Return of wandering fulmar

LAST month, I visited Rathlin Island, off the Antrim coast.

I like the beautiful the scenery, the warm people, the rich history and archaeology, and the abundant wildlife — but I’d never been there in winter.

I travelled the rough road to the west lighthouse (Rathlin, though not big, has three lighthouses). The area around this lighthouse is looked after by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, because it is one of the largest sea-bird breeding colonies in Ireland. This was January and I didn’t expect sea-birds to be there. I hoped for a glimpse of a peregrine or a raven.

I was delighted I was wrong. That ultimate seabird, the fulmar, had arrived back from its oceanic wanderings and hundreds of them were noisily competing for the best cliff ledges to nest on. Fulmars are silent and lead lonely lives, but they make up for this at breeding and the clamour was intensified by the echo off the cliffs.

They also put on impressive displays of flying skill: a few short beats of their stiff, pointed wings and long glides that utilised every shift in the turbulent air currents around the exposed cliffs. This was followed by a pin-point landing on a tiny ledge. If there was another pair on the ledge, there was a noisy argument, with the head and neck stretched vertically upward and the beak open.

A couple of pairs had occupied ledges that were only a metre or so away from where I stood, on the viewing platform at the lighthouse. Their strange nostrils distinguish them from the gulls they resemble. They belong to a group of true seabirds called the ‘tube-noses’, which includes shearwaters, petrels, and their giant relatives in the Southern Ocean, albatrosses.

Apparently, the tubes on the top of the beak perform two functions. They excrete excess salt from the body and they give the bird an acute sense of smell that helps it locate food in the ocean.

Fulmars are newcomers to Ireland. The first pair bred in Co Mayo, in 1911, followed by a pair in Donegal in 1912. The number of breeding birds exploded until they covered every suitable piece of rocky coast in the country, and even a few inland cliffs and quarries. But the numbers have started to decline — since 2000, they have dropped by 37%. English research indicates the decline is due to the plastic waste they ingest when skimming food from the surface of the sea.

ELDER (Sambucus nigra)

The appearance of the first leaves on deciduous trees in spring is something to look forward to. The native elder usually obliges.

Elders can be small trees or large shrubs and are often multi-stemmed. They like soil which is rich in lime and rich in nitrogen and often grow vigorously around farmyards so, along with stinging nettles, they can be a good indicator of the site of an abandoned dwelling or farm.

In Ireland they are traditionally associated with bad luck and Christianised versions of ancient taboos include the belief that the cross Jesus was crucified on (in some versions this becomes the tree Judas hanged himself from) was elder — both are unlikely as the tree doesn’t grow in that part of the world. The negative associations are unfortunate as the tree is very beneficial to wildlife and to humans in many ways, including being the flavouring in the Italian liquor ‘Sambuca’.

— Dick Warner