Noss, Gannets, & a beautiful tune
Photos & doings off the coast of Lerwick, Shetland
In Shetland, we were based in the capital city of Lerwick. Walking along the harbor, among the many boats and sailing ships, I spotted The Swan, pictured below at left. This is the ship that I mentioned in the post and video featuring singer Karine Polwart performing in the resonant Italian Chapel on Orkney. She was filmed singing a Hamish Henderson song there as part of a project in which a group of musicians and other artists sailed on this restored 19th century Shetland fishing boat officially called Swan LK243, to explore the culture and landscape of the Orkneys islands. The boat has also participated in a tall ships race.
At the end of this article, I’ll share with you a video of Catriona McKay, the great Shetland harp player, playing her beautiful tune, “The Swan,” inspired by her journey with the other artists on that ship.
The other two photos below show a replica of a Viking longship, docked in Lerwick harbor. This one was made locally in a boat shed 40 feet long, so that’s how long the boat is, plus the head and tail, which were added after the boat was built and removed from the shed. Full-sized Viking longships historically ranged from 50 to 120 feet in length. This replica is called Dim Riv, a Norse reference to the splash of sun at the dawning of the day. Made in 1980, it’s maintained by a local committee dedicated to keeping it shipshape.
I took the photo of the Swan from the dock, and photos of the Dim Riv from a boat we boarded in order to visit the island of Noss, which is a nature preserve and bird sanctuary.
To get to Noss, we first had to navigate through and beyond Lerwick harbor, and the skipper took that opportunity to point out various buildings and note their histories.
We sailed to the other side of Bressay, the large island just off Lerwick, and soon, the rocks of Noss came slowly into view.
As our boat rounded the bend by the cliffs of Noss, we were confronted with spectacular 600-foot sheer cliffs filled with nesting seabirds — gannets, guillemots, and fulmars — lined up practically shoulder to shoulder.
There are about 20,000 gannets nesting at Noss. You may recall that we visited another gannet nesting area on our trip to the south of Scotland, when we visited Bass Rock, a black island that appears white from a distance because of the 150,000 gannets perched there!
Below, you can see them on every shelf and cranny of the cliffs, lined up to protect their nesting spots.
If you look closely at the photos below, you can see the sky filled with gannets, white in the sun on the left, and black against the clouds on the right. (Note: to zoom in, you can click on the photo; if you’re viewing this in an email, this will take you to this article online where you can zoom in as desired, and while you’re online, you can peruse some of the other more than 100 articles in this series!)
Gannets mate for life, and sometimes you can see pairs “billing,” where they cross bills back and forth for minutes at a time when one of the pair returns from a fishing expedition.
We watched them circle the water high up and, one after the other, dive down at speeds of up to 60mph, from heights of 40-120 feet in order to catch fish. Gannets are able to dive to depths of 20 to 80 feet underwater by swimming with their wings. Their nostril openings are inside their bill so that the force of diving and swimming doesn’t force water up their noses. To put the picture below into perspective, their wingspan is about 6 feet.
These birds were everywhere on the rocks and in the air. Some followed our boat because as we were busy watching the birds, the skipper was quietly dropping a line into the water and catching fish, filling a bucket on deck. He then threw some of the fish overboard so we could watch the gannets compete with each other as they dove into the water to snatch the fish.
Below you can see some of the beautiful craggy rock formations along the cliffs of Noss. At right, behind the lines of white birds, a few dark caves can be seen, cut into the rocks.
Our boat backed slowly into one of the caves, allowing us to see young shags (a type of bird similar to cormorants) on narrow shelves inside, presumably better protected there from some of the predatory birds in the area. You can see them in the middle photo below.
On the left are adult shags hanging out in the sun.
In the photo at right, in the center, appearing black against the boat’s wake, you’ll see a Great Skua, or as they call them in Shetland, a Bonxie. The skuas are predators that breed inland but scour the cliffs in case they can steal some of the gannets’ food or pick up an egg or dead gannet chick that might have fallen into the water. The skua have even been known to gang up on a puffin to force it down into the water in order to drown and eat it.
This particular skua carefully tracked our boat and slowly gained on us, aligning its speed and flight path perfectly so as to nab a biscuit out of the outstretched hand of the skipper.
Before heading back to the harbor, the skipper settled the boat in a quiet spot to tell stories of the area, and to serve us some coffee, tea, and tasty biscuits (to Americans, these are semi-sweet cookies).
As we approached the harbor again, the skipper pointed out that we were being followed by some friends — a bunch of seals. He tossed out to them the remaining fish he’d caught, and when we docked, several of them even came half up the back of the boat to beg for more!
We enjoyed offering this boat ride several different years to our travelers, but one year we didn’t see any seals. That was the year when a pod of seal-hunting orcas were circling Shetland, and the seals went into hiding. Some years, there are only fish-eating orcas around, and the seals are in the clear.
When the orcas do make an appearance, there’s a lot of excitement. People frantically text or message each other on social media — “Orcas spotted just now at…” and one time, after several missed attempts, we did spotted a circle of orcas in a small bay.
Coming back to Lerwick harbor and the boats docked there, including the Swan I mentioned at the top of this post, below is a video of Catriona McKay playing her beautiful tune, “The Swan LK243,” on harp. She is accompanied by fiddler Aly Bain, Jerry Douglas on dobro, pianist Donald Shaw, and Russ Barenberg on guitar, in a performance from Transatlantic Sessions. Catriona has played harp and piano since 1998 with the Shetland band Fiddlers Bid, tours and records in a duo with innovative Shetland fiddler Chris Stout, and made a recent album with Alistair MacDonald.
A friend and I walked a roadway from the Lerwick ferry landing on Bressay to a small boat landing on the other side of the island. We ferried from there to Noss and spent several hours dodging skua, hiking on the grassy, elevated plateau, enjoying the view of the islands, cliffs, and birdlife from above.