Skomer Island

It could almost be a riddle. There are 300,000 birds here, on this island, which is small enough to see from end to end and where a circular walk lasts only six kilometres. Yet you can see none of them. They are nearly all nesting, and nearly all have eggs, but you can see no evidence. Why? Because the nests are all underground.

Arriving on Skomer island, greeted by puffins, guillemots and razorbills, we was looking forward to taking a walk along that great transition between the sea and the land. The rocky cliffs, even from the short boat ride, could be seen teeming with wildlife, and the colours of the flowers dusted the slopes with the pink of campion and the white of something I didn’t recognise. As we walked up the slope from the boat, the birds get astonishingly close. It is unusual in this country to have wildlife unafraid, so used are we to animals fleeing at the first sign of people, the only genuine encounter with something wild coming from someone trying to feed a grey squirrel in a London park. The puffins here stand inquisitive and the guillemots, which look like shrunken penguins, tilt their heads, watching you and the sea simultaneously.

To be fair, the lack of fear in the birds could be that this nature reserve lacks any ground predators; foxes, cats and rats have been successfully excluded. As have rich people in tweed with guns.

The first thing you are told to do is to turn round on the top of the path up the cliff and survey the slopes above another cliff a few hundred metres away over the bay. Even without binoculars the holes are obvious, peppering the ground like a chinese chequer board, puffins poking out of some. But these are mostly the burrows of the Manx shearwater, a much rarer bird for which Skomer is an internationally important site. During the day the parents are out at sea, and at night they hide away underground. During the dawn and dusk you can see them leaving and returning en masse, with a legendarily eerie call.

‘Don’t step off the path’ we are told, and made to repeat. Last week a woman sat down off the path and crushed a nest. You begin to walk and you see why. Everywhere there is no path there are burrows, with plants clinging on in-between. Only where there is water and rock do the burrows cease. On an island with only a few small trees, this is by far the most ingenious use of space, and you have to admire the puffins and Manx shearwaters for developing this burrowing ability. It certainly seems like a more attractive option than the guillemots and kittiwakes, huddling on the edges of the sea cliffs with their nests balancing above the void.

As you walk around the circumference of the island the views down onto different cliffs come into sight and then fade, and hundreds of birds are replaced with many more hundreds round the next cove. Enthusiastic photographers huddle together pointing telescopic lenses at lone puffins posing in front of their nests. Now and then a puffin will take off, or one will come in to land, their wide orange feet stretched as far apart as possible, making them look like wingsuit pilots. They do not fly in the most graceful way, but they are fast, and appear from the horizon shooting low over the sea.

The island circuit does not take long to complete, and there is just enough time to head for one of the central bird hides to watch a curlew. It is not an enormous place, but twinned with its surrounding islands Skomer shows how targeted efforts to create nature reserves in vitally important places can have benefits far more than their size would suggest. But it can’t be easy. Surrounding the island is the marine reserve, and just out in St David’s Bay we can see an oil tanker coming in to one of the many refineries around Milford Haven. Talk about life on the edge.

What Skomer also reminded me is that wildlife does not always have to be terrified, fleeing at the first smell of humans. You do not have to go to a zoo to see animals close up. Simply choose to go to somewhere where they have no reason to fear you.

Pania della Croce

Sometimes a full work day means you really have to try hard to find time to get outdoors. And sometimes, when you find yourself somewhere you can’t resist, you just have to get up at 4am and run up that mountain.

In the Alpi Apuane, the Apennine National Park in Tuscany, there is not only a spectacular mountain range, peaking above 2000m in places and providing a mix of dramatic cliffs and ridge-lines asking to be scrambled. Most of the lower mountain slopes are also covered in thick forest, mostly from what I could tell, of beech with a few oaks thrown in. There were undoubtedly more species higher up, and when the woods opened out, steep meadow flanked the rocky summits. We are used to patches of woodland in Britain, and if lucky, even get to walk through sections that almost seem untouched. The Apennine National Park feels like the most sacred and beautiful of our woodlands on a vast scale, the land protected from agriculture and the trees forming an unbroken blanket over large valleys and down precipitous slopes.

Through this landscape there are trails, marked out in the European way by red and white paint on rocks and trees every few tens of metres and on bends. Each trail is numbered, and sometimes signposts are encountered. There is of course a debate as to whether this is appropriate in Britain, and many dislike it, but in Europe it undoubtedly leads to great walking and trail running on mountain slopes that would be too steep to go straight up, and woodland too dense for most regular walkers to find enjoyment.

I had two visits to the mountain valley near the village of Fornovolasco, and after sitting in a van most days, needed the running time. The mountains towering above the village were tempting enough, and so at 5am off I went, following the red line on the map, trying not to trip over in the dawn light, running up towards the ridge. This peak, Monte Forato, is named after a natural limestone arch on the summit of the ridge, like the handle of a giant buried amphora. I came up to it, not knowing it would be there, and there it was, a hole in the mountainside. From an hour staring at trees and the rocks in front of me I could suddenly see the sea, several miles and more than a kilometre beneath me. The ridge from Monte Forato north to Pania della Croce falls away nearly vertically on the western side, whereas the eastern side has grassy slopes above the forest I had climbed through. Along this ridge I ran, the sun making its way gradually over the snow-capped peaks to the east. This kind of running, followed by the rapid descent 900m down the mountainside back to Fornovolasco, is the bit where you can really fly. Before I turned to descend, I took a look up at the monster, Pania della Croce, 600m above me.

Five days later and I was back, on another work day, up at 4am on the only morning in two weeks in Italy that we’d had rain. I ran up through the woods again, my torch pointing at the track, trying to find the red and white paint to stay on course. My shoes slipped in the mud. I wasn’t expecting mud in Italy. Gradually, as I rose higher, the light increased, until when I reached the ridgeline I could make out the path in the gloom, and the mountainsides hummed blue. Clouds filled the valleys beneath me and spilled over the low point in the ridge, a temporary cloudfall. There was Pania della Croce, 1858m high, above me. I startled a herd of mountain goats as I ran up the flaky rock path, steeper than in the woods, causing me to go slower, sometimes to stop. I promised myself that I would turn round at 6am to give time enough to descend.

The path, climbing the flank of the summit cone, reached a point where I could see over to the northern slopes of the mountain. The route had become a game of jumping, trying to keep up a run whilst leaping onto rocks and skirting path hanging over long drops.

The view began to change. There lay another ridge path, to other peaks, and there a high mountain hut. I turned to look at the summit and in front of me was rocky scramble, a sometimes loose fine ridge of limestone. It was good to feel the rock in my hands. It was smooth and cool in the morning, a comforting essence of solid mountain. It was getting on for 6am but there was the summit cone, a well rounded dome from my angle, right above me. With a beating chest I experienced again that reason we mountaineer, to suddenly come face to face with sky on all sides, the mountain around and beneath you. I touched the summit trig point, and looked out over the Apennines, at the sleeping Italian villages and the Tuscan peaks, tooths above their foresty gums, lonely in the morning light. Spreading out from that point were other trails, leading to other peaks through other forests and other adventures. And I turned to run back down mine to the valley below.