Oceanic Bird
The Fulmar. By James Fisher. (Collins. 35s.) JAMES FISHER has written a remarkable book on a remarkable bird, and I for one have found it difficult to lay aside. An oceanic bird w. hich has nested four thousand feet up amid the eternal snow and ice of the Arctic, a bird which has been seen winging its sure way over icy wastes within 300 miles of the North Pole, and has been seen like a ghost flying overhead in the cold and darkness of the Polar winter ; a bird which crosses the Atlantic from east to west in its stride, and lives on the ocean out of sight of land during the most stormy months of the year—that bird is surely worth a book to itself.
The fulmar, lord of the ocean, is among the most superb fliers that exist, and its admirers are many and world-wide. It is a bird which has increased in the British Isles in a remarkable way during the past century. Up to the year 1878 the only British colony was on St. Kilda. That year Foula, west of Shetland, was colonised, and gradually the species spread south. Mr. Fisher does not think the new arrivals came from St. Kilda ; rather he believes their origin to have been the Faeroes, or perhaps Iceland. Whatever their origin (and there must be a large yearly surplus population of young on St. Kilda now that the St. Kildans are now no longer there to harvest them), these wandering fulmars are still each year forming new colonies in Britain. The species colonised first the mainland of Scotland, spreading thence, on the east side, into England, and, on the west side, into England, Wales and Northern Ireland and Eire. The fulmar, as a breeding species, has now indeed almost encircled the British Isles. This, for a bird which normally lays only one egg in the course of a year, is so remarkable that it sounds almost like a fairy-story.
The increase is the more welcome because the fulmar is a beautiful and harmless bird, and one that can be studied without difficulty, since it nests not only on the lonely parts of the coast, but near towns and villages, and on at least one house in Scotland—Dunrobin Castle on the east side of Sutherland. It has also been seen to perch on the terraces of the Grand Hotel, Scarborough. On Dunrobin the problem has been to prevent the eggs and young from falling to the ground from the sills of the upper windows which the birds have used as a breeding-place, and I do not think that any young have been reared here.
The observer who watches a coastal colony of fulmars soon realises how careful the birds are to keep to the seaward side of thet cliff and to avoid flying over the land. Yet, once this mistrust fo'., land has been conquered, the fulmar will sometimes choose an inland cliff on which to nest—witness the new colonies in North- umberland in the Belford district half-a-dozen miles from the sea. But the fulmar does not nest only on cliffs. On Eynhallow in Orkney, in June, 1950, I saw a fulmar's nest and egg on very short heather on a gently-sloping hillside, the site being one on which it might have been expected to find an oyster-catcher nesting. This fulmar did not sit so closely as usual, but returned to her egg while I was standing in full view a hundred yards away.
Both male and female fulmars share the incubation of the egg, which may take fifty-seven days to hatch. Mr. Roland Richter made an intensive study of a pair of fulmars at the Hopeman colony in Scotland, and found (the female was marked with black paint) that there were only eight " change-overs " between June 17th and July 17th. This means that the two birds changed places approxi- mately every fourth day, and that the bird off-duty was able to travel a long way, but Mr. Fisher believes that the feeding-ground is normally, in temperate regions, within 200 miles of the nesting site. On the other hand, he records that in north-east Greenland and Franz Josef Land fulmars nest on ice-beset cliffs hundreds of miles from open water, and during its period " off duty " the bird must here cover the best part of 1,000 miles in the double flight to and from the feeding grounds. James Fisher has come to the conclusion that the fulmar is a slow-maturing bird, and may not nest until it is five years old. This would explain why new colonies are frequented during the nesting season, but no eggs are laid until several years after the colony has been founded. He would not be surprised if the life of the fulmar was half a century.
James Fisher's book is packed full of interesting information. His prose is simple and clear, and the least scientific-minded of his readers can follow him easily. It is a book which will appeal to the young (who will enjoy the flashes of puckish humour interspersed with scientific facts), to the middle-aged and to the old. r can imagine no more suitable Christmas present to give one's bird- loving friends. The author has named innumerable helpers, and tells us at the end the secret of the charm of the book. He says : " I have written this book, not because I have thought it ' useful ' to do so, but because I like fulmars and everything to do with them."
SETON GORDON.
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