Lundy (Concluded)
...Puffins, in Lundy, are there in the spring and early summer,
and as I was there in the late summer we missed one another; I was told, though,
by the islanders that they are a small, black-and-white sea bird with an
unbelievable beak of every color, a singing voice that somewhat resembles Mr.
Gade's, and a gait like a rolling ship. Further research turned up the news that
puffins were eaten in the Middle Ages; that they themselves eat animals 98.22
percent of the time and algae 1.78 percent of the time; that they are popularly
known as sea parrots, Lundy parrots, tommie noddies, tammy nories, and
bottlenoses, and taxonomically as Fratercula arctica--'little arctic
brother." A great deal of what is known about puffins, and Lundy's puffins
especially, was learned there in 1939 by Mr. Richard Perry, a naturalist who
went about it with the same patience and self-abnegation that characterized the
Curies. For eighteen weeks, Mr. Perry did little else but sit on a rock, looking
at puffins, and eventually he developed as intimate a fellowship with them as
could be expected in two beings of such widely disparate species. At first, the
puffins were quite embarrassed by his attentions--Mr. Perry confesses how they
would frequently break off their love-making "for a moment's reflection or
a sheepish look around"--but finally, when they realized that Mr. Perry
could not be shamed into withdrawal and had become, indeed, a rather permanent
fixture in their lives, they began "to ring me round…conducting their
various little intimacies, indifferent to my presence, so suspect to most wild
birds; so that I was conscious of what was, perhaps, man's true relationship
with beasts and birds. Here was tranquility."
Once this true relationship had been established between Mr. Perry and puffin, the former observed that the latter like to kiss one another rapturously with their extraordinary bills, and he remarked, "This most vigorous and prolonged performance was an abiding joy, and remains my most vivid memory of puffins." It should be stressed, of course, that Mr. Perry merely observed this activity and didn't participate in it; however, he was joined in his spectator capacity by a good number of leisured puffins, who, presently, were not only kissing each other but were kissing the initial kisser's wife or being themselves kissed by him--as idyllic a scene as one could wish. Theorizing, Mr. Perry said the bills of puffins exude a kind of nectar pleasurable to other puffins. After several days of this behavior, the birds "were approaching their zenith of emotional excitement," and Mr. Perry was also approaching his--but then the puffins flew bashfully to sea to mate, and Mr. Perry ruefully concedes that "I only saw one attempt, and that unsuccessful, at a mating on a boulder: the hen puffin running around it, with the cock balancing precariously on her stern with wildly fanning wings. This was evidently an abnormal procedure." Mr. Perry doesn't cast any judgments on his own procedure at the time, but he does say that the puffins' procedure results in a little egg and, subsequently, a baby puffin.
In biological circles, Lundy is noted not only for the puffin but for a kind of cabbage, supposedly the ancestor of every cabbage; Dr. F. R. Elliston Wright, a botanist, came upon it several years ago while walking to the Marisco Tavern, subsequently naming it Brasicella wrightii in his own honor. Some Welsh ponies, Norwegian rats, and Japanese deer are also at large in Lundy; two kangaroos were tried there with Mr. Harman's permission (see Article V), but they hopped, respectively, into a well and into the Atlantic; snakes, lizards, frogs, toads, and salamanders don't exist, and the National Geographic of May, 1947, says there aren't any bacteria, either. Besides puffins, one hundred and forty-five species of birds inhabit Lundy, and many others visit it from time to time, including such transoceanic rarities as the Sardinian warbler and the American robin. Personally I'm not a practicing bird watcher, and none of this stuff especially fascinates me, but, I realize, there are readers of mine whom it does, who are anxious to hear even more, and, for their benefit, I have studied some of the voluminous ornithological logs that were kept in Lundy for many centuries, and I have recorded in the next paragraph, and in no particular order, a few of the sightings that seem of more than routine interest. It is a paragraph that people, like me, who aren't markedly fond of birds are well advised to ignore.
