You reach Skomer by a small boat from Martin's Haven, crossing a narrow stretch of water called Jack Sound. It takes about ten minutes. When you step ashore, you are in one of the most remarkable wildlife places in Britain, an island where the puffins outnumber the humans by about a hundred thousand to one, and where the Manx shearwaters underground are so numerous that scientists are still working out exactly how many there are.
I spent two weeks across Skomer and its smaller neighbour Skokholm, staying on both islands to document the wildlife and to understand the conservation effort that keeps these colonies intact. It is the kind of assignment that changes how you think about what photography can be for.
Skomer: the meadows and the burrows
Skomer in late spring is a particular thing. The island's headlands are carpeted in red campion and bluebells, and puffins stand in the flowers as if they've been arranged there. The images almost make themselves, but that impression is deceptive. The light on the west coast of Wales is fast and variable, and the puffins, charming as they look, are busy animals. They have burrows to tend and sand eels to catch. They are not posing.
What drew me more than the surface beauty was the behaviour. Puffins mate for life and return to the same burrow year after year, sometimes for twenty years or more. You start to recognise individual birds, the one with the slightly chipped bill, the pair that always argues over the entrance to their burrow on the north cliffs. Spending a week rather than a day makes all the difference.
"You start to understand the colony as a community rather than a spectacle. That shift changes the photographs you take."
The night shift: Manx shearwaters
Skomer holds the largest colony of Manx shearwaters in the world, somewhere between 316,000 and 350,000 breeding pairs, depending on which survey you read. You would not know it during the day. The shearwaters spend daylight hours at sea, and their burrows are silent. Then, around midnight, the island transforms.
The birds come in from the ocean in enormous, wheeling groups, you can hear the sound building offshore for twenty minutes before the first ones land. When they arrive they crash into the grass around their burrows, calling loudly in the dark, a noise often described as unearthly and exactly that. I spent three nights photographing this, lying in the grass waiting, using only ambient light. It is among the most extraordinary wildlife experiences I have had anywhere in the world.
The conservation picture around shearwaters is complicated. These birds are extraordinarily long-lived, the oldest ringed individual on Skomer is over 55 years old, but they are vulnerable to introduced predators, particularly rats and gulls that take eggs and chicks. The work of the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales in maintaining the island as a predator-managed habitat is what makes the colony possible.
Skokholm: the other island
Skokholm, a few miles further south-west, is smaller and quieter. It was here that Ronald Lockley established Britain's first bird observatory in 1933, and it retains that atmosphere of serious, unhurried study. Storm petrels breed here in numbers, tiny birds, smaller than a sparrow, that spend their entire lives at sea except to nest. Photographing them is a challenge of patience and low light.
The island also has a remarkable population of lesser black-backed gulls, and grey seals haul out on the rocks below the lighthouse. I spent a week here after Skomer, and the change of pace was welcome. Less dramatic, perhaps, but more intimate, you feel the remoteness in a different way when the boat doesn't come for six days.
Read the full Skokholm story here →
What photography owes to conservation
The images I came home with from Pembrokeshire are among the best I have made of seabirds. But they exist because of decades of unglamorous work, rat control, habitat management, careful visitor management, scientific monitoring, carried out by the Wildlife Trust and before them by a series of dedicated wardens who understood that these islands needed protecting.
Wildlife photography has a complicated relationship with conservation. At its worst it treats wild places as studios and wild animals as subjects, with little thought for impact. At its best it creates images that make people care enough to support the work that actually protects those places. I try to operate in the second camp. Part of that is using sales from this work to contribute directly to what I've witnessed.