The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers

Seabirds are master navigators, thriving in the most demanding environment on earth. In this masterly book, drawing on all the most recent research, Adam Nicolson follows them to the coasts and islands of Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, and the Americas.    Extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of a seabird colony will this century become little but a memory.

The full story of seabirds from one the greatest nature writers. The book looks at the pattern of their lives, their habitats, the threats they face and the passions they inspire. Seabirds have always entranced the human imagination and over the last couple of decades, modern science has begun to understand them: their epic voyages, their astonishing abilities to navigate for tens of thousands of miles on a featureless sea, their ability to smell their way towards fish and home. Comprising of ten chapters, each dedicated to a different bird, and each beautifully illustrated by Kate Boxer, the reader travels the ocean paths, looking at the way their bodies work, the sense of their own individuality, the strategies and tactics needed to survive and thrive in the most demanding environment on earth. At the heart of the book are the Shiant Isles, a cluster of Hebridean islands in the Minch but Nicolson has pursued the birds much further-across the Atlantic, up the west coast of Ireland, to St Kilda, Orkney, Shetland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Norway; to the eastern seaboard of Maine and to Newfoundland, to the Falklands, South Georgia, the Canaries and the Azores-reaching out across the widths of the world ocean which is the seabirds’ home. But a global tragedy is unfolding. Even as we are coming to understand them, the number of seabirds is in freefall, dropping by nearly 70% in the last sixty years, a billion fewer now than there were in 1950. Of the ten birds in this book, seven are in decline, at least in part of their range.  Available in paperback (Stock ID 18006)