Lunga

One of the things we realized pretty early about Scotland when we were researching itinerary ideas was that this country seemed to offer some amazing opportunities to go seabird spotting. And I don't mean like one or two birds at a time. I mean hundreds or thousands at a time. Our trip planning had established a rough agenda of about a week in Glasgow, Inverness and Edinburgh and the other week in the Hebrides, the islands off the west coast of Scotland. For our island time, we picked Lewis (for the Standing Stones of Callanish) and Islay (for whisky) but we needed a third. We decided we should emphasize seabirds for our final island.

Enter the Isle of Mull, an island at the bottom of the Hebrides a little bit south of the Isle of Skye. I mention Skye not because it's a marker that I expect everyone to know, but because it's likely the most popular island for tourists to visit in the Hebrides, probably because you can just drive across a bridge to get there and don't have to take a ferry. 

Skye was, in fact, our original choice for a third island in the Hebrides. But when we started looking closer at our Scotland guidebook, Mull seemed like it was too good to pass up. I have no idea whether Skye is wonderful and if we missed out on something better than Mull, but Mull was the best place we went on this trip in my opinion. It was wild. It was remote. There were sheep seemingly everywhere. The roads were maddening because most of them were two-way and one-lane at the same time. Tobermory was the perfect village to stay in with some great places to eat and drink. It was absolutely a gorgeous place to be. I can see people falling in love with a place like that.

Off the coast of Mull there's an island called Lunga. And it's about the easiest and most ideal seabirding destination you could imagine. And they have tons of nesting puffins. But only in summer. Come late August these birds will be out at sea on their own until next May or June. We were there in June. Let's go!!

I don't know quite what it is that makes me keep pursuing the same things on vacation again and again. Maybe it's a quest to get an experience just perfect. Maybe I just have a narrow range of interests (not sure that's right) or I just like what I like and lots of it (that's probably closer to the truth). Who knows? But I do tend to do it a lot. Last year we went to Maine and saw our first wild puffins. It was awesome but it was fleeting. It honestly wasn't a great opportunity to watch and take pictures at the same time. Pick one or the other. On Lunga, we'd have a change to correct that experience and move closer to that perfect puffin encounter. And more.

I believe you can get a boat to Lunga from a number of spots on Mull. You certainly can catch one from both Tobermory (where we were staying) and Fionnphort (where we caught our boat). The trip there is about a 45 minute boat ride from either location, so not too bad a ride once you get on board. I think our decision to depart from Fionnphort was well intentioned (we wanted to spend some time on Iona after our trip to Lunga and the boat stopped there) but that drive to the boat was an adventure. It's all of 48 miles but the road requires rapt concentration every second of the ride (which is almost two hours long, by the way). The scenery was just gorgeous and I can't believe someone actually built a road (one-lane, two-way of course) in some spots on that drive but it is not for the faint of heart. Not regretting our decision, exactly, but it would have been much quicker from Tobermory.

So an almost two hour drive; 15 minutes or so to walk to the dock and climb on board; a little wait for absolutely everyone who signed up for the trip (why are people late to these things...); 45 minutes or so on the water followed by a pretty cool docking with a floating gangway (who knew these things existed?) that the boat pushed to the shore to allow us to disembark; and we were on Lunga. For two hours and 40 minutes. That sounded like a long time. 

It flew. But it was also a really good amount of time. Sort of the sweet spot, I think. Just right. On our own for almost three hours with a ton of seabirds, most of whom are puffins. Cool.

Our docked boat. And the (main) object of our search.

The quest for puffins (and other birds, I guess...) on Lunga starts with an uphill climb. I mean our landing point on the island was pretty much at sea level (where else would it be?) and puffins nest in burrows on top of cliffs. So the first task after getting onto land was to climb up to the top of the cliffs where the puffins are. What else would we do?

