scribe n¹: a person who copies or transcribes manuscripts, esp. one employed as a 
copyist. n²: chiefly Scottish. A piece or scrap of writing; ... Chiefly in ‘a scribe of a 
pen’ and variants (cf. scrape of a pen at scrape n.¹ I.2b). OED.

In July 2021, the beach below our house was truly littered with dead gannets. The shore here rises steeply, and successive tides left tiers of whitish, sodden carcasses above the waves. There was no way to ignore them. On the first day I counted a hundred in half as many steps, then gave up counting. Usually they were already in tatters, but from time to time I would find a fresh death – the feathers still pristine, a sharp, ice-blue eye glaring out from the weed.

The UK is home to more than half of the world’s northern gannets, and the Bass Rock, forty miles south of here, houses the world’s largest colony. They are solan in Orkney and Shetland, sule in the Faroes, súla in Iceland and havsula in Norwegian (haaf is the Old Norse for the middle deeps, a word still in use by Shetland fishermen). They nest on the rockiest, most precipitous edges of the North Atlantic. Miles out you see them, blinding white against the grey, streaming in taut, straight lines through the trough of the waves; or circling paper thin, high above the ocean, adjusting their aerofoils until they fold and drop into the sea. Diving from about 100 feet, a bird will reach 60mph, slicing down through the water to the ...