The Bird Watcher in the Shetlands/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
ENCHANTED CAVERNS
ALONG the bolder coast-line of this island, where the cliffs, without being very high, are steep and frowning, there are some remarkable caves, which I today visited with Mr. Hoseason, in his boat—he having sailed over from Yell Island. To me, at least, they seemed remarkable, principally by reason of the various and vivid colours which the rock perforated by them begins to display as soon as their entrance is passed. This rock, as elsewhere in the Shetlands, is sedimentary, but broken here and there with veins of quartz, often of considerable thickness, which seem to have been shot up in a molten state and to have afterwards cooled—"seem," I say, for I have no proper knowledge as to their geological formation. This quartz, which when exposed to the light of day is white or whitish, is here of a deep rust-red, and this, distributed in long zigzag lines or meanderings, is sufficiently striking, but nothing compared to the much brighter reds, the lakes, and brilliant greens with which the interior of the cavern is, as it were, painted; so that the whole effect, lit up by the candles which we used as torches, resembled, in a surprising and quite unexpected way, those highly coloured and very artificial-looking representations of natural scenery which one sees on the stage—in pantomimes more particularly or on some very florid drop-scene. These colours are due to some low form of vegetation which is spread like a wash over the face of the stratified rock, but it seems surprising, since one is accustomed to associate colour with light, that in the absence of all sun they should not only exist, but be so very brilliant. I have never seen anything like such vivid hues on the surface of rock or cliff exposed to the light of day, nor, indeed, in any landscape, if flowers and the autumn tints of leaves are excluded. Gaudily painted stage scenery, some enchanted or robber's cavern in a pantomime—Ali Baba's, for instance—is really the best comparison I can think of, nor shall I ever again think these exaggerated. Nature is really harder to outdo or burlesque than one may fancy—even on the stage, where the effort is so constantly, and, one would swear, successfully made.
In shape these caverns are long and narrow—throatal, one might call them—and the sea, with the many weird and uncouth noises that it makes as it licks, tongue-like, in and out of them, helps to suggest this resemblance. Though their height is really but moderate, yet, owing to the narrowness of their walls, they have the appearance of being lofty, especially near the entrance, or where, after descending till it nearly reaches the water, the roof is suddenly carried up again. For the most part, however, the height decreases gradually, with the breadth, till at length the cave ends in a low, dark tunnel, which the sea almost fills, and up which the boat can no longer proceed. Yet far beyond, where all is opaque darkness, one still hears the muffled wash and sob of the waves as they ceaselessly eat and eat into the hidden bowels of the rock. As the whole force and vastness of the ocean lies beyond this little tip of its tongue, to where may not such burrows extend? and might not, by a knowledge of their position and the direction in which they run, some inland towns be supplied with the blessing of sea-water?
The water in these caverns is delightfully clear, revealing in every detail, through its lucid green, the smooth-rolled pebbles and great white rounded boulders which strew, or rather make, their floor. To look down at them is like looking up into the arched roof of some other cave. One might think it the reflection of the one overhead, till, glancing up, the difference is remarked—jagged, bright-hued peaks and niches instead of smooth, even whiteness. This effect, as of a roof beneath one, is due, I think, to the continuation downwards of the sides of the cavern, for this gives the same vaulted appearance, but reversed, that there is overhead, and the mind, as with the image on the retina of the eye, soon sets it the right way up.
These caves must have been known from time immemorial to as many as were accustomed to coast round the island, and it is interesting to think of who, and what kind of craft may, from age to age, have visited or sheltered in them. Recently, however, they were first explored, if not discovered, by Mr. Hoseason (who has for years rented the island and done his best to protect the bird life upon it) in the spring of the preceding year, and they were at that time tenanted by numbers both of shags and rock-pigeons, who sat incubating their eggs on any suitable ledge or projection of the rock. Of the latter birds, to-day, there were none, but several of the former, though so late in the season, were sitting on eggs which, to judge by their whiteness, must have been but lately laid, and, no doubt, represented a second brood, whilst others, whose young were still with them on the nest, although full-fledged and almost as big as themselves, plunged, attended by these, into the water. The hollow sounds of splash after splash were echoed and re-echoed from sea to roof, and the air seemed filled with sepulchral croakings. It was easy to follow these birds as they swam midway between the surface of the water and the white pebbled floor of the cavern, and I was thus able to confirm my previous conviction that the feet alone are used by them in swimming, without any help from the wings, which are kept all the while closed. I have many times observed this before, but never so clearly or for such a length of time.
