Even within Orkney’s ecological treasures, the North Hill of Papa Westray is special. Our largest area of maritime heath is a mosaic of wiry grasses, squelching bog, candy-coloured drifts of thrift, and areas now carpeted in tiny Scottish primroses. Open ocean horizons lie to north, east and west, and you can enjoy both sunset and sunrise, or on a different day be punished by unfettered blasts carried from the Atlantic, Arctic or North Sea. Come late summer, black cattle will be set onto the reserve, their rasping mouths and heavy hoofs vital to maintaining the diversity of life in place.
But it is the bird life for which the North Hill has always been know. Arriving on Papay in early April, the reserve was still a quiet place, only skylarks and pipits singing, oystercatchers alarming and the greylag geese that increase year on year. By mid-April, Bonxies were appearing to claim territories, a species that has also increased its presence on Papay in the last twenty years, and shortly afterwards came Arctic Skua, fresh from their trans-global journey to challenge their Bonxie cousins for perches well suited to bomb unwary walkers from. Meanwhile, the auks were making skittish advances on the ledges of Fowl Craig, particularly Guillemots, and around the shores of the reserve at dawn cold be seen mysterious gatherings of Tysties in preparation to their own breeding.
Only on 5th May did we hear the first Arctic Tern. In its prime an estimated 12000 pairs of Arctic Tern bred on North Hill with thousands more fledglings each year. The sight and sound of the ‘pickies’ is still the true sound of summer on Papay, but their numbers are much reduced, with only around 350 pairs attempting to breed last year, and with no success in raising fledglings. The numbers of pickies sighted so far seems small, again only in the hundreds, but we face the summer with hope. Already the Guillemots on Fowl Craig are laying their large green eggs, and chicks of lapwing and greylag skulk in the long vegetation.
Terns and skuas may have finished their annual migration, but other species are still on the move. Wild south-east winds and rain brought a flurry of birds blown off course from continental migration, over over-shooting their more southerly homelands. Lesser Whitethroat, Reed Warbler, Garden Warbler, Black and Common Redstarts are always a pleasure to find, but most unusual was an islanders report of a very strange bird inhabiting his silage bales, the hoopoe here pictured!