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Read the winner of the 2009 Nature Writer of the Year Competition in the Summer special issue on sale now. Read the runners-up here:
The runners-up are:
Gull by John Woolner
Bonxie by Liam Creedon
Crow by Ian Richardson
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Gull
By John Woolner
“Isn’t it ready yet Dad? We’re starving!”
“Not long now,” I said, placing the last sausage on the grill.
Rose and her friends ran off across the vast, empty sandbank, screaming with playful delight, pulling a kite behind them. I sat back feeling most pleased. The boat ride, the opportunity to bird-watch, the mouth-watering barbecue smell, the party food and cake, was all down to my meticulous organisation.
And what a perfect setting for celebrating Rose’s birthday; small sailing boats flitting across the mouth of the estuary; flocks of crying gulls behind chugging fishing vessels approaching Exmouth harbour; glistening purple-blue cockle beds; a thin shimmering line of yellow-white sand at Dawlish Warren; shoals of weaving mullet in the shallows appearing like silvery-grey ghosts before disappearing with a flash into the inky depths; tidal water lapping against the clinker I’d spent the winter repairing; and the salty smell of the sea.
Sitting back, completely relaxed, I looked through my binoculars. Sandpipers, curlews and oyster-catchers foraged in mud banks. A heron retracted its head, tensed like a poised arrow in a bow, then stabbed the water and pulled out a fish. And in the distance the long snaking tail of Rose’s red kite darted fretfully against the cloudless sky.
Stopping to check the barbecue, a herring gull circled above me. Sleek and elegant, it gracefully arced with its large black-tipped wings, gradually descended and landed close by.
“Nice of you to drop in!” I said.
The gull lifted its head, opened its sharp, hooked yellow, single red spotted beak, and made a high-pitched, aggressive cry. It then stood in the same position, its head occasionally flicking, watching vigilantly as I turned and pierced the sizzling sausages. That’s when the next gull arrived, followed seconds later by another. And then another. They made piercing cries too, watching equally attentively as I turned the sausages. Before much longer there were at least twenty crying, nodding gulls, scattered in a circle around the barbecue and plates of food. They slowly inched their way forwards, stopping still every time I looked up, as if playing grandmother’s footsteps.
I leapt to my feet and gesticulated wildly. The gulls retreated a few feet, but no sooner had I got back to cooking the sausages than they began to creep forwards again. Cooking alone on an isolated sandbank, sweating under the incessant sun, the barbecue spitting, encircled now by anything up to fifty intimidating gulls; this couldn’t be happening! “Go away!” I yelled, raising my arm, accidentally knocking one of the sausages off the grill. In my panic, the alarming prospect of some Hitchcock-type bird attack, I hurled the blistering hot sausage.
There was a deafening cry as gulls flew forwards, lunging at the sand-covered meat, tearing it from each other’s mouths, squawking, threateningly hunching their wings, flapping and fighting. This commotion attracted even more gulls. The sausage torn apart and swallowed I was now surrounded by an army of intimidating, hungry, crying gulls, looking at me with dark, penetrating, red-rimmed, beady eyes, flicking their heads, demanding I throw something to eat.
I got up, ran in a circle, shouting and waving my arms. But the gulls only retreated a few yards. As soon as I was back at the sausages, there was the slow, relentless movement of webbed feet on the end of thin pink legs, an unnerving screeching, and a hundred heads flicking menacingly with each movement of my hand.
The smell of the sausages as they slowly turned crisp and dark left me drooling. I’d call the girls; six bustling ten-year-olds would soon scare the gulls away. I’d put the sausages in rolls with a squeeze of… Where was the ketchup? In… The boat!
It was slowly drifting downstream. Although I’d pulled it up on the sandbank, the sucking tidal water had cast it adrift. “Rose!” I screamed repeatedly, but she was too far away to hear.
“You dare!” I muttered, pointing at the screeching gulls, and leapt into the water.
A minute later I sat dripping, oars in my hands, rowing frantically, watching helplessly as I witnessed one of natures great feeding events. Sandwiches, crisps, cheesy twists, nuts and birthday cake, were tossed in the air, torn apart, grabbed, in a frenzied, whirling, screeching ball of flapping gulls.
“I know it’s not the same as a barbecue Rose,” I said that evening, sat in a line with friends on the Harbour wall, eating fish and chips out of newspaper. My mobile rang.
