Skomer Day 6: Storm on a Cliff

The forecasted storm has hit Skomer over night, 40 knot winds and massive swell pound into the narrow inlet at Bull Hole, it is just as well that the guillemots have not yet laid as the biggest waves scatter the kittiwakes lower on the cliff and spray begins to lash even the tops where the guillemot are. Looking in detail through the telescope life in the colony goes on unperturbed, the guilemots as usual seem consumed in a storm of their own whipped up by strong internal urges, released through bouts of behaviour contrasting either aggression or pair bonding. For me though the raging storm heightens the experience.

I am determined to complete an entire scroll today and decide to work in the way I have developed, minimising the marks I make to capture each individual. I also start from the bottom of the scroll this time so always drawing the guillemot in front of the next. I mark out large areas of cliff for reference then individuals in a group using circles so I do not loose track of numbers and scale as the birds shuffle and reshuffle.

I complete the drawing by 6pm, having covered a large cascade of guillemot stage left of the Bull Hole 1 drawing. I am now familiar enough with the birds to be able to draw one after just one glance through the scope, meaning I have really been able to enjoy capturing the dramatic behaviour seen today, highlights below:



Guillemot with a fish greets it's partner, the interaction seems aggressive to start with then they settle into allopreening

Grappling rivals tumble down a steep ledge, one flings the other who, possibly caught in the wind falls approximately 60m to the ledge shown at the bottom of the main drawing. After knocking the birds breaking its fall off like skittles, it stands up and begins to preen.

Mating on the steepest ledges, requires a lot of frantic wing action

All the bridled bird in this section were found to be in the top left area of the drawing. One bridled bird B4 was possible to track, and I noticed it moving between two different birds, preening both.

The complete Bull Hole Scroll 2

Bull Hole Scroll 2, detail

Skomer Day 5: Scrolling On

Bull Hole Scroll Scroll 1, Detail

Bull Hole Scroll 1

With winds gusting around 40mph, I revert to working from inside the Bull Hole hide today, even inside I need to use six heavy duty clips to stop the paper lifting, but I'm grateful for the shelter.I draw solidly all day, finally complete the first Bull Hole Scroll at around 9pm. It has taken a long time, however making it I have learnt how to reduce my drawing to capturing the essence of each bird posture, so I am developing a way of drawing that allows me to move around the colony recording what I see accurately but quickly.

Skomer day 4: Squeezed on a Cliff

Detail of the Amos Loomery

A wet and misty morning with strengthening winds improving visibility enough that I can see the loomeries by 11am. I am forced however to abandon the first scroll I started at Bull Hole yesterday evening and take refuge in Elspeth's hide at the Amos. After what seemed like half an hour of human / equipment tetris I manage to compact myself into the tiny cliff top box and find a position I can draw in. My telescope is tilted at 90 degrees from the tripod so I can look down the angled eyepiece, worryingly my head takes on a similar concertinaed stance. However, there is no way I'm going to move anywhere as the rain hammers the hide head on and fills the plastic sheet I have used to block off the section of window, save for where my telescope peers out. Despite my slight discomfort, The world through its lens absorbs me for hours as I watch and draw the interactions within groups of guillemots jostling for position on an already densely populated flat ledge. 

In this period pre- egg laying I find the guillemots appear even more highly charged than I am used to seeing; jostling for position on ledges, shuffling and reshuffling with fights breaking out as birds lash out with sharp stabbing motions at new birds, often centred around pairing birds frequently coupling as rivals (presumably for mate and ledge) challenge and are fought off. Some apparent fights turn into tender allopreening (again courtship I have not noticed later in the season), other birds arrive with fish presumably as a courtship offering, but are mobbed by their neighbours. I imagine a sense of heightened awareness as birds always seem in tune with their neighbours and the network of social interactions threading throughout the loomery. Amidst this frenzy of activity, I discover colour ringed birds, but admit to having difficulty reading the numbers (usually three digits on left leg, T on right). One ring I can read, to the left of the drawing: Green 907. Later Julie looks up G907 on the database for me, it is a male presumably ringed as a chick in 2009 (check) with no subsequent data, which suggest that it is a young adult returned to the Amos for its first breeding season. If it was a bird that had bred previously, I would amongst other things be able to see where it nests on the cliff each year (normally pairs are faithful to the same square metre of ledge)and who it's neighbours are. 

