The Great Skua in the style of Robert Macfarlane – according to Chat GPT

I thought it would be a bit of fun to ask an artificial intelligence website to “Write about the Great Skua in the style of Robert Macfarlane”.

Robert Macfarlane is a British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He is best known for his books on landscape, nature, place, people and language, which include The Old Ways, Landmarks, The Lost Words and Underland.

Here’s what ChatGPT said:

The Great Skua. Stercorarius skua. A bird of shadows and salt winds. A rogue among seabirds, a harbinger of the edge where land and sea collide. To speak of it is to speak of fierce migrations, unflinching hunts, and the wildness of places that live on the periphery of the world.

It is a bird of the northern latitudes, its dominion found in the sprawling, storm-lashed archipelagos of the North Atlantic, on the great rocky crags and cliffs where gulls nest in precarious colonies and the air smells of brine and peat. Here, the Great Skua makes its home, a creature whose very being is bound to the ancient rhythms of the sea and sky. In these skies, it does not merely fly; it glides like a dark question, hanging heavy above the tumbling surf. When it circles, there is an undeniable sense of premonition, of something wild and relentless at work in the world beneath its wings.

The Great Skua is a pirate, a ruthless thief. It has earned its reputation not only for the swiftness with which it makes a meal of the weak but also for the cruel precision with which it raids the nests of its neighbors. No bird is safe from its hunger. It does not simply hunt—it forces the hand of the land, the sea, and the air into submission. It chases, it bullies, it steals with the same inexorable power that drives the tides themselves. Watching it skim over the water, there is something haunting in its boldness—its vast wingspan sweeping low over the churning surface as if it is at once of both the earth and the sea, a creature that defies the boundaries of each.

Its plumage, a deep brown with mottled light and shadow, mirrors the murk of the sea’s depths. And yet, when it takes to the wind—often riding the great gales that sweep across the North Sea—it becomes a silhouette against a cold sky, a fierce and haunting shape cut from the very fabric of those vast, unforgiving landscapes. The wind itself seems to bend to the Skua’s will, and the sea below churns more violently when it enters the air, as if nature itself knows the bird’s power.

To encounter a Great Skua is to stand at the threshold of something primordial—an elemental force that speaks to the untamed, the savage beauty of the world. It is a bird that does not yield, not to the elements, not to time. It is a reminder of those distant places where the land is broken, where life claws out a living from the edges of the earth. And in the flicker of its wings, there lies a wild, unspoken song—one sung by the wind and waves, a song only the land’s most enduring creatures can hear.

How effective is that? Have computers finally replaced us?

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