Lundy, anyhow, I learned from my readings, has been visited by such exotic feathered creatures as the great auk, the great tit, the twite, knot, teal, stint, snipe, shag, rook, wigeon, and wood pigeon, as well as by two apparently distinct species, the chaffinch and the chiffchaff. The chaffinches were seen in great profusion at lunchtime, September 3, 1880, and a year later one was caught by a fellow named Ward, who gave it to Annie. The chiffchaff, for its part, was duly noted, but escaped captivity, from March 12 to October 23, 1954, and a fate worse than a chaffinch's was meted to a gray phalarope on December 9, 1881, when it was shot by W.B.; Cecilia Harriet Heaven called it "an evil deed," and so do I. Mr. Norman H. Joy saw an arctic skua on August 22, 1905. "A lady visitor," writes Loyd, in a memorandum on the reed warbler, "insisted she saw birds of this species daily in a certain spot…A very careful search on many occasions failed to reveal the bird, and the assertion of its presence must be accepted with great reserve." Mr. Norman H. Joy saw a cirl bunting on an unspecified day in April, 1906, and Mr. Perry looked up from his puffins on May 20, 1939, to observe a plover of some sort; he hadn't decided what sort when he was at his puffins again. A peregrine falcon was recorded in 1274 A.D. and an albatross on June 13, 1874, but, I think, the assertion of its presence must be accepted with great reserve. Crespi saw a goshawk, but Loyd says he is "obviously in error," and Hendy saw a tree pipit, but Davenport says, "As may be imagined, we saw no tree pipits"; the consensus on yellow wagtails is three to four, with Perry, Davenport, and an unnamed bluebottle maintaining the affirmative; Crespi, Rousham, Ross, and Cummings upholding the negative; and Loyd keeping his own counsel on the matter. On September 23, 1954, a spotted flycatcher caught a butterfly and hit its head against a tree, and in October, 1874, a yellow-billed cuckoo hit its head against a tree and dropped dead, after flying non-stop from the United States. Jack snipes, by way of contrast, have been hitting their heads against a lighthouse, while the foghorn there has frightened away the choughs, which were "as common as crows" in 1860, and the gannets, which were as common as choughs in 1321 A.D. A nightjar sang at 10:30 in the evening, May 30, 1922. Bluebottles in Lundy have reported nightingales, white-tailed eagles, and lesser gray shrikes, but nobody ever believed them, and in 1953 a cook at the Lundy Field Society reported a pelican, and everybody laughed and laughed. Well, it was a pelican; it had just escaped from the Bristol zoo.
While
W.B., the lighthouse, and the foghorn have played, of course, an unparalleled
role in the lives, respectively, of the gray phalarope, the jack snipe, and the
gannet, there surely hasn't been anything of such profound consequence to the
average bird of Lundy as the founding of the Lundy Field Society there, in 1946.
Since then, the birds have scarcely known a moment to call their own. Not only
are they kept under a constant surveillance that would be reserved anywhere else
for suspected criminals, but a full blotter is being maintained on their comings
and goings, their associations with other birds, their sexual indiscretions, and
such intimate details of personal hygiene as even Mr. Perry would blush at, such
as the name, number, and whereabouts of their body lice. 
Many
of these birds, after a dozen years of such scant privacy, are beginning to
betray the same signs of nervous collapse that might be expected in a human
being. A case in point is the Manx shearwater, a shy, rather introverted bird
whose mental state became so desperate that the elder Mr. Harman had to
memorialize the Lundy Field Society on its behalf. "This particular
colony," he wrote, "has suffered from rats, but has also suffered a
bit from being over-birdwatched. I don't take any exception to this, for it is
all in the cause of science, but I understand that not a single bird
hatched."
