Environmentalists are big fans of national parks, areas of land protected by governments for their beautiful countryside, rich wildlife and cultural heritage. All civilised countries have them, wearing them like badges of honour to demonstrate their commitment to conservation.
The word “park” conjures up the idea of great size, implying huge tracts of land stretching as far as the eye can see. But the Isle of Man is tiny, less than a quarter of the area of the Lake District, England’s foremost national park. A Manx national park is out of the question, but not to be outdone the island’s government has opted for National Glens instead.
A glen is a narrow valley, the word being derived from the Gaelic language, and there’s no doubt the glens are amongst the Isle of Man’s best natural features. They are heavily wooded, featuring rushing streams, tumbling waterfalls, fizzing cascades, deep rock pools and lush vegetation. Scattered here and there along them are the remains of watermills, echoes of a bygone age.
I don’t think you’d describe the National Glens as spectacular – the scale is wrong, too small – but definitely attractive and serene. They’re a perfect getaway from the hurly-burly of 21st century living.
The Manx government has designated no fewer than 18 mountain and coastal National Glens. These are preserved and maintained in a semi-natural state by its Forestry, Amenity and Lands Division, and are freely accessible to locals and tourists alike.
Pocket-sized though they are, the National Glens are a real asset to a little island in the middle of the Irish Sea. These compact and picturesque gems give the Isle of Man an unexpected but distinctive charm. Small really is beautiful.
In my book, few things in the natural world beat the sight and sound of running water amid the myriad greens of a secluded, verdant valley. Take a look at my YouTube video for a sense of the peaceful atmosphere in Silverdale Glen, Glen Maye, Ballaglass Glen and Glen Dhoon:
There’s a good good range of birdlife to enjoy on the Isle of Man, but the star of our 2018 visit was undoubtedly the Chough. Pronounced chuff – to rhyme with stuff – the Chough is a member of the crow family. It can be easily identified by its bright red bill, which is slightly down-curved, and paler pinkish-red legs.
Once locally common in the British Isles, the Red-billed Chough – to give this handsome bird its full name – suffered a catastrophic decline in numbers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Farmers wrongly identified them as agricultural pests and blasted them out of the sky, trophy hunters shot and stuffed them, and egg collectors wrecked their chances of successful reproduction.
However, the final straw was a change in land management practice. Choughs are specialist feeders relying mostly on invertebrates, and therefore need access to an environment that supports their diet, including a mosaic of vegetation with lots of short grass and open areas. Grazing animals are essential to maintain suitable coastal and upland habitats, but a reduction in such grazing activity in the 20th century adversely affected the birds’ food supply.
Thanks to rigorous conservation efforts the Chough is now showing signs of recovery, although progress is painfully slow. The RSPB reports that in 2014 there were 394 breeding pairs spread across the British Isles, up from 284 in 1982, and of these, 30% were found on the Isle of Man. As the figures below demonstrate, numbers of breeding pairs on the island almost doubled between those two years.
Choughs can be found at various locations on the Isle of Man, but when we visited in June 2018 our best sighting was at a coastal site called the Chasms, where the sandstone cliffs are incised by deep fissures. It’s a scenic but exposed and windswept spot, where purple heather, low-growing shrubs and coarse grasses hug the ground to avoid being battered into submission and then unceremoniously deposited into the Irish Sea.
The juvenile Chough is a scruffy-looking bird with less vivid colouration than the adult
The cliff-top vegetation is ideal habitat for Choughs, and we were treated to excellent views of a couple of adults probing about in it for grubs and bugs. There was also a juvenile, a scruffy-looking bird reminiscent of a moody teenager indifferent to his appearance, its bill less brightly coloured than those of adult birds, and its plumage lacking their glossy black lustre. Click the link below to view the short video I made of the Choughs we spotted at the Chasms.
After around 30 years of birdwatching it’s unusual for us to add a new species to our British Isles life-list, so seeing these striking birds for the first time felt like a special privilege. Thank you, Isle of Man!
