This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

For centuries, ten Men of Ness have gone out, yearly, to kill young gannets, not yet fledged, on the island of Sula Sgeir, and bring them home, gutted and salted, as food. The tradition of hooking chicks out of their nests and killing them, is one that seems remarkably shocking even in a world where the majority of us eat meat or fish.

Seabird photographer Rachel Bigsby recently launched a public petition calling on the Scottish Parliament to amend Section 16 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and put stop to this annual north Lewis practice, called the guga hunt.

Now 22,000 signatures, making it the fifth most-signed petition in Scottish Parliament history, agree that it should be ended.

“I set up this petition," she says, "because I have spent more than a decade documenting northern gannets across Scotland and Shetland, and I have seen both the beauty of their lives and the fragility of their future. They are long-lived birds that form lifelong partnerships and raise just one chick a year with extraordinary devotion.

"Since 2022, highly pathogenic avian influenza has devastated gannet colonies, with up to 60 per cent of some populations lost in a single season. The effects are still painfully visible; broken pair bonds, failed nests, and colonies struggling to stabilise."

Though the taking of gannets was outlawed in 1954, the guga hunt is specifically provided for under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and allowed only under licence issued by NatureScot.

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