Extreme Birdwatching for Beginners

There was a generation of young Britons, now largely passed into history, for whom the great outdoors was a playground. They were English, averagely wealthy, perhaps Oxbridge students, and came to adulthood in the 1930s.

In simpler times their preoccupations were cycling, walking, collecting butterflies, and birdwatching. There was, in fact, a great revolution in cycling in the 1930s as the cost of the bicycle tumbled. There were many rambling associations. Every weekend, hoards of enthusiastic young people left the towns, cycled somewhere nice, ate a packed lunch from a brown paper bag, and fell asleep in the long grass. It was always sunny, and blackberries filled the hedgerows. You get the idea.

‘Island Going’ by Robert Atkinson explains this love of the outdoors taken to rather more extreme lengths. He was a graduate with an obsession for cataloguing sea birds, and he went to extraordinary lengths to do so. In the style of an EnidBlyton adventure he set off, often in open boats, in search of the rarest species.

His search for the Leach’s Petrel took him as far as North Rona. The Leach’s Petrel is a rare seabird that is ocean-going for most of the year, and returns to land only to nest – in burrows – and is usually only visible at night. North Rona is an impossibly tiny rock in the sea where the Atlantic meets the Arctic Ocean – it is half way to the Faroes. Atkinson and his colleague were dropped off for the summer by a fishing vessel, armed with a tarpaulin, some tins, a notebook and a camera. He camped in the ruins of an abandoned dwelling. It must have been tough. It was the polar opposite of marmalade sandwiches, blackberrying and lashings of Ginger Beer. It rained all summer. The two of them went for a swim early on and his colleague Ainslie appears to have almost succumbed to hyperthermia. They were buffeted by the wind, and spat at by the fulmars. Fulmars, incidentally, are one of the least pleasant sea-birds. They nest in the open on cliff tops and when threatened regurgitate half-digested fish and spit it at their enemy.

If you add to this the fact that the pair of them got to the edge of Scotland in a reclaimed 1920s car that had already been written off once, you get an idea of their dedication.

The book, in diary form, covers a few summers before the war, and one afterwards. The other island experiences were slightly different. It wasn’t all total solitude, and he writes warmly of the island people. St Kilda was finally abandoned in 1930, so the people who were re-settled were part of recent memory for the fishermen who travelled from island to island.

A bizarre feature of island life before the war was that several islands were used for sheep grazing. The flock was taken in an open boat and deposited, to be left unattended all winter, and the shepherd returned each summer to sheer them. A few were lost through falling off cliffs or disease, but it was a remarkably reliable way of farming. The visitors to North Rona were limited to the shepherds, who carried out the ‘annual’ each summer and then left the sheep to their fate.

Reliant on fishermen and supply boats, Atkinson visited North Rona, the Shiant Islands, Canna, The Flannan Islands, Eigg, North Uist, The Moanch Islands and St Kilda. One of his last trips before the War was to Sula Sgeir, which he describes as having ‘no sort of inland at all’ – he was never more than fifty yards from the ocean. This last, extreme island hopping was achieved on 31^st August 1939. Like the rest of the world, travel for learning and pleasure ceased at the end of the month.

Atkinson did get back to North Rona in 1946. The immensity of the Second World War had touched the distant islands only faintly (several were used as fuelling stations, and a plane had made an emergency landing on Rona in 1941), and the beauty was intact. His telling observation, though, was of the disproportionately large number of young Hebridean men who had volunteered to serve, and how the small numbers on the remote islands had been ‘drained’ by the experience. There is a sadness in the final chapters. He says,

“Already the thirties, yesterday, were a closed and labelled period, another little packet of time passed.”

In Britain we are guilty of considering the history of the Twentieth Century in little packets as Atkinson described. Everything is either pre-War or post-War. The Twentieth Century really began in August 1914, and the modern world began in 1945. As a result the Thirties are often overlooked, or assumed a dark time clouded by the fear of another war. This book shows that this was far from the truth for many people. It is, of course, a world away from Great Depression, Jarrow marches and blackshirts. It was meant to be.

Robert Atkinson’s books fell out of print after the war, and there is little on him on the internet. It seems that he died in 1995. I have found no biography, which is appropriate considering the non-digital nature of his exploits so long ago.