The Wild Coast.  David Boag. Tuesday 13^th September

There are more than 6000 miles of coastline around the British Isles and in this strip of land can be found wildly different habitats that include cliffs, estuaries and mud flats, salt marshes, sand dunes, rocky shores and beaches of sand and pebbles. The one thing that these different habitats have in common is their proximity to the sea, resulting in an ever-changing environment – tides, salinity, weather, and temperature - making many of them hostile places to live. The surprising thing is that there is such great variety of living things - plants, animals and birds - to be found in these wild places and David Boag treated us to a feast of superb photographs of this wildlife with his talk on ‘The Wild Coast’.

The ocean with its huge productivity is home to many seabirds, and we were shown some stunning photos of these birds flying and feeding in their home element - true “masters of the ocean”.  Adapted so well to life on the wing, they often appear comical or awkward when they return to land to find a place to reproduce, a place that is safe but near their source of food in the sea. On land each species has become adapted to its own niche and we were shown guillemots and razor bills stacked up in their thousands on inaccessible cliffs, and we heard how the guillemot egg is adapted not just to not rolling off the ledge, it is impossible to make it roll off!  We saw photos of kittiwakes with their precarious nests on invisible ledges, and puffins nesting in burrows on cliff tops. The photos of the gannet colonies on outlying islands showed the pattern they form in their effort to nest exactly the right distance from each other, close enough to provide safety from predatory gulls yet not too close to annoy the neighbours!

Some birds have solved the problem of reproducing on land in extraordinary ways and we saw a landed shearwater at night, caught in the flash of the photo as it stumbled, screaming, to find its mate in the burrow. We saw terns nesting on the beach and marvelled at their ability to migrate from top to toe of the world, returning to land each year to reproduce.

This was an excellent evening – superb photos of individual species, backed up with information about how the success of living things depends on their interaction with each other and their environment. I was reminded yet again how global warming is interfering with this balance, seen by the present breeding failure of many seabird colonies, and how urgently we need to address this at an individual, national and international level.

Penny Avant