The Mystery of the Disappearing Seabird
The northernmost point of mainland Britain is a piece of land called Dunnet Head, which sticks off the Scottish coast like a big toe testing the cold waters of the North Sea. Atop cliffs at the tip of the toe sits a squat lighthouse, built in 1831 by Robert Stevenson, the grandfather of the author Robert Louis Stevenson. The lighthouse is popular with shutterbugs, but none is here on this early-July afternoon. Blame the wind. It jostles you, roughs you up, rips the breath from your nose.
Not that the wind has driven everything away: Dunnet Head hosts one of the largest seabird colonies in Scotland. From an overlook near the lighthouse, you can peer down at thousands of murres and razorbills bunched five birds deep on narrow shelves of rock; the wind carries their churlish growls. From their nests among the cliffs’ many nooks and crannies, northern fulmars croak and wheeze, but above the general clamor rings a high cry that is both insistent and becoming more and more rare: Kit-ti-waake! Kit-ti-waake! Kit-ti-waake!
The United Kingdom is home to almost half of the seabirds that breed in Europe. Of those, nearly three-quarters are in Scotland. Seabirds all over the world are declining, but few more so than the kittiwake in this part of the North Sea. Where it was once one of the most common birds here, in places its numbers have dropped by more than 90 percent. Colonies in the Orkneys and the Shetlands that rang with the calls of tens of thousands of kittiwakes now have just a few hundred pairs, or a few dozen, or none at all. But to save the kittiwake, biologists must extract the cause of its decline from a system rife with uncertainties and beset by change.
The kittiwake is a small gull about 15 inches in length, with a wingspan a little more than twice that. Adults have a typical gull’s white head and gray wings, but while they may be known for their voice—many of their common names are onomatopoeic in some way—kittiwakes truly distinguish themselves in the air. They have an almost ethereal buoyancy, their movements so graceful and fluid that when they flap, they seem to be trying not so much to generate lift as to hold themselves down.
This affinity for motion may seem total, but like all seabirds, kittiwakes must come ashore to breed. This they do in the spring. Even then, they seem loath to touch too much ground, nesting on the most precipitous of coastal cliffs. Their nests, built of
