Great Northern divers are big eaters

OUT on the channel, only 30 yards from the shore, three Great Northern divers are fishing.

One has caught a sizeable, red-brown crab and is rotating it in its beak, preparatory to swallowing it. The crab waves its feet and claws making things more difficult, but the bird will, of course, succeed. It is part of nature’s enduring plan that divers should eat crabs.

Great Northern divers that breed in Iceland, Greenland and Canada are seen around our coasts in winter, often close to shore. Some still retain vestiges of their vivid black-and-white summer plumage, striking against the blue sea, the white ‘spots’ on their backs like spangles catching the sunlight.

Hunting at depths up to 65ft., divers can stay underwater for minutes at a time. Amongst other species, they consume herring, haddock, whiting, crabs and prawns. The sea is their diner; they come to land only to breed.

Further out in the bay, cormorants are hunting. Truly voracious birds, they are unpopular with anglers since they threaten the trout and salmon stocks in rivers. They have been controlled by culling since medieval times.

Cormorants have been caught in nets at a depth of 130ft. This, however, would seem to be a mere plunge when one reads that the deepest dive accurately measured for any bird was 1,584 ft., almost one-third of a mile, this by an Emperor penguin in Antarctica in 1990. Emperor penguins also hold the record for duration of dive. While cormorants and divers sometimes remain submerged for so long that one wonders if they will ever again surface, an Emperor was recorded as remaining underwater for 18 minutes.

David Attenborough’s latest television series, Frozen Planet, is superb. The resilience of the creatures that survive in the sub-zero wastes is extraordinary. They transport us beyond human cares into the realm of nature, the ongoing, eternal force, the great, unfathomable plan for all life, wherein we are just another item on the planet’s ever-evolving skin.

In a Radio Times interview, Attenborough talked about the comfort that nature offers. “In moments of deep grief, the only consolation you can find is in the natural world. People write to me and tell me this — people of great distinction ... ‘When so-and-so died, the only thing that made life tolerable was to watch programmes on plants and animals’. And I thought, ‘That’s true for me, yes’. Because we are part of a big, enduring thing.”

I can endorse this observation in my own small way. In 2003, Gill and Macmillan published my book, A Place Near Heaven: A Year in West Cork. While the text has, apparently, provided diversion and inspiration for various readers, more importantly, it has (I’ve been told) brought solace to a few who, in illness, have found its essays on nature comforting. That my writing should do this is my best reward. It is, of course, the landscapes and the creatures that inhabit them that bring the comfort; I simply try to sketch what I see.

Life is, as always, “in the lap of the gods“, but the new gods are the technologists who can manipulate genes, clone life and create an internet system reaching to the farthest ends of the earth and beyond on a silicone chip as big as an infant’s fingernail.

The old gods created genes and consciousness and communication networks within the brains of living creatures, systems very much more sophisticated than the internet. The new technologists are set on discovering how they did it. They have brought us to the first second of the first minute of Understanding, but fulfillment is still light years away. How will this Understanding avail us? What is our ambition — that we should become gods ourselves, with all the responsibilities of gods? Our human dabbling has often been dangerous as we try to control forces which so often (tsunami, reactors flooded, meltdowns, etcetera) break lose of our constraints and do what they want to do, unstoppable. And yet, we humans must continue on our journey. We have no option; that, too, was hard-wired into our genes by the old gods — “... to follow knowledge, like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”

I applaud our resilience and our aspiration. I wish my readers peace and contentment at Christmas, and new hope in 2012.