So of course, there's a rush, right? Everyone wants to be the first one to the top, as if all the puffins were going to fly away and never come back or as if there might not be enough puffins for all the people on the boat (and other boats, keep in mind...) to see and we'd end up stuck with a guillemot or something. There's excitement and there's a little bit of desperate near-panic. It's exhilarating. It's frenzied. It's like Christmas morning as a kid. And all of that I guess sometimes causes the first one to the top of the hill, which happened to be me, to miss the point entirely. Which I did. When I go the top of the first cliffs, I kept going up (because I could) rather than making a beeline for the cliffs where the birds are.

It didn't matter. We had more than 2-1/2 hours, after all. There was plenty of time. And it didn't take long for me to recover. Being fifth or tenth or whatever to get to the clifftops didn't really matter in the end. 

But that first puffin you see up close is magical. The one that doesn't move when you approach. You have to capture the moment. You have to get the camera out and snap, snap, snap. This moment in time you've never had before. This was nothing like Maine. It is right there on solid land and it's like two feet away. What if there are no more on the entire island? That first one. Just wow.

Of course, people don't take a 45 minute boat ride and climb up a big hill to see a single puffin, especially if it took them about two hours to drive to the boat dock. Focus off that first puffin and there's another one right close to the one that you've taken about 15 photographs of. Then another couple a few feet away. Then five or so more beyond those. And ten or a dozen or so on the next cliff. There is no shortage of puffins on Lunga. Not at all.

They literally do not move when you approach by the way. We were told by our boat crew that the puffins actually like humans walking around them because it protects them from the gulls. Apparently gulls enjoy a little puffin for lunch sometimes. Not nice to think about that but you know...nature.

So once you realize that there is plenty to see, the whole situation calms down. Breathe...these things are everywhere. There is a sort of trail that leads from one end of the island to the other. It's muddy and it's messy and it's slippery and your pants will get dirty even if you are wearing boots (trust me!). It will lead you along the edge of the cliff past nest after nest after nest up hills and down slopes clambering over rocks both ways. It also gets you looks at all sorts of puffins and other birds flying, fishing and nesting. It's a little chaotic and it's awesome.

I suppose the trail might go around the whole island. It looked like it headed up a steep hill at the opposite end of the island and continued along the island's ridge back towards our docking point. We didn't do the whole loop; we turned around at what we saw as the other end, content with knowing there couldn't be more puffins on the other side of Lunga than the one we had just scrambled across. After all, we didn't really see any on the way past that side on the boat.

So about those other birds. Yes, there are birds on Lunga that are not puffins. I know, I know, not as cute, but they are there. We saw a good number of black and white razorbills and guillemots, both of which resemble some sort of penguin. They are decidedly NOT penguins, mostly because both species fly, but they look remarkably similar if you are not paying attention. These birds, which are about puffin-sized, both seemed to be interspersed with the puffins on the clifftops that we first climbed to. Definitely not as numerous as the puffins on the beginning part of our hike but noticeably there.

They caught up in numbers later on. At the spot we turned around and headed back to the boat, we stopped at an enormous rock on the end of Lunga that was covered in guillemots. Not exaggerating. Like thousands and thousands packed together. They looked like insects covering the ground there were so many. We'd seen images like this on nature programs before (penguin nesting sites actually come to mind here) but never in person. It's amazing that they can even find their mate amongst all the other guillemots. I mean, they all look the same. But they probably think the same thing about us.

We also passed a few shags, which I'd sort of describe as cormorants on steroids. These birds are large, way bigger than their smaller cormorant cousins who we have seen all over the world and their plumage is absolutely gorgeous. All four species we saw on Lunga (the shags, puffins, guillemots and razorbills) are all very well put together; they barely look like they have feathers at all they are so smooth. But the shags have this patterning to their feathers that almost looks like have scales rather than feathers. It's quite impressive and not something we could see very well until we got super close to these birds. There's value in getting close.

Shags were the scariest nest defenders on the island, by the way. We didn't really get near any nests while on our walk but we also didn't get any sort of warning signs from the puffins, razorbills or guillemots. Not so with shags. They seemed to nest in, amongst and below rocks and when you pass too close they stick their necks out of the holes between the rocks and sort of hiss-squawk at you with their mouths wide open, displaying what I remember as some yellow and blue sort of striping from within their mouths. Their beaks are pretty scary too. I definitely don't want to ever tangle with a shag after seeing that.

