With nature and a camera

Chapter II. The birds and fowlers of St Kilda

The birds on Stack Lee

During our stay Willie Macdonald caught an old male bird whilst he sat asleep on Borrera in broad daylight. The young Gannets are killed in September.

Guillemots are also caught at night, but in a totally different manner. About three weeks after the birds have returned to their breeding quarters on the rocks they are suddenly driven away from a number of favourite ledges late one evening, and long before dawn the following morning a man is lowered to each. Here he sits, motionless as a statue, and at the first suggestion of daybreak the birds stream up from the sea and alight upon him, thinking he is a rock, and are promptly secured and killed. As many as a hundred may be killed in this way in an hour, I was told, by one man alone. Directly it becomes light enough to distinguish the fowler from a rock, the birds steer clear of the ledge on which he sits and he is hauled up.

Our old friend Martin says that he was told by the steward "that a red-coat had been found in one Solan Goose's nest, and a brass sun-dial, an arrow, and some Molucca beans in another."

One writer mentions that while on a voyage to St Kilda, the boat in which he was travelling was sailing at a great pace before the wind, when a Gannet, having marked a fish just in front, stooped and drove its powerful beak through the bottom of the vessel, breaking its neck in the collision.

When we finally left St Kilda on board the Hebridean, we were told that the captain intended to steam round by Stack Lee in order to give his passengers a sight of the birds upon it. As the boat came abreast of the towering rock, some members of the crew loaded and ran out a small brass cannon. The tip of a red-hot poker applied to the touch-hole of the gun produced a deafening explosion, which seemed to be instantly flung back at us by Stack Lee, and then thundered and reverberated from crag to crag along the rocky sides of Borrera, sending a great white cloud of startled Gannets into the air above us. Yet in spite of this vast multitude wheeling round and round, and rising slowly higher and higher, the birds on Stack Lee had suffered no apparent diminution in numbers. When we had steamed round to the opposite side of Borrera and a considerable distance away from it, I witnessed one of the most curious sights it has ever been my good fortune to behold.

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A gleam of sunshine fell between two immense pinnacles of rock, causing a great ray of bright light to descend obliquely to the sea, very much like a shaft of morning sunlight penetrating an empty room through a notch-hole in a closed shutter. The Gannets returning to their nests, could be plainly seen wheeling and dancing in this ray of sunshine, like atoms of white dust.

Gannets