The Herdsman of the Sea
The winter sea holds sustenance for those with eyes to see
In winter, the divers come. They are strangers to me during the long days of summer, becoming birds of remote places or heather-sprung lochans while attending to eggs and – when their luck holds – chicks. But now it is cold. The days are still short, hemmed in by nights black as feathers and boiling clouds of the leaden elements. Sour looking pasture land, all sapped of vigour, runs down from the scoured hills to the beech-lined shore.
In the narrow sound between mainland and island, the wind owns the waves. Beaten water, never still, frothing at the skerries. A silver glimpse where waves crest the kelp beds hints at a seal, an otter, a salmon. Or, more likely, just a trick of my hungry eye in this time of optical famine.
Still, there are times when even the wind rests. When its autumnal work of shaking loose the crackling beech leaves is done, or when a gilded dawn stuns all with its beauty, the wind loosens its grip for a moment. The waves calm to a glittering, soft roll of invitation.
Beneath the trees at the water’s edge, golden sands shine beneath green-blue water. Hermit crabs emerge from kelp fronds, waving their claws at explosions of sand under a fleeing flatfish. And the divers come.
First to grace us is the Great Northern. Two sleek bodies look black upon the water. I peer through my glass, conscious of a privilege and the turning of the year’s wheel. Yes, they are here. Elegant, the divers scrutinise the submerged sands and dive. Minutes later they are back on the quietly rolling surface, quartering the shallows as they hunt.
I am transfixed. Long ago, I watched this bird through a telescope on a reservoir in a different nation. So rare was it there that the observation hide was busy with eager eyes, and checklists. Now, I watch the divers from my living room; they are but yards away. They stay all winter, using the island’s darkness to moult their plumage and prepare for spring.
On each day of relenting wind, the divers appear at the shore to tell us that a winter sea holds sustenance for those with eyes to see. There comes occasionally a gentle weather day with only a glimpse of one bird, far out from the shore. I peer again at a slightly different shape, still low in the water. The blackness could be a different tone, the head and bill shape not quite the same.
The Black-throated Diver has arrived. He is of his kind, spending his time echoing the moves and wisdom of his larger cousin – though he is warier, and less common here. His solitary visitations sometimes go unnoticed at dusk, when shades of encroaching night hide him amongst the ripples.
The time approaches when the divers will leave. It is February; light and length are pushing back, up, and out across the land and sky. The sea will hold its winter cold for a while longer. It never hurries. But soon, the wheel will click forward again as spring’s vigorous calls overwhelm all nature. The divers must shed their salt days.
The Great Northern will fly away to the northern places of countries beyond my horizon. The Black-throated goes to the loch-speckled moors. A sign of winter for me, so they become a sign of spring for those hardy upland dwellers, people of heather and rock who scrape their living where others go only to play. They wait for the divers to bring them messages of resilience and consistency in the short Highland summer.
The divers’ is an old story. In the winter of 1888, a man of God watched as a Great Northern Diver flew ‘strong and sweeping’, wings scything the air above a sea loch in the far north-west of this island. In October of the previous year, God’s same servant “heard its curious cry ring out over the still waters of the loch as the bird floated easily with the tide…”
Back then, indigenous Gaels knew the Great Northern as buna-bhuachaille, dumpy herdsman, or muir-bhuachaill, the sea herdsman. This was the land of black cattle, the snorting heart of a pastoral community seeing no distinction between human and nature. The herdsman of the land observed the herdsman of the sea, and read the weather, saw the seasons. Although the cattle herdsman’s culture is diminished now, divers remain part of our collective island story. In winter the divers come again, and I am grateful.
such beautiful description, written with love.