“Get down!” At the command, we drop to all fours and do an inelegant shuffle-crawl, like rather inept commandos, across the stubbly grass and down the small sand dune onto the beach. “There,” Brydon says, pointing just beyond the shoreline ahead of us.
We lift our binoculars to scan the water, which shimmers under the low afternoon sun, and catch the sleeked-back fur of an otter just as she dives. The silence is thick around us as we watch, half holding our breaths as we wait for her to resurface.
We have been walking the shingle coastline of Yell, one of Shetland’s northernmost islands, for two and a half hours, on the lookout for otters with Brydon Thomas of Shetland Nature. Brydon is the the kind of person that everyone seems to know on Shetland: a mention of his name to any of the people we met, on any of the islands we visited, always resulted in a comment of “If anyone can find otters, it’s Brydon.” It was a big claim to live up to.
Not that exploring the coastline here isn’t in itself pleasurable; we had previously seen nothing of Yell except on the drive straight through it from one ferry (Mainland to Yell) to another (Yell to Unst), and coming of the (only) main road reveals a low-lying, gentle coastline backed by boggy croftland. This stretch looks onto a voe – the Shetland name for a narrow sea inlet – and across to the southern half of Yell.
To our east are the islands of Hascosay and Fetlar, lending an enclosed feeling to this spot. Brydon first took us across the scrubby grassland, set back from the coast a little, so that our scent wouldn’t be caught by the otters and scare them away.
We had followed his lead, raising our own binoculars every time he lifted his, silently scanning the shoreline in unison. “I’m looking along the seaweedy line of the shore and all the way out,” Brydon explained. “Otters have a very flat profile on the surface.” It is a blustery day, with the wind whipping at our hair and rippling the water, and the white horses of the waves easily creating the momentary mirage of there being something in the water. Brydon has been otter spotting since he was a child.
“I was excited by the thrill of how hard they were to find,” he said. “For me, it was as much about finding the holts, spraints and runs. It’s like being a detective in nature.”
“We lift our binoculars to scan the water, which shimmers under the low afternoon sun”
We were fully involved in being detectives, too; as we walked, Brydon would point out telltale spraints on the grass – delighting the children at finding an otter’s loo – and the holes in the shallow sandy cliffs where they make their homes. “I don’t like to touch it like you see them do on TV,” he said about the spraint as we peered down at it in the grass. “If you do that, then the otters will be able to smell you.” If we had been here by ourselves, we would have missed so much, such as the patches of flattened vegetation where otters have scratched themselves dry.
We probably would also have either given up or just stayed in one place to wait for them, but Brydon tells us that it’s better to track a small area like this than to stay put when it comes to spotting otters. Brydon moves us quietly a little further down the beach – again, still walking downwind so that the otter won’t smell us – anticipating where she will reappear.
Shortly after he sets up his camera, he spots her emerging onshore. But she’s not alone – she has two cubs with her, and an almost blinding white octopus in her mouth. It is a phenomenal sight, even though the otters are well camouflaged against the tangles of seaweed on the foreshore. “The coast is an amazing place to be anyway,” Brydon says in a low voice, “but it feels a little flat until the otters come – and then it comes alive.” Otters aren’t the only wildlife we are here on Shetland to see.
It is early April, and the seabirds are coming back to nest for the season. Just a week before, I had watched with excitement as Sumburgh Head Lighthouse had announced on Instagram that the puffins were back on the cliffs; alas, when we get there, peering over the edge of a low wall to see them, the steep sides are empty. A cold spell a few days before has pushed them back out to sea; still, it is no hardship to be out here, at the southernmost tip of Mainland (the main island), watching the land drop into the sea.
The next day, however, we do catch a sight of a puffin – not on the cliffs but bobbing solo on the waves near the island of Bressay, immediately east of Mainland. Alone and on the water, it seems so small, its orange beak just a little flash of colour, but even so, it is enough to send the whole into raptures. We watch it from a distance, while skipper Phil Harris tells us that they’re known locally as “tammie norrie”.
Here too, among the caves and steep cliffs of Bressay, striped white “with last year’s poo”, as Phil tells us, we see shags, revealed in the sunlight not as black but a glossy dark green, and countless black and white guillemots.
