The banks of the track were lapidary with spring flowers: wood anemones and stitchwort, dog violets and ramson, vernal squills shimmering azure across the greensward as I emerged on to the headland. As old climbers will, I was returning to a memorable place of my youth: Mother Carey’s Kitchen. You’ll find the name on navigation charts these days, but it’s not as traditional as you might assume – I coined it after I first stood at the foot of its impressive high buttress of seamed walls, steep corners and bold arêtes.
Why? Because on that May morning 55 years ago, the air thronged with “Mother Carey’s chickens”: storm petrels, the smallest of seabirds, about the size of a sparrow, dark-plumaged and white-rumped. How wonderful to see them here over the sea once more, light and fluttery in their flight, wings angled as they stoop to feed on plankton and small, floating crustacea.
These petrels are mostly females, recently returned from their wintering grounds around the Cape of Good Hope to breed on Skomer Island, an hour’s flight north-west of here. They rendezvous at Skomer annually with their mates, with whom they bond lifelong. Their nesting tunnels are among red sandstone boulder-scree. Males are left in occupation to repel intruders and refurbish nests, while their partners fly off to feed up before the laying of a single large white egg which will, after long incubation, hatch in darkness late in June.
Walk across Skomer’s slopes while all this is going on and you’ll be aware of a purring, vaguely reminiscent of the churring of nightjars in certain valleys of Eryri (Snowdonia), from the ground at your feet. The nestlings gain weight rapidly, eventually are deserted by both parents, emerge warily at the burrow entrance and are immediately a focus for predators such as the little owl and the greater black-backed gull. They stretch and flap their wings, eventually stumble seawards and are gone on the long flights that constitute their lives.
I see water rising in the zawn, hop over its boulders, and climb steep rock to lounge once more among the squills, my indolence contrasting sharply with the industry of the petrels overhead.
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