like gangsters.

Are you sure you don't want to put it in here?

No, I'm all right. The bird's quite comfortable.

Ring ending 995.

'The ring provides information on the age

'and movements of the bird according to when and where it's re-caught.'

Just above the ankle, so to speak.

-Between the knee and the ankle.

-Right.

'This data helps build up a picture of how the colonies are doing

'and is invaluable in monitoring the current crisis.'

The number we mark and recapture, you can begin to calculate,

"Is the adult population stable and surviving?"

The last two or three years,

the birds that are here are breeding quite well

and there seems to be good fish supplies.

So they can accommodate not breeding very well for a year or two

and the population will be fine on the whole?

-Yes, but if it's five years, they've got a problem.

-Right. OK.

And off.

We have come a long way from the traditional sea bird harvest,

via careless slaughter and even extinction,

to arrive at today's conservation movement

with all its sensitivities.

But there is an irony here.

We are doing all we can for the birds on land,

but I wonder if the greatest problem is elsewhere,

that it's the ocean our birds depend on

that we need to turn our attention to now.

In the second programme, I look more deeply at the sea bird collapse

and discover the global forces behind the crisis.

In the mid 1990s, that boundary moved westwards

and that allowed more sub-tropical water

to flood this area west of the UK.

I join puffin hunters in the south of Iceland,

where some colonies are all but gone...

We have never seen as few puffins as this summer.

..and tap into their knowledge from a lifetime with the birds.

We are still optimistic that they will come back.

I see first-hand evidence of how the marine food chain is shifting.

These are the rivals that the sea birds have got to compete with.

Meanwhile, on the Shiants, conservation gathers momentum...

A tag.

..as GPS tracking technology arrives.

And a remarkable new visitor is enticed to the islands.

Hey, look at that!

What an exquisite thing. Look at that.

And on Bass Rock,

I confront the idea of a sea bird summer

dominated by a single species.