Mr. Harman's charitable attitude toward the Lundy Field Society seems to have been tempered, at the start, with an uneasy suspicion of its real motives. When the idea of the society was broached to him, in 1946, by its moving spirit, Professor L. A. Harvey of University College, Exeter, his reply "was only mildly encouraging, as well it might be," the professor said. "But it was not actively discouraging." Later, though, Mr. Harman had braver second thoughts, and he not only invited the Lundy Field Society to Lundy but gave it two hundred and fifty dollars, its first subscription, and the abandoned lighthouse to live in. Today, the lighthouse is still the society's roost, being inhabited in the migrating season by a half-dozen earnest bird watchers and in every season by Miss Barbara K. Whittaker, its warden, a young, personable, studious woman whose tireless devotion to the birds is regarded by the present Mr. Harman with the same uneasy suspicion that his father once had.
The first I'd seen of Miss Whittaker was from the paddle-wheeler the day I came: she was sitting on the beach beneath a rotted, upturned rowboat and peering into the drizzle with grim intensity, swallow-watching. A little later, I visited her native habitat, the lighthouse, and I met Miss Whittaker more formally, and she, in turn, introduced me to several other bird watchers there and to Mr. Oliver Hook, a lively old Englishman who watches seals but hasn't anything in particular against birds. The lighthouse itself was a perfect chaos: of tables and rickety orange crates, of dirty dishes, of unwrapped butter, marmalade tins, Spam cans, and dismembered bits of liverwurst and baloney, of shaggy, gray-green books in topless heaps, of bulletin boards, broadsides, and ornithological pinups, and, in the interstices of all this, moving guardedly, of Miss Whittaker and the bird watchers, all of them wearing baggy woolen sweaters and looking absolutely in the pink of health. The bird watchers, for the most part, were eating liverwurst, and Miss Whittaker was writing assiduously in the daily log. I saw that her entry was a curious one, this:
Wednesday, Sept. 7. Oliver Hook arrived. O.H. entered straight way into L.F.S. activities and visited Seal Hole with B.K.W., where a calf about 24 hours old was found. The spirited young lady left her imprint on O.H.
Puzzled by this, I asked O.H. for a fuller explanation, and hastily was told
that the spirited young lady referred to wasn't Miss Whittaker but the seal, and
that the imprint was of its teeth--by now, a terrifying purple welt on his
forearm. Mr. Hook assured me it wasn't malignant and, when I inquired about the
seal, observed it had been shooed away by splashing water in its face,
apparently, in Lundy, the accepted procedure for shooing away seals. Later, Mr.
Hook said, he managed to get the seal again, weigh it, measure it, and tag it
for future reference with a small aluminum band. Both parties to the operation
had set a record for Lundy, the seal being the first of its species to be tagged
by a human being, and Mr. Hook being the first of his to be bitten by a seal.
For the time being, Mr. Hook said, he proposed leaving the seals to their own devices and investigating the birds, instead, and, if possible, even catching some for more particularized study. The idea of catching a bird rather fascinated me, and, although I confessed I wouldn't know how to begin, he invited me along, and Miss Whittaker came too. When we left the lighthouse, it was late afternoon, and the setting sunlight swept across the island like a wind. Below us, the beach already was in twilight; sea gulls circled in the warmth above it, and black cormorants stood on rocks, spreading their wings like Prussian eagles. Miss Whittaker, Mr. Hook, and I walked silently for ten minutes and came, presently, to a heavy thicket of bramble and stones, rising like a dinosaur out of which was an extraordinary contrivance of wire fences, wood, and ropes, of doors and pulleys moaning in the breeze. This, Miss Whittaker said cheerfully, was a Heligoland bird trap, the most serviceable kind there is. I stared astonishedly at the Heligoland bird trap, estimating it one hundred feet long, thirty feet wide, and eight feet high--roughly one million times as large as the average bird.