“I’ll be with you shortly,” said Kathy, my wife, enthusiastically, as a large white shape landed on the wall. “How was the barbecue? Did you see any birds?” The gull pushed out its chest, its piercing cry grating like derisive laughter.
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Bonxie
By Liam Creedon
I hadn’t meant to fall in love with her. At first glance she seemed all wrong. Dumpy, dung coloured with a voice of coarse phlegmy granite, hawking her fury at the buffeting wind. No; there was no glamour there.
Scanning down the storm scarred coast below, I concentrated on the search for the creature luring me north – an animal of unquestionable star quality. I was waiting for that sinuous, telltale movement, as thick rivulets of seaweed are parted to reveal the sleek intent of an otter.
But and indignant throaty “hock” drew my attention from fruitless scanning. There she was again, the great skua – bonxie, now free of shackling wind and buccaneering on and out over the cliffs.
For a split second the sun caught her plumage. Drab brown gave way, revealing extravagant golden streaks veining the rich chocolate of her chest. The bird twisted acrobatically on the current, spiralling to unveil startling crescents of white wing flash. Quite a show, maybe I’d judged her too quickly.
Then, as if sensing my softening attitude she snapped back from over the looming void and headed quickly, purposefully in my direction. That phlegmy call again, “hock, hock, hock” this time accelerating in tone, and then … a wrenching, splattering; the shocking raking pain of talons on hair and skin … “Oh damn it!” She had expertly aimed a long glooping slick of skua droppings, right down my arm. No, I had been correct after all; nothing but a fat, ugly gull. I turned, shaken and disgusted, and crept away.
The promise of otter had summoned me to Shetland, an animal that had eluded me since childhood. I’d come to Unst, the most northerly of the chain’s islands as it boasted the highest number of the mammals.
Unst sits resolute in the face of the fearful broiling onslaught of the North Sea. Cobalt-blue fish-rich waters and indented rocky shores offer the perfect environment for the island’s thriving otter population.
But the softly undulating duvet-like moorland of Unst, broken only by black ingot slabs of peat workings, is also just to the liking of the bonxie.
The ASBO-kid of the bird-world; the great skua specialises in mugging, violence and occasional murder. Like a herring gull cross bred with a vulture and injected with steroids, bonxie is deadly and merciless. Strong enough to kill birds as big as heron, bonxie is also righteously lazy. Skuas prefer other birds to actually catch fish for them. Like sinister avian Mafioso, they “persuade” birds to give up their catch, usually by drowning them in the churning surf.
A boat trip round Unst’s headland would be sure to unveil otters. Once aboard the sea fizzed with seabirds. Puffins with their tragic painted faces whirred like over-sized bumblebees, gannet, known locally as solan, exploded like snowy javelins into the turquoise depths.
But very quickly the sky blackened. Thousands of solan from the nearby gannetry, flooded the air, their deafening, hacking calls blocking out all other noise as they played convincing homage to Hitchcock’s The Birds. Then, imperceptibly at first until becoming a stinking, white rain, the gannets in unison started to void their bowels upon the boat. It wasn’t just bonxie with little regard for etiquette.
A panicked, shrieking drew my attention if not my sense of smell away. A fulmar cornered by a gang of skuas, was desperately trying to lift off from the sea. Each attempt thwarted by its dubious escorts, clacking their hooked bills in menace. Finally, exhausted, the fulmar coughed up its frothy catch, sending the bonxies into a wave of ecstatic squabbling. Appalled yet again, I retreated to the cliffs.
Peace at last. An Orca pod far out to sea provided respite. The huge bull’s dorsal fin clearly visible as it slipped beneath the waves with the majesty of a slowly collapsing tower block.
Puffins gossiped at my feet in the soft spring sunshine, before plunging kamikaze style over cliff edges, seemingly impervious to vertigo. But a shadow passed above as I traced one of the tiny auks arrowing out to sea. The shadow sharpened into focus – bonxie of course! Swift and arching in flight, with an unerring determination of purpose. She had murder in mind.
The puffin stood no chance. The skua honed in quickly, like a vengeful fawn angel. The auk plummeted for the safety of the sea, seconds passed, the two shapes became one, a snapping, a jarring, a confetti of feathers, then separation! The puffin was away, somehow. But then, like a toreador drawing his cape before a doomed bull, the flash of white on the skua’s wing flared as it smashed the puffin tumbling into the sea – the bonxie fell upon the tiny battered body with relish.
