Country diary: All set for takeoff on the blustery cliffs

According to the Met Office, the Shetland Islands are some of the windiest places in the UK, and they’re living up to their reputation. Our planned bird cruise to the gannet colony of Noss is cancelled. Instead we make for Sumburgh Head, the spectactular southernmost point of the Shetland mainland.

White-capped waves crash far below the cliffs and sweep out to the horizon, spindrift tosses up mini-rainbows and creamy plumes of sea froth float up and over. A few puffins – tammie norries in the Shetland dialect, which has its roots in Scots, English and Nordic languages – are still couried into ledges, and a bonxie (great skua) powers past; a lone gannet – a solan – circles briefly at eye level, as small lines of them fly low across the waves, cormorants cutting across their path. I’m always inordinately pleased to see gannets now, after bird flu decimated their colonies. A friend here tells me that some gannets’ pale blue eyes have turned black – a possible sign of surviving avian flu – but it’s too blustery to hold my binoculars steady enough to see for myself.

The grey and white stiff-winged fulmars thrive in this kind of weather, catching and managing the updraughts with uncanny precision, hanging in position like a person teetering on an invisible highwire, as they wait for their moment to alight on the narrowest of ledges. The windier it gets, the more they seem to love it. Their chicks are moving away from their fluffy excess and are exercising their wings before their first descent into air.

The beautiful pink carpets of thrift are gone now, their flowers stiffened and bleached by the salty air, though the daisy-like sea mayweeds are holding on to their heads still. The sea churns and froths against the rocks, transforming from Arctic bluey-grey to Mediterranean turquoise, and all shades of blue in between, to white.

It’s hard to hear anything above the roar of wind and water, though I know that somewhere down there the puffins, the tysties (black guillemots) and other auks that made these cliffs their home will be heading to their wintering grounds out to sea. I drink in the sea-salty air, let the updraught whip my troubles away, and wonder how many words for wind Shetlanders have.

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