Bull Hole Scroll at the end of the day.

The weather blows over and by late afternoon it is dry enough to continue work on the Bull Hole Scroll. The more I observe the more natural it becomes to draw and I feel the pace picking up after this morning's session at the Amos.

Skomer Day 3: Inky Drops

At Bull Hole today, I started an ink drawing of a stepped section of the loomery.Using three brushes with reservoirs filled with ink diluted with water to varying concentrations, I was able to work quite fast. I like the effect although it is a little over complicated for use in the field since it requires timing the period of drying between each wash. In the afternoon I decided to revert back to graphite although the ink method I was using with the reservoir brushes may be useful for making some of the exhibition pieces later on.

Bull Hole, top of group B

Start of Bull Hole, scroll 1

The wind dropped in the afternoon enough for me to work higher up the cliff, which helped if only for a change of scene. This time I felt I was beginning to get my eye in, really understand the birds. I am working on a vertical format which immediately felt right because I am following the grain of the colony so to speak. The drawing is beginning to work. By around 7pm, the sun is low behind the cliff and it becomes hard to reliably make out the birds in a shadowy haze through the scope.

Tide and swell around Bull Hole, Auks on the water and in the air

I finish the day painting the sea as a swell develops,reminding myself that this is the environment guillemots have evolved to thrive in. Translucent layers of colour in the water remind me of the crypt window by Keith New in Sheffield Cathedral.     

Manx Shearwater

Shearwater and gulls in the moonlight

Shearwater, creeping into burrow, bottom

Tonight I took a torch out to see the Manx Shearwater that arrive under the safe cover of darkness on Skomer during the breeding season in their hundreds of thousands. As it fell completely pitch dark at around 11pm the Manxies began to arrive, a trickle at first like falling meteors rushing over my head then a storm of wings crashing out of the sky, and appearing instantly on the path in front of me. They are majestic in flight when I have seen them skimming the waves in Cardigan bay , but on land they flip and flop like fish out of water on account of their short legs, useless for walking. They creep into rabbit holes and the whole subterranean network soon echoes with the peculiar cackling, mewing sound of their birds safe below ground. Others unable to find a hole crouch motionless and silent amongst the bluebells, their inability to walk making them easy pickings for gulls as their numerous remains attest for. I shine my torch on the birds and draw them very quickly, imagining the long exhausting journey that has brought them here, the reluctance to be in this uncomfortable environment rife with horrible danger.    

Manx Shearwater amongst blue bells

Skomer Day 2: Bull Hole

Part of the flat section at Bull Hole, slow progress in graphite

Drawing at Bull Hole

At Bull Hole there is a small hide which I can shelter behind, offering enough protection from today's South Westerly for me to comfortably work on a large scroll drawing. That was the plan at least, however I soon encountered one problem I did not consider; the wet atmosphere of the island makes the paper very damp and heavy going to work on with graphite. By late afternoon I had made very slow progress and was coming to realise that attempting to complete the major drawings in the field was not going to be the best use of my time on the island. I needed a quicker way of drawing, even if it meant making rough records of what I'm observing which can be be reworked later on. I finish the day by planning a method using brush and ink which should be faster for blocking in the guillemot shapes and will also be unaffected by the quality of damp paper. I also try out different compositions using a vertical format, focusing on three downward cascading patterns within the loomery, shown below.

Colony Compositions at bull Hole in ink and the Amos in pencil

Skomer Day 1: Loomery Scrolls

First egg seen

I arrived on Skomer Island today to start work on a new drawing project called Loomery Scrolls which will be exhibited at the Festival Of The Mind 2014 from 18 - 28 September. This arts festival is organised by the University of Sheffield each year to showcase the work it carries out by supporting collaborative projects between artists and members of the Universtiy. I am on the Island to meet Professor Tim Birkhead, Professor of behavioural Ecology at the University and a leading figure in avian biology. Tim has studied Skomer's guillemots at their breeding colonies or loomeries every year since 1972 and today for the first time, he is going to show me the sites that have occupied this research.

