1 00:00:05,920 --> 00:00:08,880 Britain is an island nation. 2 00:00:08,880 --> 00:00:12,520 The sea is in our history and in our blood. 3 00:00:12,520 --> 00:00:17,080 The British have a great affection for the sea, of course. A seafaring nation, 4 00:00:17,080 --> 00:00:19,160 we go to the seaside for our holidays. 5 00:00:19,160 --> 00:00:23,360 People are drawn to the sea just to look at it. 6 00:00:23,360 --> 00:00:29,680 For centuries, Britons have travelled the oceans, as fishermen, explorers and traders. 7 00:00:31,480 --> 00:00:35,640 This brought us into contact with seabirds, 8 00:00:35,640 --> 00:00:40,080 both on the high seas and around our coasts. 9 00:00:42,120 --> 00:00:47,760 Coastal communities established deep relationships with these birds, living off their meat, 10 00:00:47,760 --> 00:00:51,120 their eggs and a host of other vital commodities. 11 00:00:53,040 --> 00:00:58,920 Even in the middle of the 20th century, seabirds were still being exploited for food. 12 00:00:58,920 --> 00:01:02,600 There was a sense that this was something that was given to them 13 00:01:02,600 --> 00:01:08,960 in a bountiful providence, and it was there to harvest, and it would be wasteful not to harvest them. 14 00:01:08,960 --> 00:01:12,440 Seabirds slipped into our literature 15 00:01:12,440 --> 00:01:14,440 and our fashion. 16 00:01:14,440 --> 00:01:18,360 They transformed Victorian agriculture 17 00:01:18,360 --> 00:01:21,760 and created monumental family fortunes. 18 00:01:21,760 --> 00:01:25,480 But how much longer will they shape our culture? 19 00:01:26,480 --> 00:01:32,840 The story of our relationship with seabirds is an ancient and turbulent one, 20 00:01:32,840 --> 00:01:35,560 like our relationship with the sea itself. 21 00:01:35,560 --> 00:01:42,200 It's an untold chapter in the history of our rise and fall as a seafaring people. 22 00:01:53,760 --> 00:02:01,320 Of all our birds, seabirds are the most enigmatic, the most remote from our daily lives. 23 00:02:01,320 --> 00:02:07,680 There is something remarkable, wonderful and extraordinary about seabirds. 24 00:02:07,680 --> 00:02:10,200 I think it's to do with mystery. 25 00:02:13,000 --> 00:02:19,240 So birds that inhabit the sea acquire something of the...charisma of the sea. 26 00:02:22,640 --> 00:02:28,600 A lot of them make a noise that sounds like something the other side of the world that we know. 27 00:02:28,600 --> 00:02:30,880 Extremely lonely, 28 00:02:30,880 --> 00:02:33,320 extremely beautiful, 29 00:02:33,320 --> 00:02:36,320 with a kind of forlornness about it. 30 00:02:36,320 --> 00:02:38,320 BIRD CRIES 31 00:02:39,920 --> 00:02:44,440 Much of this wild magic comes from the way they live their lives. 32 00:02:45,600 --> 00:02:49,880 I think there's a powerful sense of the other about seabirds. 33 00:02:49,880 --> 00:02:55,360 For most of the year, they're out at sea, and then for a period from... 34 00:02:55,360 --> 00:03:01,360 April through till early July they're breeding on cliffs, sometimes extremely remote. 35 00:03:11,680 --> 00:03:13,560 Britain's 12,000 miles of coastline 36 00:03:13,560 --> 00:03:18,920 are one of the best environments for seabirds anywhere in the world. 37 00:03:18,920 --> 00:03:22,520 Because of the North Atlantic drift and the continental shelf 38 00:03:22,520 --> 00:03:27,680 and our rich seas, our seabirds are spectacular. 39 00:03:27,680 --> 00:03:30,880 This is really our sort of Serengeti. 40 00:03:37,680 --> 00:03:39,960 Some seven million seabirds, 41 00:03:39,960 --> 00:03:43,680 of two dozen different species, nest on our coasts. 42 00:03:55,880 --> 00:04:01,840 They do have these phenomenal seabird cities on our towering sea cliffs. 43 00:04:01,840 --> 00:04:04,480 They're bustling with activity, 44 00:04:04,480 --> 00:04:07,880 marvellous smell comes wafting up the cliff, 45 00:04:07,880 --> 00:04:12,040 which bowls people over when they first come to the edge of the cliff. 46 00:04:14,360 --> 00:04:19,320 One can probably see ten to a hundred thousand birds 47 00:04:19,320 --> 00:04:22,080 at every moment of the day, 48 00:04:22,080 --> 00:04:26,320 and it's a kind of overwhelming abundance of life, 49 00:04:26,320 --> 00:04:29,480 and that's part of the British landscape. 50 00:04:40,680 --> 00:04:44,880 Today, these wonders are largely out of sight and out of mind. 51 00:04:44,880 --> 00:04:48,640 But it was the sheer abundance of our seabird colonies that 52 00:04:48,640 --> 00:04:52,880 originally made them so important and irresistible to our ancestors. 53 00:04:56,400 --> 00:05:00,680 That story starts on the remotest islands in the British Isles. 54 00:05:02,200 --> 00:05:03,720 St Kilda. 55 00:05:05,440 --> 00:05:08,440 It's a place that looms out of nowhere for you. 56 00:05:08,440 --> 00:05:14,200 You've got all this empty ocean, and suddenly there it is, Atlantis. 57 00:05:14,200 --> 00:05:18,360 This cluster of islands and stacks lies off the Outer Hebrides, 58 00:05:18,360 --> 00:05:20,960 far out in the Atlantic Ocean. 59 00:05:20,960 --> 00:05:23,520 Every summer more than a million seabirds 60 00:05:23,520 --> 00:05:26,600 come ashore to these rocky outcrops to breed. 61 00:05:26,600 --> 00:05:32,320 St Kilda is a particular stronghold for our largest seabird, the gannet. 62 00:05:42,520 --> 00:05:45,200 It could have been designed by an Ancient Egyptian. 63 00:05:45,200 --> 00:05:46,920 It looks like an Egyptian god. 64 00:05:46,920 --> 00:05:52,640 It's just the most magnificent, beautiful, elegant bird. 65 00:05:52,640 --> 00:05:56,400 And in the air it's a war machine. 66 00:05:57,400 --> 00:06:00,320 It has this incredible way of fishing, 67 00:06:00,320 --> 00:06:04,080 which is suddenly to dive vertically downwards, 68 00:06:04,080 --> 00:06:07,080 and plunge into the sea for herring or mackerel. 69 00:06:09,480 --> 00:06:12,960 And once one goes in, and if there is a shoal of fish, 70 00:06:12,960 --> 00:06:15,000 then they all come piling in. 71 00:06:20,240 --> 00:06:24,080 It was these seabirds that sustained a unique population, 72 00:06:24,080 --> 00:06:26,640 known as the "bird people of St Kilda". 73 00:06:29,560 --> 00:06:34,720 Their lifestyle was captured on film in the 1920s. 74 00:06:34,720 --> 00:06:37,760 The most remarkable hunter-gatherer community in the UK, 75 00:06:37,760 --> 00:06:42,240 until the middle of the 20th century, was the inhabitants of St Kilda. 76 00:06:42,240 --> 00:06:47,800 A small, Gaelic-speaking community that lived in crofts 77 00:06:47,800 --> 00:06:52,360 on the edge of this huge mountain on Hirta. 78 00:06:53,760 --> 00:07:00,000 Essentially, their entire lives were bound up in what they could harvest 79 00:07:00,000 --> 00:07:04,320 of wild birds from the cliffs and ledges 80 00:07:04,320 --> 00:07:07,760 around this incredible set of islands. 81 00:07:07,760 --> 00:07:10,000 St Kildans looked to seabirds 82 00:07:10,000 --> 00:07:13,240 to meet almost all their subsistence needs. 83 00:07:13,240 --> 00:07:20,200 They wore gannet necks and body parts as shoes, very short-lived shoes. 84 00:07:20,200 --> 00:07:26,280 Their medicine was derived from the oil found in the stomach of the young fulmars. 85 00:07:26,280 --> 00:07:32,840 They stored eggs in peat ash, which would last for months at a time. 86 00:07:35,400 --> 00:07:39,440 And the St Kildans had to find ways to preserve the eggs and meat, 87 00:07:39,440 --> 00:07:44,720 because the birds were only ashore for a few months each spring and summer. 88 00:07:44,720 --> 00:07:51,200 Islanders from Lewis were still using similar preserving techniques in the 1960s. 89 00:07:51,200 --> 00:07:54,520 They would take the corpses of these things 90 00:07:54,520 --> 00:07:58,640 and keep them in little stone bothies called cleats. 91 00:07:58,640 --> 00:08:04,320 And the wind would blow through and dry this meat to a type of biltong. 92 00:08:04,320 --> 00:08:07,760 And that would see them through the lean times, until they could 93 00:08:07,760 --> 00:08:10,360 start harvesting the birds again in the spring. 