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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2024
Birds can affect us in different ways; they glide into our consciousness and interrupt our business if we let them. We see them in our day-to-day lives, they come and go throughout the year, and some raise families alongside ours, but with few means or materiality. They are a part of our world yet they seem like agents from a more expansive field of intelligence, each highly adapted to ‘fit’ their location. Their resilience is astonishing, but their ability to cope with the speed at which their environment is changing is not. In the last thirty years, the bird populations of Europe have been devastated. After studying 144 species, scientists concluded that their numbers dropped from a little over 2 billion birds in 1980 to just 1.64 billion in 2009. While changes to modern agricultural methods have had a large impact on habitat and food availability, so too has climate change, causing much of the ‘traditional’ food sources for seabirds to migrate to sea areas further north.
Such a population loss among humans would be recognized as catastrophic and would lead to (human-initiated) environmental and political regime changes, but on land and at sea, the pressure on bird populations goes largely unnoticed by many people.
The gannet colony on the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth is one of the few current ‘good news’ stories, with consecutive years of successful breeding. As such it presents a truly spectacular sight, but one that for all we know may be short lived.
The recent aerial image of the Bass seen here and on the previous pages – in which the present-day gannet colony has now expanded to occupy the entire upper surface of the rock – is part of one of the ongoing environmental time-series projects, extending over 30 years, of artist-photographers Patricia & Angus Macdonald.
Scottish artists Dalziel + Scullion recently made a trip to the rock where the individual nesting images seen above were made together with the sea feeding images to the right.
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