A theme of festival of the mind this year is chaos, which could appropriately describe first impressions of the densely packed loomeries Tim studies; a single square metre of precipitous cliff ledge can be occupied by up to seventy nesting birds. However closer observation of individual behaviour reveals a strong social structure running throughout a loomery. Over the next five days and a subsequent week later in the season, it will be my job to make drawings that describe this order within the apparent chaos of the loomeries on Skomer. Thankfully Tim will be at hand to help me make sense of it all, along with his PHD student Elspeth Kenny and research assistant Julie Riordan who are also on the island. Happily for me; Elspeth is studying  the colonies from a detailed perspective, focusing on the allopreening behaviour that strengthens the bond between breeding pairs and their immediate neighbours, whilst Julie presents a wider picture of the colony by carrying out the work of monitoring populations and ringed birds that has continued uninterrupted on Skomer for forty years.     
 My approach will be to draw the loomeries bird by bird on long rolls of paper large enough to capture a sense of of the overall scene with enough detail to describe the posture and therefore behaviour of each individual guillemot within it (similar to work posted here on 26 May 2013). The overall aim being to exhibit drawing scrolls that capture the awe and wonder of Skomer's vast, seemingly chaotic loomeries whilst simultaneously describing the detailed and complex social order at the heart of their cohesion. 

The Amos

Tim meets me in the morning and introduces me to his two main study sites. First the Amos; a folding elbow of volcanic rock, curving out to sea and back on itself to cradle a steep sided basin around which the colony groups form on mainly deep flat ledges. The densest groups of guillemots here are all on one level, perfect for the kind of linear composition suited to the scroll format I am looking to make. This is Tim's main study site, where most of his colour ringed birds are; individually identifiable with a numbered ring that correlates to a database giving the life history of birds in some cases over more than twenty years. I hope these stories will play a part in my work, which I hope to engage viewers in through a strong sense of narrative. To continue the population monitoring this year, Tim's field assistant Julie watches the colony throughout daylight hours from a small wooden hide using a telescope. She plots positions and codes I am yet to fully understand, on a large photograph of the site pinned to the hide wall. Next door Elspeth, has a yet smaller hide from where she collects her data on allopreening behaviour in the common guillemot. I fold myself into the hide and try it out for size, It would be cramped to draw in but could well be essential given the unsettling forecast for this week.

The Amos is on the Western side of the Island facing South, exposed to the prevailing wind, which is strong today. Tim takes me to a more sheltered study site, the largest colony on the island, Bull Hole. When Tim first started studying this site for his PHD, there were approximately 500 birds in three groups he labelled a,b and c, shown on the drawing below. That was in the 70's, in 1966 there were around 5000 birds and the colony today is again close to that number. Skomer is one of the few seabird stations where guillemot populations have increased, making the research carried out here all the more important for tackling the declining population trend elsewhere, particularly the North Sea. Tim explains that since he started studying the Bull Hole site, guano and the treading action of the guillemots has broken down the grass and soil to once more reveal the bare rock ledges they need. Remarkably, this has occurred in such a way that the present day loomery is the same pattern and shape as that shown in photos from 1966. 

I have am interested in the way the pattern of a loomery is defined by the geology of the rock it is on; two forces of nature on different time scales causing an affect. At Bull Hole, I am finding two things visually striking, which makes the loomery unique to anything I have seen before. Firstly the ledges are very steep which means the loomery looks like it has formed in cascades flowing down the cliff face, narrow and dense in gullies, broadening out over spreading heaps of scree. The second difference is that I am seeing a loomery before egg laying has occurred for the first time. This means the birds, rather than incubating, seated and more stationary are standing upright with large groups facing the same directions determined by the angle of the ledge they are on, creating an overall monochrome patterned effect across the dark cliff face.

Over the rest of the day I get to understand the structure of cliff and colony at Bull Hole, shown in the drawings below. I focus on the nearest third and also densest area of the colony, drawing patterns, postures, formations of both groups and rock and finally compositions for the next days' drawing.  
  

Bull Hole, landscape, guillemot groups and patterns. 

Bull Hole, composition studies, rock formation and guillemot postures