94 00:08:11,480 --> 00:08:14,760 The meat of the young gannet, known as the guga, 95 00:08:14,760 --> 00:08:17,840 was a staple part of their simple diet. 96 00:08:19,640 --> 00:08:22,920 I would describe guga as almost the food of the gods. 97 00:08:22,920 --> 00:08:25,400 There's something wonderful about it. 98 00:08:25,400 --> 00:08:29,240 The only way to probably cook it is to boil it. 99 00:08:29,240 --> 00:08:33,720 You know, mainlanders would probably deplore the taste of the food. 100 00:08:33,720 --> 00:08:37,840 It tastes like a piece of chamois leather dipped in oil, 101 00:08:37,840 --> 00:08:44,240 but I think it tastes like salt-mackerel-flavoured chicken. 102 00:08:44,240 --> 00:08:47,840 Although thousands of birds were killed each year, 103 00:08:47,840 --> 00:08:51,360 this had little or no effect on their populations, 104 00:08:51,360 --> 00:08:55,640 because the islanders took only what they needed to survive. 105 00:08:55,640 --> 00:08:58,800 None of the species which they harvested, 106 00:08:58,800 --> 00:09:01,560 as far as we know, ever went extinct. 107 00:09:01,560 --> 00:09:04,080 In a curious way, they were custodians. 108 00:09:04,080 --> 00:09:10,240 They had a deep impulse to preserve the goose that laid the golden egg, 109 00:09:10,240 --> 00:09:12,120 and...and they did. 110 00:09:17,120 --> 00:09:20,560 Ultimately the modern world encroached on St Kilda, 111 00:09:20,560 --> 00:09:23,720 undermining the hunter-gatherer tradition. 112 00:09:23,720 --> 00:09:28,200 The population declined due to disease and emigration. 113 00:09:28,200 --> 00:09:33,760 So in 1930 the surviving islanders decided to evacuate, 114 00:09:33,760 --> 00:09:36,480 abandoning St Kilda to the birds. 115 00:09:48,240 --> 00:09:51,040 It was only the remoteness of St Kilda 116 00:09:51,040 --> 00:09:55,480 that allowed the bird people's culture to survive for so long. 117 00:09:56,520 --> 00:10:02,320 Other coastal communities had given up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle centuries earlier, 118 00:10:02,320 --> 00:10:06,800 heralding a long, dark chapter in our dealings with seabirds. 119 00:10:08,400 --> 00:10:12,920 Those who went out to sea to make their living as fishermen and seafarers 120 00:10:12,920 --> 00:10:17,000 encountered seabirds in their true element, the open ocean. 121 00:10:18,560 --> 00:10:20,960 Here, far from home, 122 00:10:20,960 --> 00:10:26,240 one bird in particular made a deep and lasting impression on them. 123 00:10:26,240 --> 00:10:27,880 The albatross. 124 00:10:32,360 --> 00:10:34,880 I think when you're sailing, 125 00:10:34,880 --> 00:10:38,720 when one of these magnificent birds with a seven-foot wingspan, 126 00:10:38,720 --> 00:10:40,800 an albatross, suddenly appears, 127 00:10:40,800 --> 00:10:43,320 and it appears out of the sky, 128 00:10:43,320 --> 00:10:45,920 and it doesn't move its wings. 129 00:10:45,920 --> 00:10:50,080 I mean, it just tilts, glides, 130 00:10:50,080 --> 00:10:54,120 and it's exploiting the up currents from surface of the sea and so on. 131 00:10:54,120 --> 00:10:58,160 So just occasionally one little flap, and then it's off again. 132 00:11:00,080 --> 00:11:03,880 All those explorers who set off from Britain 133 00:11:03,880 --> 00:11:06,760 on sailing boats going around the world, 134 00:11:06,760 --> 00:11:09,960 in these vast areas where they saw nothing, 135 00:11:09,960 --> 00:11:14,040 suddenly this incredible bird appeared on their horizon 136 00:11:14,040 --> 00:11:18,960 and came up beside their boats and followed them through the storms. 137 00:11:18,960 --> 00:11:23,000 And they must have felt a real attachment, I think, to albatross 138 00:11:23,000 --> 00:11:28,400 and would have come home and told about this bird that tracked the oceans with them. 139 00:11:30,560 --> 00:11:35,320 This mysterious tendency for the albatross to track sailing vessels 140 00:11:35,320 --> 00:11:39,920 gave rise to the pivotal scene in a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 141 00:11:39,920 --> 00:11:44,560 a poem that has entrenched the albatross in our popular culture. 142 00:11:46,160 --> 00:11:50,800 The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner is certainly one of the most famous poems in the English language. 143 00:11:50,800 --> 00:11:54,560 Which is a very interesting thing to say for one reason immediately, 144 00:11:54,560 --> 00:11:57,120 which is that it's a very long poem. 145 00:11:57,120 --> 00:12:01,680 The poem describes a relationship of a seaman with an albatross. 146 00:12:03,800 --> 00:12:07,560 The Mariner's ship is blown off course in a huge storm, 147 00:12:07,560 --> 00:12:10,480 ending up in the icy wastes of Antarctica. 148 00:12:10,480 --> 00:12:14,000 Then, miraculously, an albatross appears. 149 00:12:15,040 --> 00:12:18,480 At length did cross an Albatross, 150 00:12:18,480 --> 00:12:20,960 Through the fog it came 151 00:12:20,960 --> 00:12:23,520 As it had been a Christian soul 152 00:12:23,520 --> 00:12:26,400 We hailed it in God's name. 153 00:12:27,760 --> 00:12:29,680 It's a symbol of whiteness, 154 00:12:29,680 --> 00:12:32,720 of conscience, of souls, of Christianity. 155 00:12:32,720 --> 00:12:34,920 And it's big, like an angel. 156 00:12:34,920 --> 00:12:37,920 It's more than a bird, it's a flying symbol. 157 00:12:40,920 --> 00:12:44,960 This enigmatic bird leads the ship back into warmer waters, 158 00:12:44,960 --> 00:12:48,240 saving the sailors from certain death. 159 00:12:48,240 --> 00:12:53,320 Then, inexplicably, the Mariner shoots the bird with his cross-bow. 160 00:12:53,320 --> 00:12:56,360 His shipmates are horrified. 161 00:12:57,600 --> 00:13:03,800 One of the common bits of folklore about all maritime sea-going communities 162 00:13:03,800 --> 00:13:10,040 was that the souls of lost mariners entered the bodies of seabirds 163 00:13:10,040 --> 00:13:13,320 such as petrels, albatross, shearwaters. 164 00:13:13,320 --> 00:13:17,120 And so killing these birds was in some sense taboo. 165 00:13:17,120 --> 00:13:21,200 Thus the Mariner brought bad luck upon his shipmates. 166 00:13:21,200 --> 00:13:25,600 The wind dropped and the ship was becalmed for days on end. 167 00:13:26,080 --> 00:13:31,160 Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink 168 00:13:31,160 --> 00:13:33,720 Water, water, every where 169 00:13:33,720 --> 00:13:36,160 Nor any drop to drink. 170 00:13:43,720 --> 00:13:49,040 It's about the needless nihilism of the Mariner himself, 171 00:13:49,040 --> 00:13:54,400 who slays the albatross and brings disaster on his boat and his crew, 172 00:13:54,400 --> 00:13:56,680 all of whom die except himself. 173 00:13:56,680 --> 00:14:01,080 And he is destined to travel throughout the rest of his life, 174 00:14:01,080 --> 00:14:06,480 repenting and telling the tale of his terrible destruction of this bird. 175 00:14:13,120 --> 00:14:17,320 The poem speaks to the casual destructiveness that would characterise 176 00:14:17,320 --> 00:14:21,840 our relationship with seabirds until the late 19th century. 177 00:14:24,920 --> 00:14:30,280 Coleridge's Mariner was a familiar figure during Britain's heyday as a maritime power. 178 00:14:30,280 --> 00:14:35,920 At its height, thousands of ships were travelling the trade routes of the North Atlantic. 179 00:14:35,920 --> 00:14:41,480 These mariners drove to extinction an extraordinary, flightless bird, 180 00:14:41,480 --> 00:14:46,640 the Great Auk, Britain's equivalent of the dodo. 181 00:14:49,320 --> 00:14:52,600 Alas, I've never seen a Great Auk, 182 00:14:52,600 --> 00:14:59,080 but I imagine it as a huge, northern hemisphere penguin 183 00:14:59,080 --> 00:15:01,400 with an upright posture. 184 00:15:01,400 --> 00:15:07,240 And the two most striking features are the white splash on the face 185 00:15:07,240 --> 00:15:10,360 and that very large daggered bill. 186 00:15:10,680 --> 00:15:14,200 It was the largest of the auk family. 187 00:15:14,200 --> 00:15:17,440 Puffins are auks, puffins, razorbills, guillemots. 188 00:15:17,440 --> 00:15:20,800 And it is really, was, a giant razorbill. 189 00:15:21,880 --> 00:15:26,480 The Great Auk bred across the North Atlantic in an ark of islands from Newfoundland 190 00:15:26,480 --> 00:15:30,840 through to Iceland and Greenland and further south to Orkney and Shetland. 191 00:15:30,840 --> 00:15:33,160 It was perhaps, at one stage, 192 00:15:33,160 --> 00:15:37,920 one of the commonest birds that has ever lived on the planet. 193 00:15:37,920 --> 00:15:44,520 Common it may have been, but the Great Auk had one major disadvantage over other seabirds. 