Despite the savagery of the puffin’s death, I was strangely elated, I’d hardly breathed since the chase began; awestruck by the spectacle and the sheer terror inducing skill of the skua.
I’d been wrong. But, nobody said love was going to be easy. This was a bird combining perfect evolution with a subtle beauty and a character straight from the script of a gangster film. Bonxie demanded attention, bonxie demanded awe and respect. Otters were long forgotten
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Crow
By Ian Richardson
One late February dawn the crows returned from their winter roost, flying in (naturally) straight lines from North, South, East and West. A thousand Abu Zajir blackening the winter sky like the monkey men in The Wizard of Oz.
Farmers aren’t allowed to shoot crows anymore, haven’t been allowed to since the Countryside Act was passed in 1981. Nowadays there are hundreds of crows’ nests high up in the highest trees behind our house. Black blob silhouettes among the wind twisted tangle of bare branches. A hypnotic Jackson Pollock.
The crows used to nest in the tall trees on the other side of the Carnoustie woods but some of these trees were cut down at the end of the Second World War to make way for a new housing scheme and the crows never went back.
Mother, 90 now, with crow’s feet around her eyes, says that Carnoustie used to be called Craws Nestie; she lives in Corbie Drive near Ravensby Road.
On mad March winds, the crows descend on the golf courses around Carnoustie like frayed gliders, slipping silently from the sky to swagger imperiously over the Open Championship Course. Shiny black tricksters, Hugin and Munin, and perhaps Odin himself ignoring the birded golfers and flapping flags as they collected twigs and long grass to rebuild winter damaged nests.
As the year unfolds and the weather gets warmer, Spitfire Crows cavort in the sky above our fields. Ignoring the scarecrows, they joust with each other to establish superiority in games of aerial ‘chicken’. They fly straight at each other until the winter, flying the black flag of himself, forces the scraggy loser to turn aside. Amidst April showers the victorious crows disappear behind the unfurling green leaves high in the treetops with their partners.
Soon the eggs will hatch and then the crows work every hour of daylight feeding their young. Tyrannosaurus crow, diminutive, two-legged dinosaur that keeps the countryside and the roadside clean to nourish the growing family.
Crows get a lot of bad press because they are black and because they are scavengers. Horror Film Crows are often shown plucking out the eyes of sinners and we are told that crows can smell the scent of death on someone even before they have died. Real crows rarely kill and, in fact, spend a large part of their day clearing up our roadkill.
At the height of summer the noise from the highest branches is constant.
It is nearly impossible to describe the waves of sound that wash through the high treetops. An occasional crow cry can suddenly become a wall of sound, rising to an ululating roar when they gather for their evening parliament.
Even with our double glazed windows closed their cawing murderous noise is deafening. Poets say that the Gods tried to teach the crow to say the word ‘LOVE’ but all it could manage was ‘CRAW.’
Priests interpret the Latin ‘Cras Cras’ as ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow’ the day when the foolish sinner will come to their church to be converted.
Crows vocalisations are complex and poorly understood. Often they are like a conversation with a series of ‘caws’ being tossed back and forth among the treetops. Sometimes it is a number of short caws, sometimes a repeated long caw. A crow will announce they are taking off from their nest with an Eh-aw sound and Caw-aw raucously on return. The vocalisations vary enormously and some calls are too low for the human ear to hear.
Loud Caw-aw’s are used to mark territory and to warn of potential danger. When baby crows fall out of their sky-scraping nest too early Mr and Mrs Crow make a dreadful racket keeping predators at bay as they try to teach Junior to fly.
As the sun sinks below the horizon a few epitaph’s ripple back and forth through this Heathrow in the treetops until suddenly all falls away to a whisper. Then a man, out late, walking his dog, sets them off again, caw-awing as they keep an eye on him from above. A thousand black demon eyes in the sky looking down among the pallid evening stars until he passes.
As night falls a feeling of peace settles over the wild woods and a softer sound like a cat purring filters down from on high.
A thousand crows never flitting, still sitting, still sitting – past the hour of midnight dreary. Now we are both tired and weary.
We know that we will get peace until dawn when the arrival of the new day will be heralded by the dawn chorus that sweeps round our earth ahead of the coming of the light. A tsunami of sound that constantly washes round the planet. A pulse of song never silenced for tens of thousands of years.
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