Day 10; June the 13th

It is Friday the 13th; an very ordinary day on St. Kilda for a workparty.
Cath and I finish the church and schoolhouse. In the afternoon Cath, Steven and I help Kevin to clear down a blackhouse from rubble, stones and sods down to a layer of 1957. A lot of stuff was burned in that period, so the ground is black. We have to put back sods on that layer for later parties to do the actual archeological work.

We do find some bottles from soda from the sixties or seventies, a lot of roof covering and Steve finds an exciting looking artifact that looks like a sword of some kind, but turns out to be a hinge from a door.

Had a swim! Or rather, have been overthrown by an ice cold wave. I take a warm shower and it"s time for dinner again. After dinner Kevin, Paul, Rachel and Janice are playing music in the museum. Paul and Janice play the violin, Rachel plays a small instrument called concertina and Kevin plays flute and guitar.

The Netherlands played football today against Spain. I take a peek in the pub, but the game is over. They won 5 to 0. The guys from Qinetiq give me an update about the game. They are very enthusiastic about the Dutch  team.

On my way back I meet Flo, who is about to the pub. I accompany her and have a drink. No alcohol and not too late in bed, because tomorrow is the day of the chimney challenge!

St. Kildan wren

One of the habits I enjoyed very much was to sit on the bench outside number 1 and listen to the wren. On St. Kilda there are two endemic bird species. Just recently the snipe on St. Kilda is recognized as a subspecies from the snipe on the mainland. The other species is the wren  (Troglodytes troglodytes hirtensis).

The St. Kildan wren is bigger than the Eurasian wren from the mainland. They also differ in color, and their song is said to be different too, although he sounds like a wren in my ears.
I filmed "our" wren while singing on the chimney;

There are about 115 pairs on Hirta, but they are also present on the other isles of the archipelago.
Because the wren is exclusive for the archipelago, it was almost extinct by the end of the
nineteenth century, after a rush for specimens by collectors. In 1904 the wren needed to be protected by law. Fortunately, the numbers increased quickly.

Day 9; June the 12th

It has been a while since I wrote my last post about daily life on St. Kilda. I got to day 9; it is Thursday the 12th of June. The weather is not very good; it's cloudy and rainy. But we have a workday today, so it doesn't really matter.

First, Martin and me go out to finish the door in the ammunition store. I paint the door post and the sign on the door. On the backsite of the sign we leave our signature for future workparties to discover!

In the afternoon I clean the church and the schoolhouse together with Cath. The church and the school is in fact one building. The school is a room in the church.

The school

The church

In the lectern in the school is a copy of a book with the names of the children and some information
about them. Some children deceased at a very young age, others left the island for Harris or Skye. The classes were very small, but the ages differ between five and ten or eleven. There are no children older than twelve.

We clean the windows, the floors and we polish all the copper we can find. The work is not very hard because the school and the church aren't really dirty.

Cath is a very friendly woman. She comes from Liverpool and I love her accent. Along with Steve she almost forms a comical duo, and a real challenge for me to understand their conversation!

After dinner we visit the pub again. I'm starting to feel very much at home on the island. I love the company of my fellow workparty members, and some habits become very trusted like eating together and the regular visits to the pub.

The Fulmar

The largest number of birds on St. Kilda is the Fulmar (Fulmaris Glacialis), there are about 64,000 (1999) on St. Kilda. It is also the bird you will see the most on Hirtha. Although their numbers are decreasing.

Breeding fulmar on Oiseval (Hirtha)

Fulmars are not related to gulls, but they very much look alike. Fulmars belong to the family of procellariiformes or tubenosed. To defend themselves, they can squirt a foul smelling oil from their stomach through the tube on their beak. This oil can damage the wings of other birds so they can't fly anymore. According to Kevin and Jean you can throw your clothes away if the oil hits you.

On Hirtha the birds are breeding in the cleits, and sometimes we were forced to renounce from repairing a cleit because of the breeding fulmars.
On our walk to the tunnel I made a small detour because of a breeding fulmar, who looked like he was ready to spit.

The fulmar lays only one egg per season. They won't relay a harvested egg. The St. Kildans didn't harvest fulmar eggs for that reason.

Outside the breeding season, fulmars are pelagic, which means that they live on open sea. Fulmars can, like all tubenosed seabirds, smell a sulfur compound in the ocean which differs according to the depths, currents and temperature of the water. This way they form a map in their heads about the ocean which tells them were the good feeding grounds are and the way to their nests.

In Norway I heard the story that in earlier days sailors thought that Fulmars were the spirits of deceased sailors, because they like to fly along with ships, and they don't make a lot of noise.