the times Saturday June 11 2022
We e ke n d 9
The day I saw an
albatross — aged 7
Mya-Rose Craig
W
e were back in
Cornwall, sea-watching,
my least favourite type
of birding. The clue is in
the title. Sea-watching
is all about hanging around on
headlands or cliffs for hours at a time,
windswept and often very cold, waiting
for something interesting to happen.
Staring into grey skies and greyer water
through telescopes or binoculars
requires a special kind of concentration
as you wait for an unusual bird to
appear, and when something does
appear it’s often very brief and no bigger
than a speck on the lens. There is
virtually no chance of identifying such
specks. If you’re twitching with others,
often the shout will come up: “Look!
Over there! Just by that wave — not
that wave the bigger one. Right of the
white buoy.. .” It can be a frustrating
experience, compounded by the fact
that in less than a minute the bird will
probably disappear.
Bad weather, however,
greatly increases the
chances of seeing a good
bird, given that strong
winds blow seabirds
towards the coast.
So, while there is a
greater opportunity
of catching
something
interesting, you are
standing in a cold
breeze and, often,
the rain.
On the most
southwesterly tip of
the Cornish coast,
Gwennap Head, we hiked up
the coastal footpath hoping a
Cory’s shearwater would glide by on its
bowed wings. Even though this would be
an entirely new sighting for Mum and
me, I was bored. Staring out to sea,
watching heavy grey clouds wasn’t my
idea of birdwatching. I preferred to be
on the move, in fields or woodland, on
hills, by lakes and rivers — out of the
wind and rain.
Dad, however, decided this was a
“teaching moment”. “Come on, Mya.
Let’s get realigned. Can you see the
Runnel Stone?” The Runnel Stone is
a granite pinnacle in the sea one mile
south of Gwennap Head. It used to be
visible above water before it was struck
by a steamship in 1923. Now a buoy
marks its position, and it is commonly
used as a directional aid among birders.
Instructions such as “third bird from the
left at three o’clock of the Runnel Stone”
are indispensable when the bird is no
more than a dot in the sky. Dad took my
shoulders and positioned me. He knew
how I felt about sea-watching, and the
best way to re-engage me was to teach
me something. Locating grey birds
against a gunmetal landscape is difficult,
it takes patience and practice; trying to
spot the Cory’s shearwater in among
other birds would be hard. Over the
years I learnt how to differentiate
between species of seabird by the way
they were flying. And the more familiar
I became with identifying common birds,
the better I could pick out an unusual
one in their midst.Eventually, I broke away from Dad
and the other dozen or so twitchers and
began to explore, climbing over the big
rocks scattered across the cliffs. When
I was bored of doing that too, I made my
way back to the twitching huddle and
was about to tell my parents that I was
hungry and maybe we should go back to
the car for a flask of soup, when one of
the party calmly stated “Albatross”. He
was an experienced Cornish sea-watcher
who, I was to learn, had scanned the
coastlines of the local area for the past
30 years. Nothing much fazed him.
But... albatrosses are incredibly rare in
the North Atlantic. They are almost
mythical creatures in birding folklore as
they make improbable journeys from the
southern oceans of the Antarctic. Flying
nonstop for 16,000km is a feat worth
celebrating, and if this twitcher had
indeed spotted an albatross, surely he
would be jumping up and down and
waving his binoculars in the air!
“There!” he announced. After a few
stunned seconds everyone began
scrambling for their telescopes. Giving
directions to locations out at sea is
notoriously difficult, usually a mess of
“over at eleven o’clock” or “by the boat!
No, the other boat!”, but thankfully this
wasn’t one of those occasions. I wasn’t
bored any longer as I watched, my
mouth hanging open, a black-browed
albatross cruising effortlessly towards us.
These beautiful birds have long, thin
wings over two metres in length that
carry them vast distances across the
oceans without a single flap as they ride
the winds, an amazingly efficient way to
travel. Imagine jumping off a Cornish
cliff with only a hang-glider for company
and weeks later arriving in the southern
oceans off Antarctica — that’s the
albatross. Soaring above the tumbling
waves, slowly but surely, it made its way
towards our huddle of 14 twitchers glued
to their telescopes.