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Researching this post, I’ve discovered lots more stuff about the Chough, some of it rather surprising. Read on and find out more.
Choughs in Cornwall
Before Covid-19 wrecked our plans, we’d intended to renew our acquaintance with Choughs during an April visit to Cornwall, England’s most westerly county. The Cornish have a special affection for these birds, which, as the table above shows, have made a comeback in the 21st century after becoming locally extinct in 1973.
The Chough was once so common in Cornwall that it was known as “the Cornish Chough.” As such it became a symbol of the county, and featured in the heraldic arms of the County Council and several prominent local families. It also appears on the arms of the Duchy of Cornwall, the private estate of Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales.
The Coat of Arms of the Duchy of Cornwall. IMAGE CREDIT: Sodacan This W3C-unspecified vector image was created with Inkscape. / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
Historically the county’s rugged coastal landscape was well suited to these birds: sea caves and old mine shafts offered suitable nesting sites, while the ponies that worked at the tin and copper mines encouraged the proliferation of their invertebrate diet by grazing on the cliff-top grass.
However, the esteem in which these birds were held by Cornish people could not protect them from the combined impact of shooting, egg collecting, habitat degradation and the collapse of the mining industry.
In 1973 Choughs became extinct in Cornwall, and remained absent until 2001 when some vagrant birds arrived from Ireland. A pair of these bred the following year, and with the support of the RSPB’s Cornwall Chough Project, a slow recovery is underway. In 2019 there were 12 successful breeding nests in Cornwall, from which 38 chicks fledged.
An Arthurian connection?
King Arthur, legendary 6th century leader who is said to have defended native Britons against the invading Saxons, had strong connections with Cornwall. Unsurprisingly, therefore, his story has become intermingled with that of the county’s favourite bird. It is said that after his death, the spirit of King Arthur entered into the body of a Chough. The bird’s red legs and beak are supposed to represent the blood shed by Arthur in his last battle.
Most reasonable folk regard the whole King Arthur story as romantic nonsense, or, less politely, a load of old codswallop. I’ll leave you to decide whether Choughs owe their distinctive colouration to Arthur’s untimely demise.
Choughs in Heraldry
Whatever we think of the Arthurian connection, it’s clear that in earlier times the Chough was widely known and admired in the British Isles. From the early 16th century onwards it began to appear in the heraldic arms of families with no connection to Cornwall.
The Coat of Arms of Thomas Wolsey (and, subsequently, Christ Church Collge, Oxford, which he founded).IMAGE CREDIT: ChevronTango / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
Most notably, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor and chief adviser to King Henry VIII in the 1520s, commissioned a coat of arms which included two Choughs. This may have been a devout churchman’s punning tribute to the martyr Saint Thomas à Beckett, the 12th century Archbishop of Canterbury who was gruesomely murdered in his own cathedral, reflecting the fact that an archaic name for a Chough is “beckitt.”
There is, however, a less charitable interpretation. Wolsey’s vanity was legendary, and he cannot have been unaware that the commonly accepted meaning for a Chough in heraldry is “Strategist in battle; watchful for friends.”
How well this describes Wolsey, who, having failed to secure his master’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, died while on his way to London to answer a charge of treason, is questionable. But the cardinal did have a good friend in Thomas Cromwell, who succeeded him as chief adviser to the King. Out of respect for his friend and mentor, Cromwell also included Choughs in his coat of arms when he was awarded the title Baron Cromwell in 1536.
The Coat of Arms of Thomas Cromwell, 1st Baron Cromwell. IMAGE CREDIT: FDRMRZUSA (talk · contribs). See sourced file for original authors. / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
It seems improbable that either Wolsey or Cromwell could spare time from sorting out the King’s disastrous matrimonial problems for a spot of birdwatching, but had they done so they would doubtless have sought the Chough, which so handsomely adorns their coats of arms.
And who could blame them? As we learned on the Isle of Man, it’s a very special bird.
