Gannet

West Penwith,
Cornwall.

A sloping, grassy path leads out beyond fields and granite stiles, to the headland. Gurnard’s Head lies anchored like a low-slung battleship, a jug of cliff, protruding out into the Atlantic. In the fading light of late afternoon, the headland is being battered by the tail end of a storm, and the rising sound of surf hitting the cliffs promises drama. A high tide is running, pounding the cliffs of West Penwith in lines of churning disarray.

I love returning to this walk, through pastures filled with slow chomping cattle, to the familiar spine of exposed rock, and the path lined up like a tight rope, leading straight out to the ocean. And today, it is all about bouncing light, wind and the movement of the sea. The rain saturated darkening of heath and bracken, brings an elemental rawness, brightened by a jostling bracelet of surf. There is nothing between me and the unbridled force of the ocean, the space of sea, cliff and sky – one giant canvas.

I find myself looking again for somewhere sheltered, where I can sit quietly and face into the last of the afternoon sun. Salt spray is rinsing the rocks, so I climb to a higher path on the ridge, a dry corridor leading to a place littered with plump cushions of sea pinks. Easing into a corner, I’m screened here by a sea of faded wild carrot, all its skeletal, wintered beauty, sharply framed by the light. Flowering from another time. A chough slices past in a tangled wrap of black wings, calling roughly as it veers down the cliff, swallowed out of the air, then gone.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was walking down here through fields of shining green grass already cut for silage, and the path was criss-crossed with a matrix of swallows, cutting the air with their ribbons of flight. They wove a message across the fields that autumn was approaching. I remember how the dominant sound of the sea engulfed the sounds of meadow pipit and stonechat rasping from the field boundaries, but how even faintly, their small voices still carried to the headland from a gentler edge.

Out beyond me, I follow the graceful arc of a gannet coasting the sea quite far out, and looping in broad, generous gestures before knifing the waves like an arrow. I watch it drawing heavily out of the sea between dives, and soaring away across the huge span of sea, wings spread open like a white envelope, ready to be folded. A weaver of zawns.

I often wonder what it is exactly that the gannet sees from so high up in that moment of pausing before diving. The pin-pointed vision and absolute focus above the fish before it drops like a stone, pressing the trigger, but with no assured outcome. And how it manages to gather itself upwards, lifting the heavy doors of its wings out of the water, to move on, and begin again.

It is not easy for us to drop as freely as the gannet into the direct waters of perception. It takes time for the mind to cast loose from its habitual tracks of thought and reach a space beyond. To settle and focus, and gather ourselves into the moment. But tracking the gannet’s languid rising and falling, takes my mind to less complicated places. I find myself letting go and simply following the rolling configuration of details forming and reforming in front of me. The smooth curve of the gannet’s tilting wings, and the waves breaking on the rocks below, seem to dissolve any thoughts about this or that into a billion splinters of silver and foam.

I came to watch the sea, but my mind is gliding now with the gannet, hovering over detail, soaring with it into the sweep of space, up, out, and over the choppy expanse. Again and again, I trace waves massing in, their transparent walls curling and breaking apart. Thoughts rise and collapse into their own wash of surf. There is only the movement of the ocean, and the movement of the mind, limitless patterns of possibility created in each new moment.

Watching it all, I’m aware that the presence of a single gannet in these waters is also a poignant reflection on absence. The gannet is going through its own epidemic of avian flu, and it is not insignificant that this bird is on its own out there. Normally, if there’s one bird fishing, there would be several others, the line of vision distracted by criss-crossing flight paths as birds bomb the water, setting off explosions here and there. It is rare to see just one gannet diving in the presence of a good supply of fish.

But avian flu has had a huge impact on the gannet population, as well as many other bird species, and especially seabirds that nest in crowded colonies. I recall last autumn, the coastguard at Gwennap Head, not far from Land’s End, lamenting the fact that shoals of fish were visibly coming in, but without the numbers of gannets that usually accompany them. Instead carcasses were being washed up all along the coastline, gathered by willing volunteers, dealing with the scattering of tragic loss. It doesn’t stop there. It never stops there.

So the gannet’s vigorous, singular presence on this coastline, means it is a survivor in a fragile world, and vulnerable like everything else, to change and loss. Watching it track away over the water, so at ease and in its element, and unwavering in purpose, I am moved by its magnificence and power, but also saddened by the thought of its uncertain future. The heart tossed by two sides of the coin, as it is in these times, navigating the polarities of species decline and recovery, adjusting to the unpredictability of what is here and what isn’t. Finding the ground, witness to both, doors swinging open and closed. We cannot take abundance for granted.