194 00:15:44,520 --> 00:15:45,800 They didn't need to fly, 195 00:15:45,800 --> 00:15:50,960 and through the years their wings became small, 196 00:15:50,960 --> 00:15:55,360 so that made them very vulnerable to predation by people. 197 00:15:55,360 --> 00:15:59,680 This vulnerability became all too apparent 198 00:15:59,680 --> 00:16:06,400 when the trade routes opened across the North Atlantic, between Britain and her colonies in the New World. 199 00:16:06,400 --> 00:16:11,120 When the first whalers and fishermen went to the Davis Strait, 200 00:16:11,120 --> 00:16:13,880 between Greenland and Newfoundland, 201 00:16:13,880 --> 00:16:17,680 they were living on cod, because that's what they were catching all day. 202 00:16:17,680 --> 00:16:22,440 It must have been wonderful to be able to take a nice, big, fat, juicy bird like a Great Auk. 203 00:16:22,440 --> 00:16:26,920 Hungry mariners, based on the British colony of Newfoundland, 204 00:16:26,920 --> 00:16:34,240 sailed out to seabird islands where the Great Auks bred alongside their smaller relatives, guillemots, 205 00:16:34,240 --> 00:16:36,000 which still survive today. 206 00:16:36,000 --> 00:16:40,280 Here they found huge numbers of Great Auks, there for the taking. 207 00:16:40,280 --> 00:16:46,960 It was perfectly possible to put a sail down, get your men ashore, 208 00:16:46,960 --> 00:16:49,520 get them to drive the birds onto the sail 209 00:16:49,520 --> 00:16:52,160 and then just tip them into the boat 210 00:16:52,160 --> 00:16:54,920 and have people in the boat to club them. 211 00:16:54,920 --> 00:16:59,240 Then you could salt them and that would keep you going for the rest of the time you were out there. 212 00:16:59,240 --> 00:17:04,920 However many they killed, there were masses of others there. 213 00:17:04,920 --> 00:17:12,320 Over time, the Great Auk became even more valuable as a commodity for its feathers, 214 00:17:12,320 --> 00:17:14,760 which were used to stuff pillows and bedding. 215 00:17:14,760 --> 00:17:20,920 The feather bed industry, in really quite a short space of time, 216 00:17:20,920 --> 00:17:25,840 caused such huge destruction amongst those populations 217 00:17:25,840 --> 00:17:29,400 with these birds just being rounded up, 218 00:17:29,400 --> 00:17:32,360 driven into stone enclosures and then just pulled out, clubbed, 219 00:17:32,360 --> 00:17:36,800 dumped into boiling water to get the feathers off quickly. 220 00:17:36,800 --> 00:17:41,080 And this was done on a huge, industrial scale. 221 00:17:41,080 --> 00:17:44,280 By the end of the 18th century, the Great Auk population 222 00:17:44,280 --> 00:17:47,560 was in a state of collapse on its main breeding grounds. 223 00:17:47,560 --> 00:17:51,560 As a result, Great Auks were very rarely seen 224 00:17:51,560 --> 00:17:55,040 at the edge of their range, in places like St Kilda. 225 00:17:58,560 --> 00:18:04,360 There's a horrifying account of three men in St Kilda, 226 00:18:04,360 --> 00:18:08,400 who went out to a small island just off St Kilda. 227 00:18:08,400 --> 00:18:11,280 They came round a corner and saw this huge bird. 228 00:18:11,280 --> 00:18:13,840 That was the last auk in Britain. 229 00:18:16,240 --> 00:18:19,440 And the St Kildans caught and captured it. 230 00:18:19,440 --> 00:18:26,160 They had never seen such a bird before, and they believed it to be a witch. 231 00:18:27,320 --> 00:18:33,160 And they decided, instead of eating it, to imprison it for a couple of days. 232 00:18:34,160 --> 00:18:40,160 On about the third day, lo and behold, a mighty storm arose. 233 00:18:42,800 --> 00:18:46,200 And the bird shrieked continuously. 234 00:18:48,400 --> 00:18:52,000 The men became convinced that the bird had supernatural powers. 235 00:18:52,000 --> 00:18:58,800 And that it had brought the storm and they would never get off the islet as long as the bird was alive. 236 00:18:58,800 --> 00:19:02,720 So they went out and bashed it, clubbed it to death. 237 00:19:06,280 --> 00:19:09,400 Such was the demise of Britain's last Great Auk, 238 00:19:09,400 --> 00:19:13,520 the only British bird to go extinct in historical times. 239 00:19:13,520 --> 00:19:18,640 And yet Victorian bird experts could not accept that this was really happening 240 00:19:18,640 --> 00:19:22,040 to a once abundant species. 241 00:19:22,040 --> 00:19:27,440 It is a measure of a kind of senseless abuse of the sea. 242 00:19:27,440 --> 00:19:30,000 It's the way in which we think the sea is limitless. 243 00:19:30,000 --> 00:19:34,640 And therefore we cannot believe that these resources are finite. 244 00:19:37,440 --> 00:19:43,320 We now know that the world's last Great Auk was killed in Iceland, in June 1844. 245 00:19:44,800 --> 00:19:48,480 But a decade later, two egg collectors still harboured the hope 246 00:19:48,480 --> 00:19:50,960 that a few individuals may have survived. 247 00:19:50,960 --> 00:19:54,720 A couple of British ornithologists, 248 00:19:54,720 --> 00:19:57,840 John Whalley and his friend, Alfred Newton, 249 00:19:57,840 --> 00:20:03,960 decided to make an expedition to Iceland to try to settle the question either way. 250 00:20:05,960 --> 00:20:10,360 The Iceland trip was fruitless, and the men returned home empty-handed. 251 00:20:10,360 --> 00:20:14,080 Later, Alfred Newton wrote an article on the Great Auk, 252 00:20:14,080 --> 00:20:18,680 which caught the eye of the well-known novelist, the Reverend Charles Kingsley. 253 00:20:20,040 --> 00:20:25,800 He actually read Newton's very poignant account of the destruction of these birds, 254 00:20:25,800 --> 00:20:32,360 and the hope expressed by Alfred Newton that there might still just be a few pairs alive. 255 00:20:32,360 --> 00:20:37,000 It was a vain hope, but it provided the inspiration 256 00:20:37,000 --> 00:20:41,000 for a memorable scene in Kingsley's most famous book, The Water-Babies. 257 00:20:41,000 --> 00:20:45,320 The child hero, Tom, encounters the last great auk, 258 00:20:45,320 --> 00:20:48,600 or as it was also known, the garefowl... 259 00:20:49,920 --> 00:20:56,440 And there he saw the last of the garefowl, standing upon the all alone stone, all alone. 260 00:20:58,160 --> 00:21:04,160 Perched on a rocky outcrop, the elderly bird recounts the story of her species' demise. 261 00:21:04,160 --> 00:21:10,440 "If you had only had wings", said Tom, "then you might have all flown away too." 262 00:21:20,920 --> 00:21:25,080 Kingsley was writing in the midst of an unprecedented population explosion. 263 00:21:26,960 --> 00:21:32,760 So to keep pace with demand for food, Britain's farmers needed to dramatically increase production. 264 00:21:32,760 --> 00:21:33,800 Remarkably, 265 00:21:33,800 --> 00:21:37,840 it was seabirds that would fuel this agricultural revolution. 266 00:21:37,840 --> 00:21:39,680 At this point, 267 00:21:39,680 --> 00:21:41,120 in the mid- 19th century, 268 00:21:41,120 --> 00:21:43,840 there was a fairly severe shortage of fertilisers. 269 00:21:43,840 --> 00:21:45,680 We just weren't keeping enough cattle 270 00:21:45,680 --> 00:21:50,600 to fertilise the land sufficiently, just with dung. 271 00:21:50,600 --> 00:21:53,000 So you needed to try to find other sources. 272 00:21:53,000 --> 00:22:00,520 Whoever came up with a solution to the fertiliser shortage was going to make a fortune. 273 00:22:00,520 --> 00:22:03,880 That man was a merchant called William Gibbs. 274 00:22:10,280 --> 00:22:16,320 Gibbs sunk much of his wealth into the Tyntesfield estate, on the outskirts of Bristol, 275 00:22:16,320 --> 00:22:21,520 turning it into one of the grandest houses of the Victorian age. 276 00:22:21,520 --> 00:22:28,360 The source of Gibbs' fertile fortune was far less glamorous, according to a rhyme of the day: 277 00:22:28,360 --> 00:22:32,760 "Mr Gibbs made his tibbs, selling the turds of foreign birds." 278 00:22:36,760 --> 00:22:42,640 Tyntesfield was built on a foundation of guano - the droppings of millions of seabirds. 279 00:22:44,800 --> 00:22:49,000 Of all the stories of abuse of a natural resource, 280 00:22:49,000 --> 00:22:51,880 guano is probably the most extreme. 