Presently, Miss Whittaker saw my dismay, and observed that a Heligoland bird trap--although such elemental devices as dead herrings, balls of wool, and W.B.'s rifle had been used instead--is superior to any of these because of the sheer intricacy of its mechanism, which only the most erudite of birds could hope to grasp. Its proper utilization begins, she continued, when she thrashes about in the bramble and frightens a bird into the trap, shutting a screen door behind it. The bird flies about in consternation, and more and more screen doors are closed by Miss Whittaker, who--did I say?--is also inside the Heligoland bird trap; the woebegone bird finds itself in smaller and smaller quarters, and finally, when the last door closes, in a small, accessible, wooden box. As she explained this, Miss Whittaker scurried about the trap, thrashing her arms, yanking ropes, and closing doors by way of demonstration, and when she had finished, she put her hand demonstratively into the wooden box and discovered, to her astonishment, there was a bird inside. It was a female redstart, which apparently had been there all along, and Miss Whittaker drew it forth in triumph.
Until now, I hadn't considered what Miss Whittaker would do with a bird-in-the-hand once she had it there, so she explained that the customary procedure is to weigh it, measure its wing, bill, and leg bone, observe the color of its eye, put all this in a notebook, appropriate its body lice, put all that in a bottle, assign the bird a serial number, put this serial number--a tiny aluminum band--on its leg, and finally let the bird, band, and serial number fly blithely away. So saying, Miss Whittaker carried the redstart to a little shack and began to perform these operations, and, as she did so, commented, "The Lundy Field Society ringed more than a thousand birds last year--one thousand and ninety-eight, I believe, of forty-six different species. The late Mr. Harman discovered that we are relatively very active in the bird ringing business, since the neighboring island is forty thousand times as large but rings only twenty times as many birds. Birds that were ringed in Lundy have turned up, later, in such places as Chaves, Portugal; Alicante, Spain; and Izmozen, Spanish Morocco; and, of course, that helps us to understand how they migrate, as do the ectoparasites. In Lundy, the birds are lousy, and as you can see--they have a lot of lice, that is--and as you can see, this redstart has two or three of them in the scruff of her neck. I don't care for ectoparasites myself, but Mr. Gordon B. Thompson does, and he's asked us to save them. Mr. Thompson has discovered that the most common ectoparasite here, in Lundy, is a tick, Ixodes reduvius." Mr. Hook and I listened to this attentively, but the redstart seemed to have heard it all before. It didn't look frightened, it looked bored, and after being released it flew to the bramble and sat on a juniper twig as if nothing out-of-the-way had happened. It didn't even make its experiences known to the other redstarts, to whom, I gathered, the whole bird ringing business was old hat.
Presently, Mr. Hook observed something to the effect that two birds in the hand are worth one in the bush, and proposed that the three of us try to capture, measure, and ring another one, having had such notable success with the redstart. This struck Miss Whittaker as an excellent idea, so she, Mr. Hook, and I equipped ourselves with branches and began thrashing about in the bramble by the Heligoland bird trap. We managed to rouse a single bird--another redstart, which popped from the underbrush like a champagne cork and flew over my shoulder to distant, unknown parts. Miss Whittaker and Mr. Hook watched it go, and turned to me with disappointment.
"I'm awfully sorry," I said.
"That's all right," Miss Whittaker said, but I knew that her heart wasn't in it.
A few days later, before departing from Lundy on the paddle-wheeler and going, out of a growing curiosity, to Sark, I visited the old lighthouse again to see what mention had been made of our activities in the Lundy Field Society's daily log. I knew, of course, that these logs had been around for centuries and would be, inevitably, for centuries more, so I was delighted to see the following:
Thursday, sept. 8. B.K.W. swallow-watched all day, but in the evening she, an American author (or journalist) Mr. Fach (?) and O.H. worked the Heligoland Trap on the terrace and caught and ringed a redstart.
The hesitant nature of this entry doesn't bother me at all. The bird was the
first and only redstart whose capture and enringing I have been to any degree
responsible for, and I'm proud as a peacock, happy as a lark, to have been
granted this unsolicited measure of immortality.
