Dunbar as we see it
a miscellany
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KITTIWAKE!
The kittiwake chick - far too young to have left its nest - was already a hundred yards from the Castle.
From its flat grey three-toed webs, huge for so tiny a creature, black pipe-cleaner legs rose to a soft grey ball of down; long thin neck, round head and a perfect little jet-black bill. It might have been one of those 'drinking ducks' once so popular in shop windows, except that this enchanting scrap of life was stepping cockily along the edge of the quay.
A mound of rope barred its way, so it veered inland and continued its walk.
A pause while it raised its rear end, and another squirt of guano hit the ground. Satisfied, it turned to survey its surroundings and spotted a young herring gull, motionless beside the rope, its eye on the water.
You could almost see the kittiwake thinking: "ahah! That's where I belong!"
Ridge after ridge of the rope mountain it climbed, and stopped triumphantly on top.
Snap! Just time for one wild squawk before its neck broke, and the herring gull resumed its pose, another meal achieved.
John Muir would not have found kittiwakes nesting on the cliffs of Dunbar Castle; any he saw would have come from the Bass, 5 miles north of Dunbar, or maybe St Abbs to the south.
According to
Baxter & Rintoul, those doughty ladies who published in 1953 their 2-volume The Birds of Scotland,
"In 1934 three pairs were breeding on the windows of a disused warehouse, near the harbour at Dunbar, the following year four pairs were nesting, the next fourteen, and twenty-one pairs in 1937, while, by 1945, no fewer than fifty-four pairs were nesting on the warehouse and an adjoining house. The warehouse was renovated and in 1949 only eighteen pairs found sites in its windows. The rest moved to the harbour where they bred on the face of a stonework parapet and on the ledges of an adjoining headland. There were well over a hundred pairs."
Nowadays, there are between four and five hundred breeding pairs around the Castle, and none on the windows of
The Granary.
Kittiwakes at Dunbar Castle, a video
Except where otherwise stated, all aerial photos
on this site are copyright © Skyviews, 2002,
and all other pictures are copyright © WS/RMS, 1998-2006
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