ATLAS OF REMOTE ISLANDS
Bear Island

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Spitsbergen (Norway)

Arctic Ocean | Barents Sea

74° 26' N | 19° 03' O

NORWEGIAN Bjørnøya

178 km² | 9 residents

IT IS OVERCAST but the barometer reading is high. They arrive at the south harbour of Bear Island at two in the morning on 30 June 1908: seven obsessive birdwatchers on the steamship Strauss, along with four taxidermists and a gunsmith. Baron Hans von Berlepsch, the founder of the bird protection movement, is standing on deck with a pair of binoculars slung round his neck and, by the grace of Barbarossa, five parakeets on his coat of arms. Silent, he listens in the dark to the song of the birds that he has only known from books until now. // By the morning the gentlemen have shot fulmars and guillemots, a young ivory gull and a fully grown great black-backed gull. Swarms of newly hatched glaucous gulls are walking up and down the beach. The bird enthusiasts grab a handful of chicks, still covered in grey down, and take them on board: two to raise themselves, the others to be killed and skinned. The auks watch from the breeding cliffs. // Someone bags a lesser blackbacked gull which, on closer examination, turns out to be a small herring gull. Someone else outwits a redthroated diver. Inland, they track down a long-tailed skua, and even find some black scoter on lake ice. On the gravel bed of a small stream they shoot a female ringed plover, and a pair of snow buntings flap around them in such alarm that they betray the location of their nest – sadly still empty. A pair of arctic skuas try to distract attention from their nesting place through a display of flight. But they find the eggs in a mossy hollow, camouflaged olive, with dark speckles. The bird baron collects four whole clutches of eggs and one half-clutch, and carries them on board in hand-kerchiefs. The other gentlemen catch sight of the coveted razorbill among thousands of guillemots. Shots ring through the air, and a specimen crashes dead to the ground in all its feathered glory. The evidence has been produced; its existence on the island has been proven. The bird enthusiasts are content. While they size up their prize, a flock of gulls devours the remains of a whale carcass on the beach.