It’s one of the wonders of the world.
A few days ago, I watched the great white birds circling overhead as our boat approached the Bass Rock, home to over 50,000 northern gannets, one of the largest colonies on the planet. The cliffs are white with squawking birds and out at sea we saw them plunge from the sky at 70mph to pluck fish from the water.
The gannets are only just recovering from the bird flu outbreak five years ago which cut the Bass Rock population by a quarter. And gannets are just one of the many seabirds in long-term decline around Britain’s coastline. As our boat gently drifted nearer to the rock, the skipper pointed out the young birds, their heads still a fluffy yellow. “We call them gugas”, he said.
And thereby hangs a tale. On Monday the government agency NatureScot is expected to announce that no licence will be issued this year for the traditional “guga hunt” in the Western Isles. Last year, 10 men from the village of Ness on the Island of Lewis were granted an exemption from the protected species legislation to allow them to take 500 young birds from the rocky outcrop of Sula Sgeir. But the scientific advice is that even this limited hunt would endanger the long-term viability of the colony.
Over the past year there’s been a campaign by conservationists against the guga hunt, labelling it a “grisly piece of history.” There have been demonstrations at Holyrood and at the NatureScot conference. A petition against the hunt has attracted 100,000 signatures and a campaigner, dressed as a gannet, even stood as a candidate in the Scottish elections in May.
The guga hunt is symbolic of the transition we are all supposed to be making from a world with limitless resources to one where resources are finite. Most of us now realise that we cannot go on plundering the planet’s oil and gas and forests and fields without endangering our own existence.
I say most of us, because Donald Trump leaked the information this week that Andy Burnham is about to “open up the North Sea” for more oil exploitation. It looks like he will grant a production licence to the Rosebank oil field west of Shetland and the Jackdaw gas field off Aberdeen. He will, of course, argue it doesn’t break Labour’s manifesto promise not to license any new oil fields, since the developments are already under way. (They are not, actually, or shouldn’t be, since they have no licence.) But even oil grandees, like Sir Ian Wood, who died this week, realise that we have to get on with the transition to renewables.
The new Prime Minister has been using his first fortnight in office to announce a string of token measures to please his new subjects. Number 10 North in Manchester will apparently give more powers to local regions in England but there was little said about Scotland – except, of course, that a second independence referendum is “off limits”.
Andy (if we call him that, in this tee-shirt Burnham era) is cutting VAT on electricity bills, saving the average household a massive £45 a year. Those living on state pensions only will not pay income tax – most of them don’t have to anyway. And he re-announced Starmer’s £8.4bn “investment” in nuclear-armed submarines. He says it will preserve 40,000 jobs, some of which are on the Clyde or at Rosyth. But £8.4bn spent in almost any other way would preserve and create many more jobs.
The Commonwealth Games are now just past the half way stage. At the time of writing Scotland has won 23 medals, 9 of them gold. We’ve done particularly well in the swimming, with Angharad Evans winning gold in both the 100m and 200m breaststroke and Duncan Scott, OBE. taking the gold again in the 200m individual medley. On Saturday Josh Kerr will hope to repeat his world record for running a mile in 3:43. The overall winner of the Games will probably be Australia which already has 103 medals in its locker. England comes next with 57 and Scotland and South Africa are fighting it out for third place.
Sadly, I’m not going to the Games, even though I live just 50 miles away. I’ve tried three times to buy a ticket on the official website. My email pleas have gone unanswered and the phone line simply directs you to the website. I’m surprised there is anyone in the stands.
I have however managed to buy tickets for the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe which begins next weekend. It’s expected that some 2.6m tickets will be sold, in contrast to the Glasgow Games’ 500,000.
But every seat taken is important, just like the 20,000 on Sula Sgeir and the 50,000 on the Bass Rock.