Recently I’ve posted several pieces about birds and birding, and I guess the casual reader might have concluded I’m a twitcher. Nothing could be further from the truth. In day-to-day conversation most people use the words “twitcher” and “birdwatcher” interchangeably, but this is completely wrong. To be absolutely clear: I’m not, never have been, and never will be a twitcher. Neither is Mrs P. Capiche?
Twitchers may enjoy seeing wild a Eurasian crane, which is bouncing back in the UK after a reintroduction programme
So just what is a twitcher?
Twitching is … “the pursuit of a previously located rare bird.” …. The term twitcher, sometimes misapplied as a synonym for birder, is reserved for those who travel long distances to see a rare bird that would then be ticked, or counted on a list. … The main goal of twitching is often to accumulate species on one’s lists.
SOURCE: Wikipedia, retrieved 25 August 2019
Twitching is anathema to me. It sounds like a sad and lonely activity undertaken primarily by sad and lonely men who really need to get their priorities in order.
Sadly, no self-respecting twitcher would give this wood pigeon a second glance
Twitchers appear to care little for the bird itself, but are obsessed by the chase. For them it’s all about the quarry. Once a particular species has been seen and ticked off in the appropriate book or list they quickly lose interest and move on to the next challenge. It’s as if by seeing the bird it becomes their property, theirs to log and then ignore as they immediately consign it to history in favour of the next target.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to see a rarity, to get the chance to study in the flesh a bird that most birders have only read about. But it gives me just as much pleasure to spend a quiet moment watching an everyday bird like a wood pigeon or a bullfinch as it does to glimpse a rarity.
Sex and the City: peregrines mate on a ledge at a local disused cotton mill. Twitchers and peregrines in simultaneous ecstasy?
Even if it’s as common as muck, a bird is still a masterpiece of nature. Birds are tangible evidence of evolution in action, sculpted from bones and flesh and feathers. I love nothing more than to marvel at their very existence, to learn about their lives and to enjoy their antics as they go about the everyday business of living.
Twitchers, it seems to me, are doomed to a life of unhappiness: they have never seen enough birds, or the right birds, to bring them the satisfaction they crave. Mrs P and I, however, live in the moment, enjoying the starling or the sea eagle or whatever else comes our way, taking simple pleasure in the wonder of nature. This to me is what birding should be about, not pursuing a quarry species to the ends of the Earth and then all but forgetting it once it is seen.
Twitchers, please don’t dismiss the bullfinch just because it’s a common bird
There’s a book in here somewhere, Zen and the Art of Birding Contentment perhaps? My next project, maybe?
Bird cliffs are wonderful things. Home to thousands – sometimes tens of
thousands – of birds living in close proximity to one another, they are a
cacophony of noise and a maelstrom of action.
On the cliffs birds mate, lay their eggs, raise and feed their young,
and fight off predators. All life – and
sometimes death, too – is here.
And then, of course, there’s the delicate matter of having a
poo.
We all know that when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. And we also know it’s best not to mess in your own back yard. But how does the fastidious bird cope with this, without leaving – and therefore possibly losing – its favourite spot on the crowded cliff? During our visit to Sumburgh Head on Shetland we were pleased to see a puffin demonstrate how it’s done.
We’d been watching the bird for a while. It was standing motionless on scrubby grass close to the cliff edge, staring out at the ocean as if deep in thought. Finally, it seemed, the puffin reached a decision.
The bird shuffled around until its head was facing inland and its tail out to sea. It then engaged reverse gear and inched gingerly backwards. At last, teetering on the very edge of the cliff, just inches from disaster, it dipped its head, raised its backside into the air and casually did the business.
Except for its bill a puffin’s face is unmoveable, an inscrutable mask. But I’m sure I could detect in that bird’s eye a mischievous twinkle, the barest hint of smug satisfaction. I swear the puffin was quietly rejoicing in a job well done as it waddled away from the cliff edge, turned and resumed its previous position to stare serenely out to sea.