One shag, two razorbills and a whole lot of guillemots.

Our trip on Lunga ended with about 45 minutes or so of standing on those first cliffs we found that I almost sprinted by. At this point, we were determined to watch intently, rather than filling up the camera memory stick with as many images as we could pack on there before our boat picked us up again. We knew that we'd have plenty of time to just watch and observe.

The puffins obliged by behaving like puffins, taking off towards the sea by just jumping off the cliffs and spreading their wings and then returning and landing so clumsily with a mouthful of shiny silver sand eels, either on the land and then shuffling quickly towards their burrow or just diving right into the burrow itself in a way that seemed more graceful that puffins could handle. It was a constant conveyor belt of food delivery to their chicks (or pufflings...not kidding, that's their name). We never saw the pufflings, by the way. Apparently the chicks are so vulnerable to predators that they don't come out during the day. They learn to fly at night until one day they just take off and never come back. Until they need to start raising pufflings of their own.

I spent my time on this portion of our landing trying to get pictures of puffins doing something other than just standing around. I had an informal goal for the day to get some good pictures of a puffin or two with some sand eels dangling from their mouths and I think I accomplished that goal. I also wanted to capture puffins in flight and landing. Not so successful there but I think overall we got some great looks and some great pictures.

I came to the Isle of Mull in Scotland looking for the perfect puffin encounter. I can't believe it could get much better than this. Maybe more time? I don't know. I think being in a spot for almost three hours with unfettered access to these birds is pretty much perfect as far as I'm concerned. At the risk of posting too many pictures of puffins in this post, I'm emptying the rest of my favorites album from this day and displaying them all below. The last puffin picture below was taken from about two feet away. You really can get that close!

Yeah, I think we probably had our perfect puffin day.

But there is one more story to tell. When the boat drops you off, you are standing on a narrow portion of the island pointed towards a cliff. On that cliff is a large painted white arrow. It's where you are supposed to go to see the puffins (and other birds). Just follow the arrow is what we were told by the crew on our boat before we landed.

Now, some people didn't seem to get the message because as soon as they set foot on Lunga, they started spreading out on the island walking towards the water, which is decidedly NOT where the puffins are. We got the message from the crew and took off straight for the arrow. And while I may have made it to the top of the cliff first, my wife, wearing her green wool hat that we picked up at the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland a few years ago, was definitely setting the pace towards the cliff early on. 

But other travelers on our boat couldn't figure it out. Maybe it was a language thing or something. Ultimately it got so bad that we heard an annoucement from the boat's speaker system: "Follow the lady in the green hat!" 

Good advice. I intend to do that for a very long time. As long as she'll let me, anyway.

Puffins done! Now about those flamingos and penguins...

Follow the lady in the green hat (lady in green hat not pictured).

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How We Did It

There are at least two tour companies (and probably more) that run day trips to Lunga from the Isle of Mull. We picked Staffa Tours because they had an early morning cruise and because they departed from Fionnphort, which would give us a chance to stop at the Isle of Iona on the way back. Our tour took us to both Lunga, where we saw puffins, and Staffa, where we stopped at Fingal's Cave, a rock formation formed of hexagonal basalt columns which is supposed to be the other end of the mythical Giant's Causeway. We spent part of a day at the Causeway in Northern Ireland a few years ago.

I can't say anything but good things about Staffa Tours. There was plenty of time to do everything we needed to do on both our stops on Lunga and Staffa and the boat ride was great. Couldn't ask for anything more. I'd highly recommend taking a tour with them.

Unfortunately in 2022, avian flu has decimated bird populations on islands around Britain in what has become a bit of an epidemic. Lunga, it seems, is no exception, because tours are suspended on the island for the rest of the summer as of this writing. I guess we got super lucky here. A few more weeks and we'd have missed this experience entirely. I've lamented our misses with various types of wildlife several times on this blog. I'll have to remember this as one time we got lucky and got it right.

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