Bird of the Month: Razorbill

The Razorbill

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

Seabirds in general have decreased in number by 28 per cent since the 1990s. This decline will undoubtedly be exacerbated by the current avian-flu epidemic. But so far this has not affected the UK and Ireland’s million breeding pairs of guillemots and 180,000 breeding pairs of razorbills.

The razorbill (Alca torda), like its sea-cliff neighbours the guillemot and the puffin, is a member of the auk family. ‘Auk’ derives from the Icelandic word alka. Francesca Greenoak (British Birds: Their Folklore, Names and Literature) relates alka and some other of the bird’s names to imitations of its principal call. It is described in Brett Westwood and Stephen Moss’s Tweet of the Day (illustrated by The Oldie’s Carry Akroyd) as ‘the grumbling of an old man with a hangover’.

Razorbill was originally its westEngland name, from the Latin radere, ‘to scrape’. The French call it petit pingouin: its upright stance is, like the guillemot’s, penguinesque. The legendarily extinct (since 1852) great auk was a larger – hence fatally flightless – relative of the razorbill.

Linear elegance, like tailored piping, is accentuated by a feathered pelt of richly contrasted black and white. This smart appearance applies to both genders – a choice between Fred Astaire and Coco Chanel.

It is less gregarious and more fastidious than the neighbouring guillemot, whose incubations on crowded ledges foul their beautiful eggs. By contrast, the razorbill’s plainer, less pointed and even larger egg – proportionally equivalent to a human mother giving birth to a 20lb baby – is, like its plumage, spotlessly clean.

For all razorbills’ colonisation, each bird seeks to lay its single egg in a crevice, and hygienically craps over the cliff edge – or a decent distance away from the nest, if nesting under boulders, as on the Shiant Isles in the Minch.

Unlike young puffins, which are left by their parents to find their own way to the sea, young razorbills on cliffs or shore are parentally shepherded. They usually enter the sea at dusk to avoid predators; parents and chicks rain down from the cliffs – rarely to fatal effect – an amazing sight. Parents stay with the fledgling for several weeks. In The Seabird’s Cry, Adam Nicolson describes this momentous event on the boulder-strewn Shiant shore, where males take control:

‘And so on summer afternoons and evenings the boulders rattle with the paternal cry: rraaar rrrrarr… From hundreds of yards away, you hear them, the extraordinary resonance built into these little bodies, so that the sound drums through them. Their whole being is a voicebox. The fledglings reply, shrill, high and bright, from within the crevices; a pure note, so that it is a duet between rasping father and peeping child, rrrrar-peep, rrrrar-peep, dialoguing across the generations.’

Ronald Lockley (1904-2000), the pioneering ornithologist who in 1927 took a 31-year lease on the Welsh island of Skokholm and founded the first British bird observatory there, brought a razorbill to Buckingham Palace as a pet for the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. It bit him during the presentation.