It was a fine performance, and Mrs P’s photo captures for posterity the exact moment when the foul deed was done. But spare a thought, if you will, for the poor fulmars and guillemots nesting on the cliffs below without a care in the world, unaware that just a second or two later they’d be showered in puffin poo, courtesy of the upstairs neighbour from hell.
My last post described how puffins at Sumburgh Head were the highlight of an otherwise miserable visit to Shetland earlier this year. I hope future generations will have the same opportunity to enjoy them, but the prospects are not good. The Atlantic Puffin is now identified on the BirdLife International/International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List as a vulnerable species. Massive population declines are projected over the next 50 years because of food shortages due to climate change, as well as pollution, predation by invasive species and adult mortality in fishing nets.
Iceland is one of the puffin’s strongholds. Mrs P and I have visited Iceland on a couple of occasions, and were impressed by the Icelanders’ ability to carve a decent living out of that bleak, inhospitable lump of rock in the North Atlantic. To do so they had to use whatever nature offered, and therefore included seabirds as an important part of their diet.
But I cannot forgive Icelanders for allowing puffin trophy hunting.
The Metro newspaper reported recently that trophy hunters are paying to kill up to 100 puffins at a time. Follow the link for photos of the gloating hunters and their “trophies”, but prepare yourself to be appalled.
Where, for god’s sake, is the sport in killing 100 puffins, not for food but simply for the “fun” of it? All life is precious, and no creature should die simply to enable men – it’s usually men, isn’t it? – to show off their prowess with weapons. There are times when people disgust me, and this is one of them.
What also disgusts me is that it’s legal to import puffin trophies into the UK. Surely we, collectively as a modern, environmentally-aware society, and individually as responsible citizens of a fragile planet, should be better than that.
I wish I could tell you we had great holiday in Shetland earlier this summer, but as the Platypus Man never tells porkies I’ll simply say that it was, sadly and for all the wrong reasons, an unforgettable experience. We were there 17 days, and it rained on about 14 of those. On several days it didn’t stop raining at all, while a bitter wind from the north made us wish we’d packed our thermals.
Shetland is an island group at the northern extremity of the British Isles. It’s much closer to Norway than to London, and it’s a different world up there. We’ve been before, nearly 30 years ago, and when the sun’s out it’s strangely beautiful in a stark, barren, pared-back kind of way. In June 2019, however, we barely spotted the sun at all. Gloom and despondency settled upon the Platypus Man and Mrs P, and we bitterly regretted not going somewhere more congenial, like Antarctica, or maybe Everest base camp.
But of course every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case it was
the puffins. Shetland is one of the best
places in the UK to see the Atlantic Puffin, and although their numbers are
falling steadily due to the impact of climate change on the fish that make up
their diet, they are still present in good numbers.
Sumburgh Head, at the southern tip of Shetland, has an easily
accessible puffin cliff. We went twice,
and on both occasions a miracle occurred: the rain stopped and the sun came
out, though the wind buffeted us mercilessly, howling like a banshee and
tugging roughly at our hair and coats like an old woman stroking a cat.
Mrs P and I are seasoned birders – bird-nerds, some might say – and
enjoy nothing more than spending time watching birds of all types. The average Brit is less keen, but I defy
anyone not to be enchanted by puffins.
Some people call them sea parrots, others cliff-top clowns, but what’s
in a name? They are, quite simply, the most
iconic and instantly recognisable of this country’s seabirds.
And they came in their droves to the cliffs at Sumburgh, ordinary folk who’ve probably never done a day’s birdwatching in their lives, to be captivated by the puffins. Some of the birds are so close you can almost touch them, and they seem to pose for the camera. It’s difficult not to take a good photo of a puffin.
Everyone loves a puffin, wants to see them, wants to get up close and personal with them, wants a selfie with them. It was just the same when we visited Newfoundland a couple of years ago. In coastal areas, wherever the birds were known to nest, the conversation between ordinary tourists was dominated by one subject: where is the best place to see a puffin?
In coastal Newfoundland, as at Sumburgh Head in Shetland, one thing is beyond doubt: it’s all about the puffins.
Now I'm 64 