Winging Away Time: The seasonality of birds in Scottish and North Atlantic islands
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-01-28

Birds are some of the most mobile animals known to man, with certain species travelling great distances during migration and others covering large areas to feed. Their mobility can mark the passage of time and the change of seasons, altering a landscape with their presence and absence. Human interaction with these mobile creatures in the past can tell about how populations perceived and experienced the yearly passage of time, and made use of the changing environments and faunal resources around them. This paper explores the role of birds in time marking and seasonal experience in the Scottish and North Atlantic islands through zooarchaeological and historical data. In these settings, large colonies of gregariously breeding seabirds would have provided past populations of these locations with a concentrated resource base in summer that could be targeted intensely or sporadically for meat, eggs, oil, and fat. The arrival of wintering birds would have both heralded a different change of season, and provided a new set of resources for exploitation at what could have been a challenging time. On a smaller timescale, birds can also be important parts of different points of the day; from dawn chorus to screeches of the night. By exploring the temporality of birds, we can more fully understand life in these island environments from their first settlement up to the present day. 

Julia Best (Bournemouth University/Cardiff University)