Every time I pull on my green wool jumper, I’m reminded of the farm. Maybe it’s the smell of it, a kind of warm dustiness that even repeated washes and being covered in the scent of petrels can’t mask. Felted army green, with faux suede shoulder and elbow patches worn pale. Sitting on a chill sea cliff, shearwaters wheeling in the dark sky, I’m about as far from the farm as I can be. That ochre red dust, quartz sand, baobab and acacia land. Dry and heavy with heat. I had such a childhood, experiencing these extremes, learning to follow caracal and oryx tracks, driving the bakkie through red dust roads with a cushion stuffed behind my back to reach the clutch, sharing the quiet dawn hours with my father and the guineafowls, a mug of milo, and rusks. My uncle gave me the jumper after it shrunk in a hot wash, from draping his nearly 7’ frame to barely meeting my 5’4”, sleeves hiked up my forearms. It’s been my essential for island work ever since, warmed not only by layers of felted wool, but the memories of hot African sun and nights with my family by the fire. The constant blaze of stars woven into the fabric of it.
Watching toanui wheel in the pre-dawn moonlight, their sleek dark shadows slicing through the icy southerly air. Islands like holes cut out of the world, ink black in relief against a beaten metal sea. All the colour has been sucked out of the world, repainted in silver black hues and subtleties. Moaning, kreaching, wailing. The gentle breath of the waves against the rocks below. Tucked in warm in a pocket of dense muhlenbeckia. Aa-woooo-eeeee…a-wailing like cats in the night. It’s a chilling, mournful sound, but it tingles my spine with excitement and the thrill of feeling completely at home. At night my eyes open, fully, away from the squinting glare of the sun. Sometimes even the moon seems over-bright, casting sharp shadows on the maw of shoreline rocks. The gentle drawing away of the light, as dusk falls and with it come the birds, pulled in from the sea. These islands are their night-home, their burrows a warm safe respite from the wild weather of the ocean. And it has been wild – we’ve spent many hours sitting on this cliff in a deluge, in winds so wild that all other sounds vanish but for the scream of air on water, on rocks, on tortured trees. Still the birds arrive – loving the wild night as much as I do. And now they wheel and call as the night ends and they depart for the water once more, skimming low over the brush, the rush of air through their primaries an exhalation as they pass.
As a scientist, for my research, this trip has been largely a failure. Not enough samples collected from my study species to do anything meaningful with. As a photographer, it has been the same – time spent trying to find and catch birds has left space for little else but for scant sleep. But in these moments of calm before dawn, where these seabird islands come to life, shaking off the quiet hours when birds preen and doze in their burrows to head for the sea, I’ve found all I need. The reason and the goal. Just to be, and to watch. Wrapped warm against the chill air in green wool. To be part of the world as it turns, and these rhythms of life continue. Nights are a simple time. And it is always worth getting up at 4am to see the full moon sink and burn into the dawn.
