On this island, I am surrounded by the dead

And there is beauty here.

I was standing on the beach next to the shop. It was winter, and the storming sea had torn the kelp from its anchorage, swept it inland. It was tangled on the shore in great mounds, and if I crouched it looked like a mountain-scape stretching out into the distance.

I had learnt to walk the kelp carefully. Its fingers held the secrets of the storm, soft wet bodies tangled within. Fish, seal, bird, dolphin.

A few weeks before, I had found more than thirty dead guillemots in the kelp. I learnt that it is called a ‘storm wreck’, when dead seabirds wash in like this. I also learnt that I was becoming so used to finding bodies on the beach that this mass death almost didn’t register as a tragedy.

I picked my way through the kelp. No bodies today, at least not on the surface. I found myself breathing a sigh of relief, and then I found myself feeling a sort of meta-relief, relieved that I had not quite become immune to it yet – the presence of all this death.

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It’s not as if I’m unfamiliar with death. One summer when I lived in Cornwall, doing research for my PhD, I had to collect the bodies of jackdaw chicks that died in their nests. It was quite grim. I got to know each jackdaw family intimately. I watched the parents, observed their behaviour, started to know their quirks, their personalities, what they were like as partners (were they attentive? affectionate? were they chatterers or were they quiet?), and every few days I climbed a ladder to their nests and checked on their eggs. Mottled turquoise, warm, heavier than you’d expect.

When the eggs hatched and the crinkly pink chicks emerged, I cradled them in a woollen hat as I climbed down to the ground to weigh them. As they settled on the scales, I’d wonder at who they might become: chatty, brave, a problem-solver, an introvert? The more you learn about different species the more you find they are almost just like us, but also entirely otherworldly.

It is easy to fall in love, when you pay attention.

Once I’d written down their weights, I’d climb back up the ladder and gently place them inside their cosy nests. For each nest, I did this every few days. I watched the babies grow. Little feathers emerging. Big eyes suddenly aware, suddenly watching me. When the chicks died, as one or two did in every nest (jackdaws have more chicks than they can usually feed just in case it’s a good year for food), I carried their small bodies away in my backpack and popped them in the lab freezer. If I didn’t get to the body fast enough, the parents would fling it out of the nest. It could sometimes, literally, be raining bodies. We joked about it, in the sort of way people do to cover an uncomfortable twist in the stomach, our smiles stretching just a little too wide.

People go into this sort of research for a love of the natural world. The brutality of it was a shock, I think, at least for most of us. Sometimes it was almost unbearable.

By the end of that summer, there were about two hundred dead chicks in the freezer. Throughout the autumn I dissected the bodies (a fitting season – the season of endings, the season of red and purple), then I threw the bodies away and extracted DNA from the samples I had taken. All those little lives became nothing more than four letters, strung and restrung in different orders on the cold blue light of my computer screen.

All this to say, death is not foreign to me. Some might even say I’m familiar with it. For a Western woman raised in suburban southern England, anyway.

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Still, when I moved to a small Scottish island wedged between the North Sea and the Atlantic, I wasn’t prepared for how everyday death would become. At least with the jackdaws death was contained within a brief season: May and June were the humid, sticky season of the corpses. And with the jackdaws, I was seeking death; I knew exactly where to look for it, and I knew it would not easily find me beyond those spaces. I could put a barrier up between myself and it. I knew where to hide.

But here, on this island, the sea gifts me death each day.

In the winter it rolls in with the storms; in the summer it bobs onto the shore with the gentle tide. Every day a new skull, a new breastbone, a new wing, a new limb. Usually the bodies are just bones, and I do think there’s beauty in that; a beauty created by distance. I see only the architecture of the body, not the body itself. I can wash the bones and take them home, line them up on my windowsill and think not of flesh or organs or decomposition but of the life this wild thing once had.

I am not very good at identifying living birds, but I have become quite good at identifying their bones. I think of this as more evidence that I am not yet indifferent to death. I want to know the body that framed each skeleton. I want to know who it was, how it lived, where it might have travelled. It feels like an act of respect, of memorial. Although it is a rather selfish act of memorial, it has to be said. Or, if not selfish, then at least self-involved. The wild thing would not care one way or another. The wild thing is too wild, too free, to have any notion of importance or beauty or legacy.

That winter morning on the beach by the shop, there were no bodies in the kelp, but there was something upon the rocks – something white, chalky, reflecting the low winter sun. It was part of a spine, thick as a tree trunk, too heavy to do anything with but touch, call people over, wonder at what it could have been. We thought it must have belonged to a whale. There was nothing else big enough to contain it.

I mentioned it back in the shop, my eyes all goggled up with awe. The shopkeepers nodded and said oh yes, that’ll be the whale. They described how a storm swept a gigantic whale body in a few months ago. It got caught on the rocks by the shop and decomposed there, the smell of it heavy in the air like swamp-water – no escaping it, they said, no pretending it was not there, rotting right outside their door. They said that another storm came in and washed the body back out to sea, but now – months later – the bones had started coming. A vertebra, a skull, whole sections of spine. They were speaking with wonder but also something heavier, something that sounded a little like sadness.

Yesterday, in the long light of a summer evening, I went back to that beach by the shop and my dog started tugging at something wedged beneath a rock.

A rib, thick as my arm, long as my body.

Another piece of whale gifted to the shore.

I knelt to touch it, imagined the whale: the boom of its heart, the miles it might have travelled, the songs it might have sung. I promised myself then that I would not become immune to this. On this island where I am surrounded by the dead, my house will become a shrine to the bones I can carry, and the beaches will be a shrine to the bodies I cannot, and the dead – always, whether bird or whale, flesh or bone – will stop me in my tracks and remind me to think of wild things, of endings, of the light and the heavy all at once.

This is the first post of between two seas, a weekly newsletter from Rebecca Hooper - scientist, poet, and freelance writer. Please consider subscribing if you liked this piece – it’s free, although you can pay if you’d like to.