A walk on the wild side

The word ‘safari’ may evoke lions and Land Cruisers, but you’ll never run out of wildlife-based thrills on these shores. From seabird skyscrapers to ostentatious otters and rutting red deer, Ben Lerwill discovers the best British Nature trips on offer

- Ben Lerwill

IT’S noon and through the salty-aired sunshine flies a short-eared owl. The raptor scythes low over the island meadow, its moon face scanning the

undergrowth, its broad wings outstretched. For several minutes it glides and turns, before suddenly—whomp!—it drops and pounces, claws spread. I lose sight of the bird in the grass, but, when it doesn’t reappear, I know the outcome of the hunt. Owl one; vole nil.

I’m on Skomer, a small island a mile or so off the Pembrokeshire coast. The boat crossing from the mainland takes about 15 minutes, but the voyage is transportive in more ways than one. Here, the world is a little wilder. Beds of bracken and bluebells froth above plunging cliffs as grey seals swish through rocky inlets. Porpoises swim in the swell, guillemots skim the waves and gannets range the skies, poised to dive-bomb any wrong-place-wrongtime fish.

Despite its size—it covers only 720 acres —Skomer serves up one of Britain’s richest wildlife tapestries, particularly during the seabird breeding months of spring and early summer. ‘The Normans actually used to farm rabbits here,’ one of the wardens tells me, apparently still shocked at the idea. ‘These days, the island’s internationally important. It’s been designated as a Marine Nature Reserve since 1990.’

I’m staying for two nights in the island’s 19th-century farmhouse, which has 16 guest beds arranged across five rooms. Being here in the evenings gives me the chance to witness the astonishing avian event that occurs on Skomer after dark, when an estimated 350,000 pairs of Manx shearwaters become active, noisily greeting their partners outside their burrows. They represent the largest— and, therefore, the loudest—such breeding colony in the world.