Sun,showers & Solan Geese.

At this time of year gales are pretty much a given. Southerlies tend to be warm, Northerlies bitterly cold. Usually, from whatever direction they arrive, sheets of grey rain will ride in on their coat-tails, overtopping ditches and turning the ground to boot sucking clart. Occasionally though they coincide with the magic words – sun & showers. On those days it’s good to be out. One such day came at the end of October, with a Northerly blowing at 60mph the logical place to be was the sheltered and Southwest facing coast of Brims, as the crow flies a couple of miles or so from home.

To get to the shore you go over an exposed headland. The wind hits side on, with streaming eyes you adopt a gait of head down – lean sideways, walking like a half shut penknife. More than once a gust pushed me in the direction it wanted me to go rather than the direction I was aiming for. Beyond the headland  there’s an undulating landscape of low coastal grassland, cropped tight by Sheep and shaggy coated Cattle. In Summer it’s lit with wildflowers and snow white tufts of cotton grass. Today, after October’s rains, it’s miry, on OS maps it carries the name Rotten loch, earned perhaps from the brackish black water that rises up from each boot step. Despite the name it’s a home from home for hidden wisps of Snipe who prod and probe the saturated ground.

Beyond the grassland there’s a shoreline of shallow Geos, a mix of sandstone and black basalt, formed when Orkney sat far closer to the Equator than it does today. The basalt rises from the shore as if lifted by a wave, above the high water mark it’s dressed with Lichens, below it, washed twice daily by the tides, it’s dark and slick. The rain comes and goes. I’ve got a camera around my neck with a telephoto zoom, a wide lens is in a pocket. When the rain arrives I tuck the camera inside my coat and turn my back to the weather. Way over in the distance a group of cattle follow suit, heads to the South, arses to the North.

After a while I find a place to sit, sheltered by a bank, facing South towards Caithness. Gannets are fishing offshore, in Orkney they’re Solan Geese, from the old norse, sula. In old english they were the Ganot, a gander or a goose. As the weather turns and another shower blows in, a half dozen birds come within camera range and are photographed through a gauze of backlit rain. They’re large birds, a metre long body sporting an almost two metre wingspan. At a distance they’re white, up close they have eyes of pale blue-grey, black tipped wings and a head and neck dusted with ochre yellow.

As the rain continues, I watch them dive, when a fish is spotted there’s the briefest inflight pause, they dip their heads and stiffen their wings, almost a hover, a split second later, down they go. At first they form the classic W, slanting in, wings half closed, eyes on the prize.

At the last moment they become a missile, a tube of feathers, feet at one end, dagger like beak at the other. Hitting the water at 60mph and barely causing a splash. My reflexes couldn’t keep up, from dive to impact is a couple of seconds – when I chimp the screen on the back of the camera I see far more out of focus misses than in focus hits. Other birds are seen, wandering Black-backs and pleeping Oystercatchers. Greylag geese rise honking and complaining from the mire, upset by my presence. Two fence lines away a Hen harrier flies at sheep’s back height, ducking the wind, but for today at least the Gannets are the star attraction.

As the day wore on the showers thinned and the skies turned blue. On the walk home I watched a young Gannet hunt close to the shore. If an adult at a distance is white, a youngster is sooty black. Up close they’re mottled grey-brown, the colour of a Basking shark. As with the adults, just before diving, the bird had a tell, an almost imperceptible pause of the wings and a tilt of the head.