The young birds, after diving, made for the nearest rock or ledge on to which they could scramble, and they were so unwilling again to take the water that some of them allowed themselves to be caught by us, though showing every sign of fear—indeed, of extreme terror—which one might naturally suppose them to feel. This is a puzzling thing to understand—at least, to me it is. An aquatic bird that swims and dives all as easily as it breathes, and which has just before plunged into the water from a considerable height, stands now upon a rock but little above its surface, and watches a boat, the object of its dread, coming nearer and nearer, till at last it stops in front of it, and the hand is stretched out to seize and take, without ever escaping, which it might easily do in the way that it has just before done. What is the explanation? We may suppose, perhaps, that these young birds have not yet got to look upon the ocean as a place of long abode, that they enter it only with the idea of getting quickly out again, and that the rock is as yet so much more their true home that they cling to it in preference, and may even have a feeling of safety in being there. But if this last were the case, why should they leave it in the first instance? There would be no difficulty in understanding the matter if they refused to take the sea at all, but having done so once, it seems strange that they should so fear or dislike to, again. Possibly the having soon to come out—as being impelled to do so—and finding themselves no better off, but menaced as before, may give a feeling of inevitability and hopelessness of escape, sufficient to take away the power of effort. But this I do not believe—despair hardly belongs to animals, and if it did, imminent peril, with at least a temporary refuge at hand, ought to conquer such a feeling. As the birds which we thus caught were only in the water for a very little while, exhaustion could have had nothing to do with their self-surrender. The paralysis of fear ought, one would think, to have acted from the first, instead of supervening after a period of activity, but perhaps mere bewilderment, by preventing sustained exertion, may have produced a similar effect. Had it always been the parent bird that led the way on the occasion of the first leap from the rock, this powerlessness on the part of the young to leave it a second time might be attributed to her absence—but as far as I can remember there was no fixed rule in this respect. Both old and young birds generally went off with great unwillingness, but at other times this was not nearly so marked.
In their swimming so quickly to the shore again, after their first plunge, and refusing thereafter to leave it, these young cormorants brought to my mind those amphibious lizards of the Galapagos Islands which Darwin mentions as never entering the sea to avoid danger, but, on the contrary, always swimming to land on the slightest alarm, though it might be there precisely that danger awaited them. This "strange anomaly" Darwin explains in the following manner: "Perhaps this singular piece of apparent stupidity may be accounted for by the circumstance that this reptile has no enemy whatever on shore, whereas at sea it must often fall a prey to the numerous sharks. Hence, probably, urged by a fixed and hereditary instinct that the shore is its place of safety, whatever the emergency may be, it there takes refuge." The shag, as far as I know, has nothing particular to fear, either by sea or shore. His only enemy is man, who is not confined to either, but is as brutal and ignorant on the one as the other. But in avoiding danger the instinct of any animal would probably be to leave the place to which it was less accustomed, and run to that with which it was familiar—and this we constantly see. Thus a land-bird that was beginning to take to the water would leave it for the land on any alarm, whilst a water-bird under similar circumstances would make for the water. But all water-birds were probably land-birds once, so that we might expect sometimes to see in their young that old instinct of taking refuge there, which had become reversed in the parents. We might also expect to find greater dislike, on their part, to entering the water; and certainly the young shags did enter it very unwillingly from the first. So, indeed, for that matter did the old ones, as already stated, but with them there was the love of being on their nests, or at least their nesting-ledges—a late continuance of the breeding habits—to be overcome. When once they had plunged, however, they did not, like the young birds, swim at once to the shore again, but made for the open sea, and it must have required a strong contrary instinct on the part of the latter not to follow them. The lizards on the Galapagos Islands have, no doubt, also taken to the sea gradually, so that their habit of swimming to the shore when alarmed may, possibly, be due to a long-enduring ancestral instinct, having nothing to do with sharks.
We passed, whilst exploring one of these caverns, just beneath a ledge of rock, where a shag sat brooding over two tiny little things, but just hatched, perfectly naked, and jet black all over. This poor bird showed an anxiety which could hardly have been overpassed in the most devoted of human mothers, and I almost believe her sufferings were as great—for surely all extremities are equal. Her hoarse, bellowing cries reverberated through all the place, and helped, with the gloom, the murky light flung by our candles, the lurid colouring, and the deep, gurgling noises of the sea, to make a weird, Tartarean picture, difficult to excel. But it was not in sound alone that she vented her displeasure, for she was angry as well as alarmed. As the boat passed, she rose on the nest, and, in a frenzy of apprehension, snapped her bill, and alternately advanced and retreated her long, snake-like and darkly iridescent green neck. Though my head was but a foot or two away from her, she kept her place on the nest, and becoming more and more beside herself, behaved, at last, in such a manner as it is difficult to describe, but which upon the human plane and amongst the lower classes, is called "taking on." Not until I actually took up one of the young ones, to examine it—for this I could not resist—did she fling herself into the water, and then it was with a dramatic suddenness that looked like despair. It was as though she had attempted suicide, but no cormorant, I suppose, would do so in such a way.