281 00:22:57,720 --> 00:23:02,120 The guano didn't come from British seabird colonies, 282 00:23:02,120 --> 00:23:06,560 but from thousands of miles away, off the coast of Peru. 283 00:23:06,560 --> 00:23:11,720 The particular feature of Peru was that the Humboldt current, 284 00:23:11,720 --> 00:23:15,480 coming up from the south, was a very cold current, 285 00:23:15,480 --> 00:23:17,760 with upwellings of cold water. 286 00:23:17,760 --> 00:23:20,760 And this supported a huge plankton population. 287 00:23:20,760 --> 00:23:24,440 That then supported a huge fish population, in particular anchovies. 288 00:23:24,440 --> 00:23:29,520 And the fish population then supported this absolutely gigantic bird population. 289 00:23:29,520 --> 00:23:34,680 And millions of birds just on the one island at any particular time. 290 00:23:36,240 --> 00:23:42,840 The main guano-producing birds were the Guanay cormorant and the brown pelican. 291 00:23:42,840 --> 00:23:47,040 Over centuries, their droppings had accumulated to extraordinary depths, 292 00:23:47,040 --> 00:23:49,520 forming mineral-rich mountains. 293 00:23:51,120 --> 00:23:57,360 Peruvian guano was widely recognised at the time as certainly the best fertiliser anywhere. 294 00:23:57,360 --> 00:24:01,120 Because it was a natural product, and it had all the main plant foods, 295 00:24:01,120 --> 00:24:03,320 nitrogen, potash, and phosphate. 296 00:24:05,560 --> 00:24:11,240 Gibbs had negotiated a deal with the Peruvian government, giving him a monopoly on the guano trade. 297 00:24:11,240 --> 00:24:15,760 But he still faced a problem - how to get the stuff back to Britain. 298 00:24:15,760 --> 00:24:20,200 In many respects, it was an extraordinary thing to do. 299 00:24:20,200 --> 00:24:23,720 You were taking guano, literally from the other side of the world, 300 00:24:23,720 --> 00:24:25,720 very dangerous and difficult voyage, 301 00:24:25,720 --> 00:24:31,280 around some of the stormiest seas in the world, Cape Horn, of course, and then right across the Atlantic. 302 00:24:33,160 --> 00:24:37,720 Once the guano arrived in Britain, Gibbs sold it in vast quantities 303 00:24:37,720 --> 00:24:40,640 to farmers desperate for an efficient fertiliser. 304 00:24:42,520 --> 00:24:45,960 Guano gave a massive boost to the nation's agricultural output. 305 00:24:45,960 --> 00:24:50,920 And it made William Gibbs the wealthiest commoner in England. 306 00:24:53,920 --> 00:24:59,360 This was in sharp contrast to the men actually mining the guano in Peru. 307 00:24:59,360 --> 00:25:03,680 The workforce was organised by Peruvian landowners, 308 00:25:03,680 --> 00:25:07,640 and relied on slaves, convicts and, by the 1850s, 309 00:25:07,640 --> 00:25:10,000 foreign indentured labour. 310 00:25:10,000 --> 00:25:14,520 They took Chinese coolies from the Far East, 311 00:25:14,520 --> 00:25:17,640 building them into contracts they knew nothing about. 312 00:25:17,640 --> 00:25:21,640 They got to these desolate equatorial islands, 313 00:25:21,640 --> 00:25:25,520 and the conditions were completely appalling. 314 00:25:25,520 --> 00:25:32,320 There are few photographs of this period, but an impression of the environment the coolies worked in 315 00:25:32,320 --> 00:25:35,760 can be gained from early 20th Century footage of Peruvian labourers. 316 00:25:40,760 --> 00:25:45,800 And the guano, once it was loosened up from the solid rock that it formed on the island itself, 317 00:25:45,800 --> 00:25:49,800 became a noxious powder that blistered your lungs and your nose. 318 00:25:53,280 --> 00:25:57,880 The normal amount the Chinese labourer had to remove was about five tonnes, 319 00:25:57,880 --> 00:26:03,240 but sometimes eight tonnes a day, and he had to do everything from the original pickaxe, 320 00:26:03,240 --> 00:26:05,560 separating the manure from stones, 321 00:26:05,560 --> 00:26:12,400 carrying the stuff to the edge of the cliffs, and then great canvas chutes into the boats below. 322 00:26:20,080 --> 00:26:26,080 Given the lack of regard for the human labourers, it's not surprising that there was no concern at all 323 00:26:26,080 --> 00:26:27,880 for the birds producing the guano. 324 00:26:27,880 --> 00:26:33,600 Their nest sites were destroyed by the mining, and they were subject to continual disturbance. 325 00:26:33,600 --> 00:26:36,040 The birds disappear from the islands. 326 00:26:36,040 --> 00:26:40,080 the whole question of conservation, of holding on to the bird population 327 00:26:40,080 --> 00:26:42,360 didn't really come until the 20th Century. 328 00:26:44,160 --> 00:26:47,520 They were typical of the boom-bust pattern of maritime harvest. 329 00:26:47,520 --> 00:26:50,720 It was one of the most grotesque dashes for growth, 330 00:26:50,720 --> 00:26:54,800 regardless of the consequences, that there has ever been. 331 00:26:57,680 --> 00:27:03,760 The wanton destruction to man and bird in South America went largely unnoticed back in Britain. 332 00:27:09,720 --> 00:27:16,760 But by the 1860s, the welfare of seabirds at home could not be so easily ignored. 333 00:27:16,760 --> 00:27:19,760 For the first time, voices were about to be raised 334 00:27:19,760 --> 00:27:23,400 against the unbridled exploitation of British seabirds. 335 00:27:27,640 --> 00:27:32,000 The majority of our seabird colonies are on remote rocky islands, 336 00:27:32,000 --> 00:27:36,520 like the Bass Rock, off the east coast of Scotland, 337 00:27:39,480 --> 00:27:41,840 and the Farne Islands, off Northumberland. 338 00:27:44,680 --> 00:27:48,680 The isolation of these places offers the birds some protection 339 00:27:48,680 --> 00:27:53,080 from terrestrial predators, both man and beast. 340 00:27:53,080 --> 00:27:56,800 But there are a few seabird colonies on the British mainland, 341 00:27:56,800 --> 00:28:01,120 such as the cliffs of Bempton and Flamborough Head, in Yorkshire. 342 00:28:03,480 --> 00:28:07,360 These cliffs are a favourite haunt of the kittiwake. 343 00:28:09,680 --> 00:28:12,680 The kittiwake is a very delicate gull. 344 00:28:12,680 --> 00:28:15,160 It's also a gull which tells you its name - 345 00:28:15,160 --> 00:28:21,120 when you go to the colonies, there it is, shrieking away, "Kittiwake! Kittiwake!" 346 00:28:24,880 --> 00:28:30,520 It has these wings that are black ended, as though they've been dipped in black ink. 347 00:28:30,520 --> 00:28:36,360 The thing that makes kittiwakes different from just about every gull 348 00:28:36,360 --> 00:28:42,200 is that it breeds on narrow cliff ledges, so it's relatively safe from terrestrial predators. 349 00:28:42,200 --> 00:28:45,240 So with a black-headed gull, 350 00:28:45,240 --> 00:28:48,360 if a predator like a fox or hedgehog comes into the colony, 351 00:28:48,360 --> 00:28:52,920 all the birds fly up and mob that predator and try and drive it away. 352 00:28:52,920 --> 00:28:56,080 Kittiwakes, on their narrow cliff ledge, 353 00:28:56,080 --> 00:28:58,640 never do that mobbing because there is no value in it. 354 00:28:58,640 --> 00:29:05,440 This tendency to sit tight made kittiwakes very vulnerable to human hunters. 355 00:29:09,520 --> 00:29:14,600 At Bempton and Flamborough Head, local people had always harvested the seabirds for food. 356 00:29:14,600 --> 00:29:21,280 But by the Victorian period, this had escalated into an intensive, commercial use of birds, 357 00:29:21,280 --> 00:29:25,600 their eggs, and, in the case of kittiwakes, their plumage. 358 00:29:29,000 --> 00:29:32,040 They would catch the bird, presumably with nets, 359 00:29:32,040 --> 00:29:36,360 and they would cut their wings off, the bits that they wanted, 360 00:29:36,360 --> 00:29:38,800 and throw the bird, wingless, back into the water. 361 00:29:38,800 --> 00:29:44,280 The wings were used by hat makers in Paris and London and New York. 362 00:29:44,280 --> 00:29:48,560 The people that were harvesting the sea birds at Flamborough at that time 363 00:29:48,560 --> 00:29:53,880 were doing it for profit. There was a sense of manifest destiny, 364 00:29:53,880 --> 00:29:57,680 that this was something that was given to them in bountiful providence, 365 00:29:57,680 --> 00:29:59,280 and that it was there to harvest, 366 00:29:59,280 --> 00:30:02,320 it would be wasteful not to harvest them. 367 00:30:02,320 --> 00:30:06,480 Harvesting the kittiwakes, though cruel, 368 00:30:06,480 --> 00:30:08,720 was at least commercially justifiable. 369 00:30:08,720 --> 00:30:13,560 But now they became targets for a very different element of British society. 