Those who discover ornithology as a hobby usually first concentrate on songbirds. The blackbird tripping across the lawn is just as familiar to us as the curious robin. Few would think of entering with Limikolen or Herons. Or with sea birds. For one thing, they are not easy to determine. It takes practice to tell growing herring gulls, Mediterranean gulls, and black-backed gulls apart. Young spatula, parasite and hawk skuas also look more or less the same to someone who only takes a cursory glance. On the other hand, these birds are far from anything that seems familiar to us. The high latitudes and sub-polar seas are your comfort zone. “The further away we feel from home, the more at home they are.“This is how the English author Adam Nicolson put it in his book“ The Call of the Sea Bird ”.

Kai Spanke

Editor in the features section.

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When he was eight years old, his father traveled with him to the Shiant Islands.

The uninhabited archipelago belongs to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and has a bitter charm: cliffs and stone beaches, grassy slopes and rain.

An inhospitable place.

And yet life raged there.

Little Adam was greeted by three hundred thousand birds.

They whizzed over his head and let themselves be studied from just a meter away: "It was a look into another world." The boy from back then has now become a sixty-four year old man, but the fascination for gannets, dark shearwaters, guillemots and Cormorants haven't slacked off a bit.

Rather, it has become a real passion.

If you take a closer look at these animals, it is not surprising. There are “no flying marine mammals, no sea bats, no sea insects, no flying crabs or aerial humpbacks” - but sea birds. Of the roughly ten thousand known bird species, only three hundred and fifty specialize in the open sea. Their lives are fundamentally different from that of a wren or a mallard. While the feathered visitor in the garden is maybe two years old, a wandering albatross glides over the oceans for eighty years, covering eight million kilometers in the process. In addition, seabirds are often monogamous, with both parents involved in raising young. The females often lay only one egg (blue tits produce seventeen eggs), and only after many years.

These manageable proportions stand in stark contrast to the mass gatherings that seabirds organize for the breeding season. On the coasts around Newfoundland alone, 35 million specimens gather every summer to provide for offspring. In addition to such remarkable numbers, Nicolson's treatise comes up with graphics, photos, and research findings. The author explains why puffins are attracted to the color orange and the incredible data provided by a GPS transmitter on the back of a fulmar.

The ten chapters, in which there is a lot to learn not only about the biology and the cultural-historical significance of animals, but also about our relentless handling of them, Nicolson often puts into form with a poetic language: subjective, sensitive, unfortunately whispering at times and drifting away in metaphysical kitsch. As imposing as sea birds are, that they embody genius and “show the beauty and the mystery of being”, can be questioned and dismissed as rhetorical tinsel. Apart from that, Adam Nicolson has succeeded in creating a differentiated presentation that will impress even those familiar with the subject.

Adam Nicolson: "The Call of the Sea Bird".

From the lives of puffins, boobies and other sea travelers.

Translated from the English by Barbara Schaden.

Liebeskind Verlag, Munich 2021. 368 pp., Hardcover, ill., 36, - €.