Night Rafting on Arran - 10th May 2026

As is our custom each Spring, we recently spent two weeks on our favourite Isle of Arran in our favourite house that lies right on a rocky seashore that is but a few metres below a wall that guards the house from the sea.

Before us is nothing but the wide seascape of Kilbrannan Sound and across the sea looms the impressive rolling hills and distant mountains of the Kintyre Peninsula and the Mull of Kintyre. 

Below on the rocky beach Common Gulls are nesting in a loose colony while gleaming white Gannets plunge spectacularly from on high into the sea beyond. Amongst the gulls a pair of Ringed Plovers have chosen to nest. 

I hold little hope for their nest being successful as for much of the time the parent birds are not incubating the eggs but trying to distract the nearby gulls from discovering the nest and devouring its precious eggs. Even if the young hatch they will inevitably be discovered and consumed by the gulls but for now the nest somehow survives and the plovers continue instinctively to indulge in frantic distraction displays, feigning broken wings and severe injury. The gulls are indifferent and ignore them even when they are only feet away.

The Ringed Plover's distraction display, pretending to be injured

April and May are good months for watching the local and not so local wildlife on Arran. A steady passage of migrant Whimbrels arrive on its shores to rest and feed before moving further northwards to their breeding areas which can be anywhere from Shetland and Orkney to Iceland, The Faeroes Scandinavia and north western Russia. Some even fly non stop from their wintering areas in West Africa to Iceland covering a distance of between 3900-5000km in six days but others make a stop in north western Europe, possibly to replenish their energy reserves after a long flight from Africa and put them in prime condition for the breeding season ahead.

Whimbrels

Not a day passed that I did not see small groups of Whimbrel feeding or resting on the rocky shore by the house. I rather like Whimbrels, a smaller more classy cousin of our resident Curlew with the added romance of coming from afar, West Africa to be precise. By the time they reach Arran they have accomplished the major and most dangerous part of their long journey across the Bay of Biscay and up the Irish Sea to stop on this beautiful romantic island for a brief spell of recuperation before completing the last part of their epic journey.

One particular Whimbrel caught on the south coast of Arran on the 30th April 2017 and fitted with a yellow leg flag bearing the number A2 has faithfully returned for the last nine years to the same Arran shore in virtually the same week as when it was originally trapped. Even more remarkable, on the 24th November 2022 it was seen wintering on the coast at Bank d'Arguin in Mauritania, West  Africa. 

Their distinctive, seven note tittering call alerts you to their presence as maybe a dog walker on the nearby beach disturbs their rest and sometimes a bird will indulge in a wild and wonderful sequence of notes, an evocative  courting song as if it cannot contain itself until it arrives on its breeding haunts.

But most of all I look forward to seeing a spectacular bird that never fails to cause me to look in supreme admiration at its beauty and magnificent presence. I speak of the Great Northern Diver. The sea off Arran is a favoured wintering habitat from September to May for this impressive bird so I know I am not going to be disappointed and to add to my sense of anticipation I know that most will be in full summer plumage.

I am familiar with them in winter around our coasts and even on our local inland reservoir in Oxfordshire but always in dull grey non breeding plumage.Not so on Arran where they are transformed to a wonder of black and white chequering with a black and white striped vicar's collar around their neck and eyes the colour of rubies, glistening in  huge head and bill of matching black. 

Being so close to the sea we can sit by the wall and watch them as they come in close to the shore hunting butterfish, flatfish and crustaceans in the shallows and where they do not even have to dive but rather snorkel with head either submerged or just above the water to seize their prey.

The bay that our house looks out onto is called Drumadoon and is a particularly favoured haunt of these divers and where I have never failed to see less than half a dozen every morning, each bird cruising over the sea in stately fashion and always alone

This year we were blessed with glorious weather and the sea, especially in the evening, would become almost glass like with no wind and sunsets to die for.The divers can become quite vocal in these conditions and at this  time of day as the world here seems to fall into quiescence and reflection, their haunting other worldly cries come from far out in the Sound, touching some primaeval nerve within me that brings a confusing onset of emotion, thrilling but also unsettling.

In  the late evening, in such conditions the divers can congregate into loose groups, a behaviour that has only relatively been discovered and termed 'night rafting' and is likely to be for protection and energy conservation.Although they feed alone during the day, the divers gather in small groups that join others to eventually form larger groups that spend the night in an area well offshore. This behaviour is recognised as being crucial for over 20% of the Great Northern population that spend the winter around Britain's northwestern coasts and originate from their breeding areas in Greenland and Iceland. 

I was fortunate to observe this behaviour on the evening of the 30th of April.

As the light faded between eight and nine o; clock and the sun set over Kintyre I watched a group of eight Great Northerns swim past in the middle of the Kilbrannan Sound, heading out to the more open deeper sea. A short while later another group of eleven were slowly swimming in the same direction and out to sea to join other small parties of fellow divers. They do not feed but swim slowly with obvious purpose to a destination known only to them. These congregations are quite distinctive on the smooth water and I watched them until they merged into the fading distance and I could see them no more 

In total I counted thirty seven Great Northern Divers.

Turning away to the west I watched the departing sun's yellow orb sink behind Kintyre, the sky flame orange that was almost imperceptibly turning to a gentle rose pink above the island's topography, now become indistinct and magical in the dusk. 

The composer Benjamin Britten and poet W. H. Auden combined to put one of Auden's poems to music and within which is contained a memorable but melancholy line from the poem which goes

Love's all over the mountains where the beautiful go to die

And so it felt on Arran at that moment.