370 00:30:13,560 --> 00:30:15,520 HORN BLOWS 371 00:30:15,520 --> 00:30:21,880 The burgeoning middle classes, who aspired to the leisure activities of the aristocracy. 372 00:30:21,880 --> 00:30:26,960 Once the railways made access to these coastal locations easier, 373 00:30:26,960 --> 00:30:33,160 hunting parties came to these sea-bird colonies to shoot these birds, 374 00:30:33,160 --> 00:30:37,920 which were so easy to shoot, because they sat so tightly on the nest. 375 00:30:37,920 --> 00:30:45,920 Boarding so-called pleasure boats in Scarborough, groups of men would sail towards the colonies of birds. 376 00:30:45,920 --> 00:30:49,720 And then they would be taken underneath the cliffs, 377 00:30:49,720 --> 00:30:54,840 and would blaze away at the parent birds, sitting on eggs... 378 00:30:54,840 --> 00:30:57,360 GUNFIRE 379 00:30:59,760 --> 00:31:03,040 ..killing as many as they could, because the size of the bag 380 00:31:03,040 --> 00:31:05,680 was presumably the measure of success of the sport. 381 00:31:05,680 --> 00:31:08,600 And it was having a devastating effect on breeding numbers. 382 00:31:08,600 --> 00:31:15,160 But the activities of these shooting parties didn't go unnoticed. 383 00:31:15,160 --> 00:31:19,280 And it was the sight of large numbers of dead, dying birds, 384 00:31:19,280 --> 00:31:23,840 and chicks whose parents had been killed left in the nest, 385 00:31:23,840 --> 00:31:25,680 that started to upset people. 386 00:31:25,680 --> 00:31:33,600 One person who took exception to this slaughter was the ornithologist Alfred Newton - the same man 387 00:31:33,600 --> 00:31:39,200 who 13 years earlier had searched unsuccessfully for the last great auk. 388 00:31:40,200 --> 00:31:41,400 By the late 1860s, 389 00:31:41,400 --> 00:31:46,320 Alfred Newton was Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge. 390 00:31:46,320 --> 00:31:52,800 He'd realised what had happened to the great auk a generation earlier, 391 00:31:52,800 --> 00:31:55,560 he saw that there was a danger of it happening again. 392 00:31:55,560 --> 00:31:58,200 To publicise his concerns, 393 00:31:58,200 --> 00:32:01,880 in 1868 he made a calculatedly emotional speech 394 00:32:01,880 --> 00:32:06,120 to the British Society for the Advancement of Science. 395 00:32:06,120 --> 00:32:12,240 At the present time, I believe there is no class of animal so cruelly persecuted 396 00:32:12,240 --> 00:32:18,040 as the sea-fowl - that a stop should be put to this wanton and atrocious destruction of a species 397 00:32:18,040 --> 00:32:21,960 I think none of my audience will deny. 398 00:32:22,920 --> 00:32:30,520 Just as Newton had hoped, his sensational speech was picked up by the press and widely reported. 399 00:32:30,520 --> 00:32:35,240 And for the first time, the issue touched a nerve with the British public. 400 00:32:35,240 --> 00:32:38,320 There was a sense developing that this slaughter 401 00:32:38,320 --> 00:32:41,200 on the cliffs was somehow to Yorkshire's shame. 402 00:32:41,200 --> 00:32:46,600 And a combination of local landowners and MPs 403 00:32:46,600 --> 00:32:48,840 and members of the clergy got together 404 00:32:48,840 --> 00:32:53,680 and in 1868, formed an association for the protection of sea birds. 405 00:32:53,680 --> 00:32:58,720 As a result of their work, a bill for the preservation of sea birds 406 00:32:58,720 --> 00:33:01,480 was presented to Parliament the following year. 407 00:33:01,480 --> 00:33:07,600 And they came up with a fascinating strategy, and it is based on utilitarianism, 408 00:33:07,600 --> 00:33:11,120 in a way, this idea that the birds were useful. 409 00:33:11,120 --> 00:33:15,920 They did two things - when the fishermen of Bridlington were coming home on foggy days, 410 00:33:15,920 --> 00:33:20,440 and they couldn't see the cliffs, the cries of the sea birds alerted them to the presence 411 00:33:20,440 --> 00:33:24,080 of the cliffs. The birds were, in other words, the Flamborough pilots. 412 00:33:27,280 --> 00:33:31,760 And the second argument was that the sea birds flew inland 413 00:33:31,760 --> 00:33:35,280 and harvested pests on agricultural land. 414 00:33:35,280 --> 00:33:38,480 And those two arguments carried the day. 415 00:33:42,400 --> 00:33:50,320 The Sea Birds Preservation Act came into law in June 1869 - the very first act of Parliament 416 00:33:50,320 --> 00:33:52,240 protecting British birds. 417 00:33:52,240 --> 00:33:57,000 This marked a turning point in the history of our relationship with sea birds. 418 00:33:57,000 --> 00:34:03,520 By the late Victorian era, a new sensibility towards birds and other wildlife was beginning to emerge. 419 00:34:03,520 --> 00:34:06,000 We had finally begun to appreciate birds 420 00:34:06,000 --> 00:34:11,680 not just for how we could exploit them, but for their beauty, and for our delight in them. 421 00:34:16,800 --> 00:34:24,360 And yet where sea birds were concerned, we still knew so little about their real lives. 422 00:34:24,360 --> 00:34:26,480 One of the wonderful things about sea birds 423 00:34:26,480 --> 00:34:29,720 is that they are essentially very mysterious. 424 00:34:29,720 --> 00:34:32,640 Aspects of their behaviour are very, very little understood. 425 00:34:32,640 --> 00:34:37,120 Although much was already known about the birds of our countryside, 426 00:34:37,120 --> 00:34:41,280 it was only in the 20th century that science would 427 00:34:41,280 --> 00:34:44,080 begin to unravel some of the mysteries of sea birds. 428 00:34:44,080 --> 00:34:50,640 One man who pioneered their study was the Welsh naturalist Ronald Lockley. 429 00:34:50,640 --> 00:34:55,320 As a young man, he hadn't set out to be a sea bird scientist. 430 00:34:55,320 --> 00:34:59,760 In fact he was rather a dreamer, with an entrepreneurial streak. 431 00:35:05,440 --> 00:35:10,120 In 1926, Lockley took a lease on an uninhabited island called Skokholm, 432 00:35:10,120 --> 00:35:13,400 off the southwest coast of Wales. 433 00:35:14,200 --> 00:35:18,000 When Lockley turned up on Skokholm, 434 00:35:18,000 --> 00:35:20,640 his initial plan was to make a lot of money. 435 00:35:20,640 --> 00:35:22,640 And he wanted to do this by 436 00:35:22,640 --> 00:35:24,320 breeding giant chinchilla rabbits, 437 00:35:24,320 --> 00:35:29,640 a sort of giant, fluffy version of a wild rabbit. 438 00:35:29,640 --> 00:35:34,520 Unfortunately, there was an indigenous rabbit population eating the grass 439 00:35:34,520 --> 00:35:37,080 required by his chinchillas. 440 00:35:37,080 --> 00:35:40,560 He tried to exterminate all of the rabbits on Skokholm and failed. 441 00:35:40,560 --> 00:35:43,240 He tried all sorts of ways. In fact, he tried cyanide gas, 442 00:35:43,240 --> 00:35:46,000 it is all quite a grim story. 443 00:35:46,000 --> 00:35:49,440 His experiment failed completely, 444 00:35:49,440 --> 00:35:54,560 because the market for rabbit skins for fashion completely crashed during the Depression. 445 00:35:54,560 --> 00:35:59,320 But Lockley's interest in sea birds was directly born out of this failure. 446 00:35:59,320 --> 00:36:02,880 While trying to trap the indigenous rabbits in their warrens, 447 00:36:02,880 --> 00:36:09,320 he kept catching a strange, burrow-nesting bird instead - the Manx shearwater. 448 00:36:09,320 --> 00:36:13,840 The Manx shearwater is like a tiny albatross 449 00:36:13,840 --> 00:36:18,600 It's a true sea bird, spending most of its life on the sea. 450 00:36:19,680 --> 00:36:23,600 It's a bird that needs to come ashore only to breed, 451 00:36:23,600 --> 00:36:29,920 and it lays a single white egg in a burrow, like a rabbit hole, that it digs itself. 452 00:36:29,920 --> 00:36:31,800 And it comes ashore just at night. 453 00:36:31,800 --> 00:36:38,280 Under the cover of darkness, these ungainly creatures feed their young, 454 00:36:38,280 --> 00:36:41,000 calling to each other all the while. 455 00:36:42,360 --> 00:36:46,760 When he first heard this strange cacophony, it took Lockley by surprise. 456 00:36:46,760 --> 00:36:49,440 BIRDS CALL 457 00:36:54,360 --> 00:37:00,640 Until this time, no-one had attempted to study the behaviour of Manx shearwaters, 458 00:37:00,640 --> 00:37:03,800 or indeed any other sea birds, in detail. 