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.
Feet in the Woods 