The Arctic Tern and the Lumpfish

There are 60 Arctic Terns in this colony but sadly only three surviving chicks. That’s better than the collapsed colony at the other end of the Island did last year. There, we had no surviving chicks and the site was abandoned and hasn’t been reoccupied this year. It seems eerily empty without them and without the piratical Arctic Skuas which depended upon them.

The eager adult Terns are arriving with fish after fish and attempting to feed the few remaining chicks even though they aren’t their own. It’s called allofeeding and it’s a great way of using your surplus hunting capacity. It’s a bit much for so few chicks, though.

There are sand eels being brought in:

There are flatfish arriving:

But my favourite is when an adult arrives with a Lumpfish, especially one which is too big for such a small chick:

This poor chick tries for five minutes to swallow the Lumpfish, but each time only gets its head and shoulders down. It drops it several times and has to skitter into the sea in an attempt to retrieve it. I love the expression on both their faces.

Finally, it abandons it to the waves. Never mind. There’ll be another adult along in a minute with yet another meal. It won’t go hungry.

Lumpfish

In Scotland the Lumpfish, or Lumpsucker is known as the Cock-Paddle, while in Orkney it is locally referred to as the Padle. Reverend George Lowe wrote about it in his Fauna Orcadensis in 1813:

The Padle, as it is here called, is very frequent in our harbours, especially on the sand-banks, where I have seen half a dozen drawn ashore in a net at once, but never of any great bulk. It is an oddly-shaped creature; the back rises into a sort of hunch, on which is a part something resembling the comb of a cock; the side of the belly and sides have rows of hard tubercles, running along them towards the tail; the whole skin is rough, and the colour of those found in our harbour is black on the back, and greenish on the belly; whether they change colour as they increase in bulk, I know not.

The most curious part of this curious fish is a hollow under the pectoral fins, by which it adheres with great firmness to the stones, or any thing else where it can fix itself, so that when once it is fixed there is no removing it, and the stone may sooner be moved than it pulled away. This part, I imagine, acts much in the same manner as the circular piece of wet leather, which children use to run a string through the centre of, and clapping it on a stone, by the action of the air it is held with great force, so as to lift a very large stone, and sustain it as long as the leather continues moist, and the outward air is excluded by its closely embracing the solid body.

Now I really want to find a large adult washed up on Westray’s beaches.