459 00:37:03,800 --> 00:37:07,560 Lockley became enthralled with these mysterious creatures, and devised 460 00:37:07,560 --> 00:37:13,160 imaginative experiments to study the most intriguing aspects of their behaviour. 461 00:37:13,160 --> 00:37:17,360 One of the things he was fascinated by was the navigational 462 00:37:17,360 --> 00:37:24,560 capacity of the Manx shearwaters. And in one of these experiments, he took a bird from Skokholm to Devon, 463 00:37:24,560 --> 00:37:27,760 and released it, and within a few hours, the bird 464 00:37:27,760 --> 00:37:29,600 was back in its nest borrow. 465 00:37:29,600 --> 00:37:34,640 And then he took this further, and they took a bird to Venice... 466 00:37:39,560 --> 00:37:42,440 And it was about a 900-kilometre journey overland. 467 00:37:42,440 --> 00:37:46,320 But of course a sea bird such as a Manx Shearwater would almost certainly 468 00:37:46,320 --> 00:37:51,200 have taken a sea route, which was a hugely circuitous route 469 00:37:51,200 --> 00:37:55,800 through the Straits of Gibraltar, and then up through the Atlantic, 470 00:37:55,800 --> 00:38:00,920 and I think it took 17 days, and a journey of something in the region of 4,000 kilometres. 471 00:38:03,720 --> 00:38:10,360 What it reveals is the puniness of human travel efforts. 472 00:38:10,360 --> 00:38:13,480 You know, this is a bird that has to find its way 473 00:38:13,480 --> 00:38:18,960 across the open ocean, by itself, feeding and travelling for days. 474 00:38:18,960 --> 00:38:24,000 I think that's what captivates us in part about sea birds in general, 475 00:38:24,000 --> 00:38:30,160 is the way in which they treat the open ocean, this featureless landscape, as home. 476 00:38:32,960 --> 00:38:38,720 Ronald Lockley's legacy goes beyond his discoveries about shearwaters. 477 00:38:38,720 --> 00:38:44,880 On Skokholm he also created the UK's first bird observatory in 1933. 478 00:38:45,920 --> 00:38:50,920 But he had to leave his island paradise after the outbreak of the Second World War, 479 00:38:50,920 --> 00:38:54,600 when it was commandeered by the armed forces. 480 00:38:57,760 --> 00:39:01,360 The sea blockade and food shortages of wartime 481 00:39:01,360 --> 00:39:04,880 meant that despite protection laws, sea birds were back on the menu 482 00:39:04,880 --> 00:39:07,120 for the first time in a generation. 483 00:39:09,360 --> 00:39:13,960 Shags were eaten in the war, and cormorants were eaten in the war. 484 00:39:13,960 --> 00:39:16,960 In fact, most birds would have been eaten in the wartime. 485 00:39:16,960 --> 00:39:22,560 They shot shags on Fair Isle, and they sent them to London for food. 486 00:39:22,560 --> 00:39:25,440 But instead of calling them shags, they called them black ducks. 487 00:39:25,440 --> 00:39:30,200 So, by the end of the war, shags were very scarce, and as 488 00:39:30,200 --> 00:39:32,720 soon as they saw a boat, they were in flight. 489 00:39:34,200 --> 00:39:38,440 But this use of sea birds for meat was short-lived. 490 00:39:38,440 --> 00:39:43,720 In the post-war period, our contact with ocean-going sea birds would diminish. 491 00:39:43,720 --> 00:39:47,400 Gradually, Britain's maritime power waned, 492 00:39:47,400 --> 00:39:52,120 and fewer people made their living at sea. The end of the war 493 00:39:52,120 --> 00:39:56,520 also brought a scientist to Britain who would demystify our commonest 494 00:39:56,520 --> 00:39:59,280 sea birds - Niko Tinbergen. 495 00:39:59,280 --> 00:40:05,560 Tinbergen is one of the great pioneers of animal behaviour studies in the field. 496 00:40:05,560 --> 00:40:09,800 He saw that the kinds of experiments which had been going on, which involved 497 00:40:09,800 --> 00:40:15,000 looking at animals in cages, and in captivity, was pretty pointless, because he thought that animals 498 00:40:15,000 --> 00:40:20,280 in captivity would not display the kind of behaviours that they would in the wild. So, what he did was 499 00:40:20,280 --> 00:40:24,120 take animal behaviour studies into the field, and it was very ground-breaking. 500 00:40:24,120 --> 00:40:29,680 For this kind of work, it is not enough to pay occasional visits to the birds. 501 00:40:29,680 --> 00:40:33,520 We must live with our animals literally day and night. 502 00:40:34,360 --> 00:40:37,400 Tinbergen grew up in the Netherlands, 503 00:40:37,400 --> 00:40:41,120 where, as a teenager, he became interested in nature study. 504 00:40:41,120 --> 00:40:46,440 But his career as a zoologist was interrupted by Nazi occupation of his homeland, 505 00:40:46,440 --> 00:40:52,880 and he was imprisoned in a concentration camp for his political views. 506 00:40:52,880 --> 00:40:55,640 This experience was to shape his later research. 507 00:40:55,640 --> 00:41:02,760 Having been kept in prison left its mark on him, because he was so passionate 508 00:41:02,760 --> 00:41:06,320 about getting out onto the cliff tops, getting away from 509 00:41:06,320 --> 00:41:09,400 his Oxford laboratories 510 00:41:09,400 --> 00:41:12,200 and getting out into the field. 511 00:41:12,200 --> 00:41:18,640 Leaving the dark memories of the Netherlands behind, Tinbergen moved to England after the war. 512 00:41:18,640 --> 00:41:23,120 And he came to Oxford and set up an animal behaviour study group here. 513 00:41:23,120 --> 00:41:25,600 I was lucky to be one of the first members of that group. 514 00:41:25,600 --> 00:41:31,080 Gulls became the major focus of his study group at Oxford. 515 00:41:31,080 --> 00:41:38,120 One of Niko's principles in studying birds was to always go for the most common birds. 516 00:41:38,120 --> 00:41:44,600 The more common and populous a bird is, the easier it is to study. 517 00:41:44,600 --> 00:41:47,640 And he loved gulls because they were common. 518 00:41:47,640 --> 00:41:50,560 GULLS CALL 519 00:41:50,560 --> 00:41:56,640 Tinbergen's research on gulls was popularised through a bestselling book, 520 00:41:56,640 --> 00:42:01,480 The Herring Gull's World, and a successful TV film made with broadcaster Hugh Falkus. 521 00:42:01,480 --> 00:42:03,360 The beginning of it is great. 522 00:42:03,360 --> 00:42:07,480 He starts off shaking his fist at the camera and scowling to show aggression, 523 00:42:07,480 --> 00:42:09,080 which everyone understands. 524 00:42:09,080 --> 00:42:10,360 When I do this, 525 00:42:10,360 --> 00:42:15,440 you know at once what I mean - the angry face, 526 00:42:15,440 --> 00:42:18,920 the clenched fist convey a mood of aggression. 527 00:42:18,920 --> 00:42:22,480 It's a simple form of communication. 528 00:42:22,480 --> 00:42:24,200 It's about a gull colony, 529 00:42:24,200 --> 00:42:26,920 and how gull colonies are always on the edge of chaos 530 00:42:26,920 --> 00:42:28,280 and aggression. 531 00:42:28,280 --> 00:42:32,240 There's murder, and there are chicks being eaten, it's just a complete disaster zone. 532 00:42:32,240 --> 00:42:35,040 This is a great bird city. 533 00:42:35,040 --> 00:42:38,040 This is a city of thieves and murderers. 534 00:42:38,040 --> 00:42:42,560 There are all potential killers and eaters of their neighbours' chicks. 535 00:42:44,160 --> 00:42:46,400 But social life in bird city is made possible 536 00:42:46,400 --> 00:42:48,960 by a highly complex system of communication - 537 00:42:48,960 --> 00:42:54,960 a language comprising posture, movement, colour and sound. 538 00:42:54,960 --> 00:42:57,040 He showed that there were very, 539 00:42:57,040 --> 00:43:00,120 very precise patterns of behaviour and signals, 540 00:43:00,120 --> 00:43:03,640 which gulls knew and understood, which basically kept the 541 00:43:03,640 --> 00:43:05,920 colony from tipping into total chaos. 542 00:43:05,920 --> 00:43:09,680 And I think if you look at the way in which this is presented in the programme, 543 00:43:09,680 --> 00:43:12,600 it's very clear that Tinbergen himself was very worried 544 00:43:12,600 --> 00:43:17,880 about the way that humans were going, and he thought that in the future, overpopulation, crowding, 545 00:43:17,880 --> 00:43:22,960 it was all bit like a gull colony, it was going to be a disaster for us. 546 00:43:22,960 --> 00:43:27,320 So he saw this as being a kind of lesson for humanity, and how to negotiate these primal instincts. 547 00:43:28,640 --> 00:43:34,520 By the late '60s, the way we thought about the natural world was changing. 