Each time I thought I had the best
view possible, the albatross flew closer
and I saw more, until it was only a few
hundred metres away and I could see
every detail. It flew close in, slowly
towards Porthgwarra. I saw it with the
telescope well and then with binoculars
and then with just my eyes. It looped
through the air by the cliffs and then
swooped down towards the sea in a
single elegant thrust, catching the wind
beneath its massive wings. Rising again,
it repeated the whole sequence twice
more before flying parallel with the cliff
face towards the next promontory — on
which two lone birders were staring out
to sea. We waved at them, jumped up
and down and screamed into the wind to
try to catch their attention.
As the albatross melted away, the
birders sprang into action, calling in the
record, putting local birders on high
alert, but this was to be the only sighting
that day or in subsequent days, just 16 of
us in total to acknowledge it had ever
happened. When I uploaded the
albatross sighting on to my online list,
someone reported me for lying.
Apparently there was no way a seven-
year-old had seen an albatross out at sea.
© Mya-Rose Craig 2022. Extracted
from Birdgirl, to be published by
Jonathan Cape on June 30, £16.99then she could crash. I didn’t see the nega-
tive stuff at first as my dad and sister shield-
ed me. It was only when she started going
into more depressive episodes and was in
bed more and wasn’t able to communicate
that I maybe started to think something
was wrong.”
Originally, she says, Birdgirl wasn’t sup-
posed to be such a personal book, “but I re-
alised that the piece that was missing was
my mum’s illness, as our lives didn’t make
sense without mentioning it, because most
families don’t just run away to all these
countries all the time. My mum wanted
mental illness to be destigmatised and to
explain the good bits in my book. Bird-
watching calmed her mind. It’s a form of
mindfulness for me too. Life is so busy now,
with social media, it’s very nonstop and it’s
easy to stare at a screen all day. Birding is
a respite.”
Birding, Craig explains, contains two
very different elements: “The competitive
side where it’s like a game and even Mum
and Dad compete occasionally, and the
contemplative side, about enjoying being
outside. The birdwatching is about loving
being in nature, while twitching is more
like a sport. I like mixing up the two.”
She has now seen more than 5,500 spe-
cies of bird. “I have a list online but I’m not
just a tick-off and move on kind of person.
There is an albatross living off the York-
shire coast near my gran’s house that is
beautiful. I think it has moved in with the
gannets and I visit regularly.” For years she
was desperate to see the harpy eagle and
the little auk. “The more times you fail to
see a bird the more desperate you become.
The little auk finally turned up at the har-
bour near us.”
Watching the decline of so many species
turned her into an avid environmentalist,
but she is also aware that travelling the
globe opens her up to accusations of hy-
pocrisy. “Everyone has to come to terms
with their own impact on the planet. I’m
vegetarian, I’m not a big consumer. I’m
trying to get the train [more].”
She also runs camps for inner-city Bris-
tol children from different backgrounds, so
they can enjoy the countryside — taking
them camping on the Somerset Levels, for
example. “Nature can be quite daunting
and I love watching them learning to get
muddy, pick up worms, stroke birds and
lose their squeamishness.” She once found
a large maggot had burrowed into her
head after birdwatching in Africa. “I loved
the gross stuff — to my parents’ dismay.
I’m only afraid of spiders.”
Her parents never had to push her pas-
sion but Craig was unnerved by the vitriol
she received on social media, much of it for
her work as a campaigner and activist. “I
don’t think I would have got so much abuse
if I had been a boy. People here seem to feel
threatened by female birders. In America
there are more female than male birders,
so it’s a UK thing, but maybe it has been
useful to be underestimated. I do have
good male and female friends in the bird-
ing world.”
Her family are still her favourite birding
companions, and they are all going on a
trip to Mexico in September. “I haven’t
been on a big trip since before the pan-
demic. I’ve met all my major targets, so
now there won’t be a competitive rush. But
my parents have started going on holiday
without me and saw a lot of birds that I ha-
ven’t yet,” she says, feigning horror and
laughing. “But I’m slowly making my
peace with the fact that our lists are never
going to match any more.”JOHN ANGERSON FOR THE TIMES; MYA-ROSE CRAIG/INSTAGRAM; RSPB-IMAGES.COMMya-Rose CraigMya-Rose with Sir David Attenborough in 2018After a few
stunned
seconds
everyone
began
scrambling for
their telescopes