The main focus of this boat trip by Shetland Seabird Tours is the island of Noss, hidden on the eastern side of Bressay. Uninhabited Noss is now a nature reserve, and can be reached by ferry and explored on foot, but visiting from the water like this allows for another perspective of the island, and its most famous residents: gannets.
As we sail towards Noss’ sheer cliffs, we are passed by a couple of the birds, flying close enough that we can see the yellowtinged feathers of their heads and the black lines on and around their white beaks. Soon, there are hundreds of birds flying alongside us.
“They know what we’re here for,” Phil says with a smile, nodding at the big bucket of mackerel in the back. He stops the boat and walks to the stern, where he retrieves a large metal pipe, which he drops into the water as he tells us to switch the video modes on our phones to slow motion.
As soon as he drops a fish down the pipe, it begins: the gannets fold themselves up, like origami, into missiles and plunge into the water to retrieve the mackerel. It is an exhilarating sight: birds flying alongside us, others diving into the water; the air and the deep blue of the sea a swirling mass of white feathers.
“How many do you think there are here right now?” I ask Phil, expecting the answer to be around 50. “Oh, probably 600 to 700,” he says. “It’ll be thousands in the height of the season.”
Shetland’s isolated position makes it an ideal spot for wildlife, particularly seabirds stopping here for the summer: the mix of North Sea and Atlantic Ocean waters help to provide a rich supply of nutrients that, aided by summer’s long daylight hours, creates an abundance of phytoplankton – which feeds zooplankton, which is in turn eaten by fish, particularly sand eels, that are eaten by the birds.
The cliffs here, and throughout the islands, are already occupied by scores of them – not just shags, guillemots and gannets, but fulmars, razorbills and kittiwakes, among others – but in the summer there’ll be over a million of them.
It’s a staggering number for this relatively small archipelago. It’s not just cliiffs that the seabirds like either. On the uninhabited island of Mousa, reached by a short boat trip from Sandwick, just 12 miles from Lerwick, several hundred pairs of storm petrels return every summer to nest in the high stone walls of the Iron Age broch (a roundhouse unique to Scotland).
We are a month too early to see them, but spend a few contented hours wandering the path around the island and spotting ringed plovers picking at the seaweed, nesting fulmars and seals playing in the shallows. The squeak of oystercatchers seems to accompany us wherever we go on the islands, and we spot little groups of eider ducks paddling on the water just outside almost every harbour.
When we sail out of Lerwick on the ferry back to Aberdeen, the islands are hazy in the early evening sunlight. We stand on the top deck, pointing out the cliffs where we had seen shags, fulmars and gannets, and little Mousa with its broch now hidden from view.
It takes a while before we have entirely left sight of Shetland’s stretched-out archipelago behind, but we stay up there until all we have left is the sea, vast and infinite, stretching out before us.
Need to know: Shetland
- Getting there: Northlink Ferries (northlinkferries.co.uk) runs daily between Aberdeen and Lerwick on Shetland, taking 12 ½ to 14 ½ hours (longer services call at Kirkwall, Orkney en route). Cabins sleep up to four people and are all en suite.
- Getting around: Hiring a car makes getting around the archipelago easy. There are a couple of local operators in Lerwick, or you can pick one up from Enterprise (enterprise.com) in Aberdeen and take it on the ferry with you. Inter-island ferries are run by Shetland Islands Council (shetland.gov.uk/ferries); booking in advance is advisable.
- Best time to go: Seabirds start returning to Shetland around early April, but to see them in their largest numbers, come from late May to July. Whatever time of year you visit, bring layers and waterproofs.
- Where to eat: Amazing breakfasts (and other meals) with a sea view can be had at Fjarå Café Bar, while The Dowry is a café by day and a restaurant by night – we loved the burgers. The pricey but delicious seafood at St Magnus Bay Hotel (stmagnusbayhotel.co.uk) is worth a detour.
- Where to stay: Hayhoull Bed and Breakfast (bedandbreakfastshetland.co.uk) has beautiful views overlooking St Ninian’s Isle, and o “ers fabulous food and a friendly welcome.
- Further information: shetland.org; shetlandnature.net; shetlandseabirdtours.com; mousa.co.uk