548 00:43:34,520 --> 00:43:38,400 Tinbergen's work reflected the ecological anxieties of the era, 549 00:43:38,400 --> 00:43:45,240 as well as revealing the habits of seabirds to the viewing public. 550 00:43:45,240 --> 00:43:48,360 And yet, as we became a nation of landlovers, 551 00:43:48,360 --> 00:43:53,560 seabirds became even more remote from our daily lives. 552 00:43:53,560 --> 00:43:57,160 They were increasingly out of sight and out of mind. 553 00:43:59,440 --> 00:44:03,800 Overnight, one event would change all this. 554 00:44:08,760 --> 00:44:14,760 If there was one moment in our history when seabirds truly invaded the national consciousness, 555 00:44:14,760 --> 00:44:21,600 it was the Torrey Canyon disaster of March 1967, off the end of Land's End. 556 00:44:21,600 --> 00:44:28,480 'Saturday March 18th, and the Torrey Canyon, a giant tanker on charter to British Petroleum, 557 00:44:28,480 --> 00:44:34,360 'goes aground on the treacherous Seven Stone Rocks between the Isles of Scilly and Land's End. 558 00:44:34,360 --> 00:44:37,920 'On board, 120,000 tonnes of crude oil.' 559 00:44:40,920 --> 00:44:44,200 The Torrey Canyon was the 13th largest ship in the world 560 00:44:44,200 --> 00:44:47,280 and she was rushing to get the tide at Milford Haven, 561 00:44:47,280 --> 00:44:51,800 and Captain Rugiati decided - against all established thinking, 562 00:44:51,800 --> 00:44:57,080 which was to go round to the west of the Isles of Scilly and swing round into the Bristol Channel - 563 00:44:57,080 --> 00:45:01,160 to cut the gap between the Scillies and Land's End 564 00:45:01,160 --> 00:45:07,240 and, overnight, he managed to run aground this enormous ship on the Seven Stones reef, 565 00:45:07,240 --> 00:45:11,080 The next morning, the people of Britain woke up 566 00:45:11,080 --> 00:45:17,320 to the first-ever massive environmental catastrophe on their coastline. 567 00:45:17,320 --> 00:45:20,040 'At once, oil began to spew from her. 568 00:45:20,040 --> 00:45:23,840 'In no time, there was an ominous slick of oil eight miles long.' 569 00:45:23,840 --> 00:45:31,280 The Torrey Canyon was the first environmental disaster to unfold in the television era. 570 00:45:32,680 --> 00:45:39,440 Perhaps the most powerful images of the Torrey Canyon disaster were not what we might have expected. 571 00:45:39,440 --> 00:45:43,680 It wasn't the broken ship lying on the Seven Stones reef. 572 00:45:43,680 --> 00:45:50,600 The most powerful images were sea birds covered in oil that were being washed up on Cornish beaches. 573 00:45:50,600 --> 00:45:54,720 These were pitiful images that said an awful lot to us 574 00:45:54,720 --> 00:45:59,120 about our mastery and domination over the natural world. 575 00:45:59,120 --> 00:46:04,800 They certainly were emotive and people reacted to them. 576 00:46:04,800 --> 00:46:12,240 The seabird centres in Cornwall were inundated with box-load after box-load 577 00:46:12,240 --> 00:46:14,960 of, sadly, doomed-to-die seabirds. 578 00:46:16,480 --> 00:46:20,960 Chief Inspector Gardner, you've got a lot of birds... 579 00:46:20,960 --> 00:46:27,120 One man on the frontline was Tony Soper, a young broadcaster and naturalist. 580 00:46:27,120 --> 00:46:30,680 We had no idea how much damage this was likely to cause 581 00:46:30,680 --> 00:46:36,000 but, in West Cornwall, they had a big problem with guillemots especially. 582 00:46:36,000 --> 00:46:40,760 Any number of outfits were trying to clean these things up. 583 00:46:40,760 --> 00:46:44,760 People were setting up rescue stations right, left and centre, 584 00:46:44,760 --> 00:46:51,880 especially hairdressing salons because of course they had the little showers for doing people's hair 585 00:46:51,880 --> 00:46:55,640 and they were putting detergent on these birds, 586 00:46:55,640 --> 00:47:00,840 which got the oil off very effectively but left them without any grease and they couldn't fly. 587 00:47:00,840 --> 00:47:06,400 So an awful lot of birds were put back in the sea totally unable to manage. 588 00:47:06,400 --> 00:47:11,640 A disaster on this scale required decisive action from the government 589 00:47:11,640 --> 00:47:14,400 and the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, waded in. 590 00:47:14,400 --> 00:47:19,600 He of course was viewing this not only as our national leader, 591 00:47:19,600 --> 00:47:22,800 but also somebody who was intimately involved with the Isles of Scilly. 592 00:47:22,800 --> 00:47:28,640 He'd holidayed there since the 1950s, it was his own personal paradise. 593 00:47:28,640 --> 00:47:34,080 In an effort to spare the beaches and the seabird colonies from the oil, 594 00:47:34,080 --> 00:47:38,520 Wilson's government made the controversial decision to bomb the stricken vessel. 595 00:47:41,360 --> 00:47:45,480 Hundreds of bombs, and even napalm, were used to ignite fuel in the hull 596 00:47:45,480 --> 00:47:48,080 in the hope that it would all burn off. 597 00:47:51,520 --> 00:47:55,000 Harold Wilson went to the top of St Martin's, 598 00:47:55,000 --> 00:47:59,240 one of the islands on the Scillies, and stood there with the people of the Isles of Scilly 599 00:47:59,240 --> 00:48:06,480 and watched the aircraft come roaring in and dropping incendiary bombs on this vast supertanker. 600 00:48:08,600 --> 00:48:11,000 But even after the ship was sunk, 601 00:48:11,000 --> 00:48:14,600 large quantities of oil made its way to the shore 602 00:48:14,600 --> 00:48:16,640 and a clean-up effort was required. 603 00:48:18,880 --> 00:48:24,800 It was BP at the time and they poured masses of detergent on the beaches, 604 00:48:24,800 --> 00:48:28,480 right, left and centre, all the way along the beaches on this oil, 605 00:48:28,480 --> 00:48:31,400 which, in the long run, was a mistake. 606 00:48:31,400 --> 00:48:39,480 In the aftermath, the nation reflected on how ill-prepared it had been for such a disaster. 607 00:48:39,480 --> 00:48:45,520 There was a powerful realisation in government that there was no overarching administrative body 608 00:48:45,520 --> 00:48:48,560 to deal with an environmental disaster like this in Britain. 609 00:48:50,080 --> 00:48:56,640 The ensuing Royal Commission on Pollution eventually led to important changes in government. 610 00:48:58,160 --> 00:49:02,480 And in a way, the Torrey Canyon disaster of 1967 611 00:49:02,480 --> 00:49:07,960 led to the first-ever Department of the Environment within government, 612 00:49:07,960 --> 00:49:11,200 anywhere in the world, here in Britain. 613 00:49:11,200 --> 00:49:15,240 For a few weeks in 1967, environmental disaster 614 00:49:15,240 --> 00:49:19,880 propelled seabirds into our national consciousness. 615 00:49:19,880 --> 00:49:26,440 Soon after, scientists launched the first seabird census to take stock of Britain's breeding colonies. 616 00:49:36,560 --> 00:49:40,760 But seabirds might easily have slipped from public view once again 617 00:49:40,760 --> 00:49:45,680 were it not for a dramatic change in the behaviour of one group of birds. 618 00:49:45,680 --> 00:49:48,800 For better or worse, this change would bring more of us 619 00:49:48,800 --> 00:49:53,640 into direct contact with seabirds than ever before. 620 00:49:53,640 --> 00:49:55,280 The poor old herring gull. 621 00:49:55,280 --> 00:50:00,400 There's no herring gull that's seen a herring in the last 50 years! 622 00:50:00,400 --> 00:50:02,080 They live off other things now. 623 00:50:08,200 --> 00:50:11,280 Most people encounter seabirds today because of some shock-horror about 624 00:50:11,280 --> 00:50:15,800 gulls eating the Flake from your ice-cream in a city centre. 625 00:50:15,800 --> 00:50:18,520 They're not exotic, they're not the other any more, 626 00:50:18,520 --> 00:50:23,480 and they're a problem when they get out of their own sphere. 627 00:50:23,480 --> 00:50:27,320 Keep to the ocean but don't invade my other territory. 628 00:50:27,320 --> 00:50:32,320 Two species have moved inland - the lesser black-backed gull 629 00:50:32,320 --> 00:50:35,600 and its paler-winged relative, the herring gull. 630 00:50:35,600 --> 00:50:38,920 They're obvious birds, they're big birds, 631 00:50:38,920 --> 00:50:44,080 and they're getting about their business in an obvious way. 632 00:50:44,080 --> 00:50:48,280 We see courtship, we see them nesting, laying eggs, 633 00:50:48,280 --> 00:50:52,880 feeding their young and, during that process, they become quite aggressive 634 00:50:52,880 --> 00:50:59,880 and that's a shock to us because in our little lives in the cities, we don't expect that sort of behaviour. 