The boat chugging ahead toward Staffa, which can be seen as the darker mass in the background. The trip there was a fairly short at just under an hour. Along the way, the captain and his cute-as-a-button first mate pointed out various seabirds and seals milling about the tug. The Arctic terns had just returned from their winter vacations in Australia, a migration of nearly 15,000 miles. (Ridonkulous.) Guillemots and black-legged kittiwakes were also flitting about the sky or bobbing along the boat's wake.
Approaching Staffa with its two main geological features--Mackinnon's Cave near the center and Fingal's Cave at the right--showcased.
Fingal's Cave is an enormous sea cave formed by the same volcanic activity that created the other Hebridean islands. The walls of the cave are hexagonal columns of cooled igneous rock that meet in a natural arch at the top. This arrangement causes the cave to have acoustics similar to the nave of ancient cathedrals, trapping and amplifying the sounds of the waves lapping against the rock. Inside the cave, there is what can only be described as a melody from the sea. This melody was the inspiration for Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture.
If you click on this photo to enlarge it, you can see the columns of basalt much more clearly. These columns are similar in origin to the Giant's Causeway off the coast of Northern Ireland and Kilt Rock on Skye.
Despite the advanced age of the rock comprising the Outer Hebridean islands Lewis and Harris (Lewisian gneiss, ~3.3 billion year old), the rock comprising Staffa is fairly young at only 55 million years old. Iona, which will be covered in the next entry, is made of the same Lewisian gneiss formation as Lewis and Harris, and is thus considerably older than its near neighbor Staffa.
The disembarkation point. There really isn't a fixed pier or anchoring site on Staffa. Instead, ships pull in to this cove and let passengers alight as they wish.
Naturally, I chose to get off and make full use of my hour on the island. I immediately headed to the opposite end of the island where the brooding grounds were located. Staffa is a nesting site for several species of seabird, including the puffin, which was next on my Scottish wildlife bingo card.
The view toward Mull on the left and the island of Ulva on the extreme right.
The waters around Mull, Staffa and Iona were a brilliant turquoise, and clear to the bottom. Here, the color of the sea is muted as the clouds had yet to dissipate.
As I said earlier, I was ambling around the island in the hopes of catching a glimpse of a puffin up close. For those of you who have never heard of puffin, allow me to paint a picture of just how darling they are. Imagine a toucan and a penguin got wasted one night, had a momentary lapse of judgment, and bumped avian uglies. The resulting bastard child would be a pigeon-sized ball of squeal-inducing fluff.
Atlantic puffin--the kind I was in search of--breed in the early summer and lay a single egg in a burrow formed on the side of a cliff. When not brooding, they remain out at sea, soaring through the water like a penguin ("She got it from her mama" as the popular rap song of late might say). Both sexes have brightly colored bills, though they become brighter in the weeks preceding breeding season when beak plates grow in. These plates are then later shed.
Both parents tend to the burrow, but in the daytime can usually be seen floating on the water near their cliff, hunting herring and sardines. The captain of our boat gave me a few tips on how to successfully lure puffin to their burrows, the most important of which was to stand still near a cliff edge, thus scaring away the gulls. The mere presence of a human encourages the puffin to return to their nests, without fear of harassment from the noisy gulls that roost nearby. I took this advice to heart, found myself a burrow on a cliffside, and stood near it quietly. Three minutes later, this little guy popped up.
This stunning creature was perched fewer than six feet from me, keeping a watchful eye over his burrow and the treasure inside.
After he flew away and I ensured I had snapped a good photo of him, I proceeded to do a victory dance that likely frightened away most of the roosting birds in the area for quite some time. Thank goodness for uninhabited islands.
I then trekked back toward the boat, collecting along the way, and headed toward my next stop of the day, Iona.
Still to come from the Hebrides: the birthplace of Christianity, Caribbean(?) sands, and keeping friends close and anemones closer.
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