By Barnaby Ashton.
Those with musical tastes which run a little heavier may have spotted that I’ve misappropriated the title of this entry from an Iron Maiden lyric. The lyric is from “The Evil that Men do”, and it seemed fitting on a few levels. Don’t worry though, despite that set-up this isn’t going to be quite as heavy-handed as the music I was listening to while writing it.
One thing I’ve been conscious of from an early age is that my mind often seems to work a little differently, so I’m going to assume that my casually linking Iron Maiden with razorbill ecology might need some explanation.
“Er guys, has that puffin’s wing gone all the way round this rock…?”
At the most basic level, there is simply the question of noise. Unrelenting, cacophonous, glorious noise. Sound, or the complete lack thereof, is a strong feature of my mornings. Finding, enjoying and working with wildlife can often involve very early starts. I’ve been known to set my alarm for 2:45am to reach a site before dawn, and the day’s noise gets off to an interesting start at that time. I can be quite imaginative, but even I’m surprised at the sheer creativity I can put into a string of expletives when the alarm goes off.
The soundtrack of the next stage of the morning has a regular beat: the click and hiss of the kettle; the soft hollow whistling as I blow the heat from the surface of my coffee; the always over-amplified sounds of trying to be quiet at that hour; the clunk of the van door and the thunder of the engine turning in the cold pre-dawn quiet; then rousing metal or punk on the stereo to finish waking me up, until the total silence that follows after I reach my destination.
Early bird etc…
However rousing my wake-up music may be, even in the stillness before dawn it’s got nothing on the riotous sound that reverberates from the cliffs of a seabird colony. The low, croaking growl of the razorbill perhaps does not place them among the lead vocalists in this avian concert, but they are certainly in the backing group.
Deep Purple are often cited as the loudest band ever, recorded at an ear-bothering 117 decibels during a 1972 gig. If they’d played Smoke on the Water on the surface of the water below a large seabird colony, they might have needed to turn it up. Maybe even to 11... Note that I do not, of course, condone loud noises near breeding birds. I’m just getting carried away with my analogy.
Rock concert
Getting more specific with the song in my title brings me to the remarkable breeding behaviour of razorbills. Razorbills really do live on the edge, both physically and metaphorically. The safest way to raise our young is one of the primal questions of the natural world, and it’s a question with some interesting and surprising answers.
Often, perhaps even more often than not, the answers that nature finds involve actively embracing some dangers to lessen others. Razorbills, like many seabirds, use just such an approach to their nesting habits. Nest predation is such a threat that a common strategy for seabirds is to breed and rear young in places which are so precipitously dangerous they are incredibly difficult for predators to reach.
Razorbills favour crevices for their breeding sites, on the sides of sheer cliff faces or sometimes amongst tumbledown boulders and scree, and generally prefer not to go to the trouble of building a nest. For those on cliffs, it’s rather like if your front door opened onto a few hundred of feet of thin air. Then imagine raising children in that environment. Yet they are able to make this strategy work. A single egg is laid per breeding season and only one parent is ever fishing at any given time, with the other keeping a close eye on that front door. Which seems sensible.
Rocky landing ahead
For fledglings leaving a cliffside home, it’s an experience to shame even the most extreme of human adrenaline junkies. It is, quite simply, a case of base-jumping without a parachute to the water below, accompanied by what presumably is a somewhat worried father. In place of a ‘chute are tiny, not yet developed wings pumping at the air in a blur to help slow the descent of a body which has evolved to be light enough for this most extreme of starts in life to work. That’s certainly living on a razor’s edge.
For those razorbills making a home amongst tumbled boulders near the shore at the foot of cliffs, the experience is somewhat less fraught. I was fortunate enough to witness just such a moment, as a male razorbill made his stately way down the shore to lead his fledgling out into a life at sea. Razorbills come ashore only to breed, so this first foray into the water was a big moment.
The photos, I think, tell the story of their little journey through the weeds and rocks into the wide world better than I ever could. So I’ll let them speak for themselves between the final paragraphs of this entry.
Instead, I’ll finish wrapping up my weird little analogy inspired by a thirty year old metal song. I mentioned the title was The Evil that Men do, and the title itself resonates with me for this piece as well as the lyrics. The obvious link would be to a worrying decline in seabird numbers over recent years, razorbills among them. That’s a little too obvious though, and too big a topic for the space I have left. I was actually thinking of something more specific to capturing the images which accompany this entry.
You may note that some of these images are quite pulled-back, despite the fact I was using 500mm of focal length (in non-photographer terms, simply lots of magnification to make far away things seem bigger. If you’ve ever watched Father Ted think of Dougal and the cows). It may even seem a little frustrating that the birds don’t fill more of the frame in the final few.
There’s a good reason for the pulled-back nature of these images though, and one beyond a simple artistic desire to show the context this journey happened in. Put simply, had I tried to fill more of my frame with razorbill, and got really up close and personal to capture every feather filament, these tender and heartwarming moments never would have happened.
When I first spotted the pair I was standing on very loose shingle, which made for difficult and noisy footing. The birds were a little far from me, but to move closer would undoubtedly have caused enough noise and commotion to disturb them. The journey they were starting was big enough and scary enough already without a huge great human (to them at least, I’m relatively small compared to most other humans…) lumbering loudly up to them.
The fact I would be pointing a long dark piece of metal at them also really wouldn’t have helped if they’d seen it: birds with an inherent tolerance of humans pointing long tubes at them are not likely to have been winners at natural selection. Any wildlife photographer can attest that the minute a big lens is noticed, the subject tends to leave in a hurry. Usually just at the moment of shutter release. There is also the simple fact that in nature if something is paying you particular attention it most likely either wants to eat you or mate with you. Any one of those reasons is a good one to run away when someone points a big lens at you.
Which brings me to finishing the link to the song. In that moment when I spotted these two razorbills, I had a choice. I could clatter and slide my way across the shingle in the hopes of one really good, crisp close-up as my subjects scattered away from me and each other. Or I could very quietly crouch down where I was and watch what unfolded from that distance.
I have no doubt that I made the right choice. It’s so important when photographing wildlife that it is the wildlife which is valued, not the shot. It might be tempting in the heat of the moment to turn into some sort of bush paparazzo, and chase after the subject for that one money shot close-up. I’ve seen that done, and I’ve also seen the disdain which can be directed at people with big telephoto lenses as a result of this sort of behaviour. Sadly, it’s really not unusual for people to behave this way for a photo, so a lot of us are tarred with the same brush. Which is understandable.
Not only is it terrible behaviour towards the wildlife, I personally don’t think it even makes for better photos. If there’s a trade off between affecting subject behaviour and the distance my photos are taken from, I’ll take the distance every time. This is a choice we face whenever we interact with wildlife. I believe it’s important to make the least selfish choice and never disturb for personal gain. We mistreat the natural world in enough ways as it is.
As for our intrepid razorbills, I am very happy to confirm that they made it safely to the water. There was one big challenge for the fledgling however, when Dad demonstrated how to jump off a rock near the end of their journey to the water. At the risk of overly anthropomorphising, judging by the look on the little one’s face it may be for the best that this one wasn’t reared up the cliffs on a razorbill’s edge…
For more blog posts and wildlife photography, visit Barnaby’s website and follow him on Instagram.
Love seabirds? Take a look at our puffin products:
