Adam Nicholson’s book “The Call of the Seabirds”

widthHe discovered that ornithology is a hobby, first focusing on songbirds. The black bird that stumbles on the lawn is as familiar as the curious robin. Few people would think of entering with Limikolen or Herons. Or with seabirds. On the one hand, they are not easy to determine. It takes practice to distinguish between growing herring gulls, Mediterranean gulls, and black-backed gulls. The young spatula, the parasite, and the eagle skua look more or less the same to a glance. On the other hand, these birds are far from what we are familiar with. High latitudes and sub-polar waters are your comfort zone. “The farther we are, the more they feel at home.” This is what the British author Adam Nicholson said in his book “The Call of the Seabirds”.

When he was eight years old, his father went to the Chiante Islands with him. This uninhabited archipelago belongs to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and has a bitter charm: cliffs and rocky beaches, grassy slopes and rain. A desolate place. Yet life is raging there. Three hundred thousand birds greeted little Adam. They whizzed past his head and allowed themselves to be studied one metre away: “This is looking at another world.” The boy at that time was now 64 years old, but he was unfamiliar with gannets and black seagulls. Infatuation, guillemots and cormorants did not slacken in the slightest. On the contrary, it has become a true passion.

If you look closely at these animals, it is not surprising. “There are no flying marine mammals, no sea bats, no sea worms, no flying crabs or aerial humpback whales”-but seabirds. Of the approximately 10,000 known bird species, only 350 species specialize in the high seas. Their lives are fundamentally different from those of wrens or wild ducks. Although the feathered tourist in the garden may be only two years old, a wandering albatross glide in the ocean for eighty years, spanning eight million kilometers in the process. In addition, seabirds are usually monogamous, and both parents are involved in raising the children. The female usually lays only one egg (the blue tit lays 17 eggs), and it lays many years later.

These controllable proportions are in stark contrast to the large gatherings organized by seabirds for the breeding season. On the coast around Newfoundland alone, 35 million specimens are collected every summer for future generations. In addition to such amazing numbers, Nicholson’s paper also provides graphics, photos and research results. The author explains why the puffin is attracted by the incredible data provided by the orange puffin and the GPS transmitter on the puffin’s back.

Nicholson often uses poetic language to turn these ten chapters into forms: subjective, sensitive, Unfortunately, sometimes whispering, drifting away in metaphysical kitsch. As majestic as a seabird, embodying genius and “showing the beauty and mystery of existence” can be questioned and refuted as rhetorical gold leaf. In addition, Adam Nicolson (Adam Nicolson) also successfully created a differentiated presentation that even people familiar with the subject can leave a deep impression.