What a strange sight this was! What a gargoyle of a creature—alive, in these gloomy shades! It seemed not a bird, but something in The Færie Queen, one of
The uncouth things of faerie,
—a line, by the way, which only resembles Spenser by being, probably, unfamiliar to most people. But our knowledge makes things commonplace. Did the fairies exist, they would be classified, and, with Latin names and description of their habits, would be no more really the fairies than are birds or beasts. Let one but know nothing, and these caverns are enchanted.
It is not often that one has so close a view of a shag as this. My head was but a foot or so off, and on a level with her own; my eyes looked into her glass-green ones. One thing about her struck me with wonder, and that was the intense brilliancy of the whole inside of her mouth, which, in a blaze of gamboge, seemed to imitate, in miniature, the cavern in which she sat. Most stupidly I did not think to open the bill of the chick whilst I had it in my hand, in order to see what its mouth was like. As bearing on the conjecture which I have formed, this would have interested me, and such an opportunity is not likely to come again. I noticed, however, that the naked skin about the beak, which, in the grown bird, is thus vividly coloured, was very much lighter, and consequently not nearly so handsome, in the larger fledged young ones. That here the intensity of the hue was gained gradually through sexual selection, I—being a believer in sexual selection—can have no doubt, and the lesser degree of it in the young bird would be due to a well-known principle of inheritance, which has been pointed out or, rather, discovered by Darwin. If, therefore, the inner colouring has been acquired in the same manner, it ought also to be first light and become brighter by degrees.[1] I must now watch for these young cormorants to open their bills, for it is a habit which they share, more or less, with their parents, and out of it, as I believe, the adornment has grown.
I have no doubt that numbers of shags roost in these caverns during the night, for when I was lost on Raasey Isle in Skye, I came to a huge vaulted chamber in the cliffs, into which scores—perhaps hundreds—both of these birds and the common cormorant flew, after the sun had set. When they were all settled, every ledge, crevice, and pinnacle seemed tenanted by them, and never shall I forget the gloom, the grandeur, and the loneliness of this scene. I admired it, though naked, except for a torn pair of trousers which were half wet through. I should like to see them come flying into their caves here also, where I am not so forlorn; but the distance of my hut from this part of the shore, the lateness of the hour up to which the light lasts, and my having to cook my supper, makes this difficult, or, at least, inconvenient. But if I cannot see them fly in in the evening, I may see them fly out in the morning, and that should be "a sight for sair een."
Whilst rowing to these caves we had seen one black guillemot, or "tysty," flying over the sea with a fish in its bill, and another swimming with a young one by its side. The latter was of a greyish colour, and about a third smaller than the parent bird, which in shape and movements it closely resembled. These birds, therefore, breed in the Shetlands—a fact well known before, I believe; but I like to rediscover things. Another and more interesting thing that we saw was a seal swimming very fast, and leaping, at intervals, out of the water. I think I may use this expression, for if he did not leap quite free of it, he very nearly did, so as to show his whole body. He rose in a very bluff, bold way, with great impetus, as it seemed, and went straight, or nearly straight up, for a little, before falling forward again. Each time one seemed to hear the splash and the blow, but this was only in imagination, the distance being too great. When I say that this seal was swimming very fast I am giving my impression merely. All I saw was the leaps, which were quickly repeated, yet with a good space between each, and all in one direction. Between them, therefore, he must have been speeding along at a great pace, so that, each time he plunged up, it was as from a spring-board of impetus and energy. I do not remember reading of seals leaping thus out of the water, but Mr. Hoseason had seen them do so before, though not often. There was a fine joyous spirit in the thing—"there is" joy, as well as "sorrow on the sea."
It is good to see an animal like this in this United Kingdom of ours—or at least in its seas—for, for a moment, it makes one think one is out of it, and in some wilder, more life-teeming part of the world. It is hard to have to live in a country, glorified as being "a network of railways," and to have no taste for railways. Oh, wretched modern world of ugliness, noise, improvement and extermination, what a vile place art thou becoming for one who loves nature, and only cares for man in books!—the best books bien entendu.
- ↑ This is, in fact, the case.