635 00:50:59,880 --> 00:51:03,680 That doesn't happen here, it happens on TV or out in the country. 636 00:51:03,680 --> 00:51:10,640 As a young seabird researcher, Tim Birkhead had first-hand experience of a gull attack. 637 00:51:10,640 --> 00:51:13,720 This gull came down, making this terrible wheezing noise, 638 00:51:13,720 --> 00:51:19,440 put both feet out, hit me on the back of the head, 639 00:51:19,440 --> 00:51:23,200 and vomited and defecated simultaneously, 640 00:51:23,200 --> 00:51:29,360 so I got vomit down the front of my head and gull shit down the back of my neck. 641 00:51:29,360 --> 00:51:32,720 It left me feeling sick for the whole day. 642 00:51:32,720 --> 00:51:38,440 Not the defecation bit, just the whack on the back of the head was so unexpected. 643 00:51:42,440 --> 00:51:46,320 Nesting seagulls will attack any bird or mammal 644 00:51:46,320 --> 00:51:50,760 that invades their territory because they're protecting their young. 645 00:51:50,760 --> 00:51:57,400 Our contemporary dislike for gulls in our towns and cities is in stark contrast 646 00:51:57,400 --> 00:52:01,840 to the way we used to feel about them when they lived at the coast. 647 00:52:11,680 --> 00:52:16,320 If you think of the opening signature music to Desert Island Discs, 648 00:52:16,320 --> 00:52:19,800 the wailing of gulls is the soundtrack of the sea. 649 00:52:19,800 --> 00:52:24,680 The child with their bucket and spade, the sound of seagulls in the background - 650 00:52:24,680 --> 00:52:28,720 it's part of a repertoire of recreational holiday life in Britain. 651 00:52:28,720 --> 00:52:33,160 That wonderful laughing call of the herring gull, 652 00:52:33,160 --> 00:52:37,720 throwing back its head and making that extraordinary noise. 653 00:52:37,720 --> 00:52:41,440 That's the image most people have of gulls. 654 00:52:47,560 --> 00:52:49,560 Or at least, it used to be. 655 00:52:49,560 --> 00:52:56,520 Ironically, our efforts to solve a major pollution problem inadvertently created the conditions 656 00:52:56,520 --> 00:53:00,160 that would encourage gulls to settle inland. 657 00:53:00,160 --> 00:53:06,320 The Great Smog of 1952 killed many thousands of people. 658 00:53:06,320 --> 00:53:10,400 The government's response was the 1956 Clean Air Act, 659 00:53:10,400 --> 00:53:14,160 which prevented the burning of household waste. 660 00:53:16,400 --> 00:53:22,480 So in the following decades, ever-increasing quantities of rubbish 661 00:53:22,480 --> 00:53:26,960 were hauled off to landfill sites, providing a bonanza for the gulls. 662 00:53:26,960 --> 00:53:31,080 We've got massive landfill sites on the edges of our cities, 663 00:53:31,080 --> 00:53:38,280 which is a great food source for them and they've taken advantage of that. They're victims of our excess. 664 00:53:38,280 --> 00:53:42,800 Gulls are the most adaptable of all seabirds 665 00:53:42,800 --> 00:53:48,880 with extraordinarily catholic tastes, but their scavenging behaviour doesn't endear them to us. 666 00:53:50,400 --> 00:53:55,000 The gulls are exploiting as a food supply human waste, 667 00:53:55,000 --> 00:53:58,200 to which we ourselves feel some feelings of disgust. 668 00:53:58,200 --> 00:54:02,920 They became in a sense a kind of metaphor for human waste 669 00:54:02,920 --> 00:54:06,720 and I think that's part of why they attracted so much hostility. 670 00:54:06,720 --> 00:54:13,600 Gull populations in some British cities have grown to the point where they are now considered vermin. 671 00:54:13,600 --> 00:54:17,920 And yet we only see part of the picture. 672 00:54:17,920 --> 00:54:24,080 We have a sense of gulls being ubiquitous and commonplace but in fact, 673 00:54:24,080 --> 00:54:29,640 one of the most frequent nesters on people's roofs has declined substantially. 674 00:54:29,640 --> 00:54:33,000 Up to 50% of all herring gulls have gone in the last 50 years. 675 00:54:35,720 --> 00:54:42,880 This is because the original, coastal colonies of herring gulls have collapsed due to lack of food. 676 00:54:42,880 --> 00:54:49,800 Fishermen no longer lay out their catches on the harbour side, nor gut fish at sea. 677 00:54:49,800 --> 00:54:53,880 Over-fishing has also reduced the gulls' food supply. 678 00:54:53,880 --> 00:54:57,480 Herring gulls have survived until now because they are truly exceptional. 679 00:54:57,480 --> 00:55:02,640 They've adapted from being seabirds into urban birds. 680 00:55:02,640 --> 00:55:06,960 But other species of seabirds may not be so lucky. 681 00:55:06,960 --> 00:55:14,680 We are not managing the marine resources in Britain well, or Europe, and the seabirds show us that. 682 00:55:14,680 --> 00:55:22,240 Sadly for us, our best-loved seabird is one of the species now in decline. 683 00:55:26,000 --> 00:55:32,560 Even though most of us have never seen a puffin, we feel we know this comical little bird. 684 00:55:32,560 --> 00:55:37,040 The model for countless children's toys and the inspiration 685 00:55:37,040 --> 00:55:40,640 for the world's most celebrated series of children's books. 686 00:55:40,640 --> 00:55:43,960 It's like a toy animal, really. 687 00:55:43,960 --> 00:55:49,520 You just look at it and you simply cannot believe that this is the real thing. It cannot be a real bird. 688 00:55:49,520 --> 00:55:51,840 How can it exist like that? 689 00:55:52,840 --> 00:55:59,640 The puffin's predicament provides a salutary warning for the future of our relationship with seabirds. 690 00:55:59,640 --> 00:56:03,640 The iconic view of a puffin is this bird 691 00:56:03,640 --> 00:56:07,960 with this incredibly bright bill coming ashore, 692 00:56:07,960 --> 00:56:14,320 running up to its burrow with all these little fish, head to tail, arranged through its bill. 693 00:56:16,360 --> 00:56:22,320 Puffins feed these nutritious little fish, sand eels, to their growing chicks. 694 00:56:22,320 --> 00:56:29,200 In recent years, many chicks have starved to death because of a shortage of sand eels. 695 00:56:29,200 --> 00:56:36,040 This is partly due to over-fishing and also down to a more serious long-term problem - climate change. 696 00:56:38,200 --> 00:56:42,360 Sea temperatures are rising and it means that species that support 697 00:56:42,360 --> 00:56:45,600 our seabirds - sand eels - are heading north. 698 00:56:45,600 --> 00:56:49,480 They want that cooler water and what will follow them? Our seabirds. 699 00:56:49,480 --> 00:56:53,760 In the last ten years, climate change has already contributed 700 00:56:53,760 --> 00:57:00,200 to a significant fall in the total number of seabirds breeding in Britain. 701 00:57:00,200 --> 00:57:05,360 And if we lost our seabirds, we would not just be losing 702 00:57:05,360 --> 00:57:12,680 colonies of birds, we'd be losing a whole part of our heritage, a whole part of what makes Britain Britain. 703 00:57:14,200 --> 00:57:19,080 Arguably, we have lost much of this heritage already. 704 00:57:19,080 --> 00:57:23,240 As our dependence on seabirds gradually diminished, 705 00:57:23,240 --> 00:57:26,000 we developed a deeper aesthetic appreciation of them. 706 00:57:26,000 --> 00:57:33,520 But at the same time, their cultural relevance to us began to recede. 707 00:57:33,520 --> 00:57:37,960 We may have protected seabirds and learned more about them, 708 00:57:37,960 --> 00:57:42,280 but now our mismanagement of the seas threatens their very future. 709 00:57:45,080 --> 00:57:47,840 So today, they float in our peripheral vision, 710 00:57:47,840 --> 00:57:52,880 as ghostly reminders of the seafaring people we once were. 711 00:58:03,440 --> 00:58:09,440 Next time, in the final episode of Birds Britannia, we explore the extraordinary impact 712 00:58:09,440 --> 00:58:14,240 the birds of the British countryside have had on our nation's history and culture. 713 00:58:17,400 --> 00:58:22,480 From nightingales in poetry, to grouse on the Glorious 12th... 714 00:58:25,040 --> 00:58:28,120 ..these birds have not only shaped our rural landscape, 715 00:58:28,120 --> 00:58:33,240 but also defined what the countryside really means to us.