My Mercury

Yeah, well, here we are.

Five days on the island already.

Things are going great.

The dunes all around.

Isolation all about.

But the work is the most important thing.

And that's why I'm here.

I'm gonna do it.

Carry on, push through, do the monitoring work.

Chase the seals. Never forget.

Never forget the seals on Mercury Island.

So anyway, this is just to say that

basically, this guy

is fucking glad to be back here for a while.

Down the mountain to the desert.

And then?

When we get to the desert... When you first get to...

The first desert, you turn left.

You drive for about 300K,

then you get to the second desert, and you turn right.

In 1988, I went to visit my brother, Yves,

on an island off the Skeleton Coast called Ichaboe Island.

We drove through the Namib Desert to Lüderitz,

which is the harbour from which the boats leave

to go to the Guano Islands.

Yves is a nature conservationist.

There are very few young men

who would have wilfully signed up

to manage 50,000 gannets on a remote island

where there was absolutely nobody.

His enthusiasm for what he was doing completely intrigued me,

and I wanted to go and see for myself.

As we got closer and closer to Ichaboe,

I could just smell this pungent guano, birdshit.

And then the sounds. It's a cacophony.

When you step onto Ichaboe,

if you've got a passion for seabirds,

it's mind-blowing;

the entire island being covered from one end to the other

with an incredible gannet population, at that time,

along with thousands of penguins

and thousands of bank cormorants and Cape cormorants.

Ichaboe Island is just mesmerising.

Yves was a headman on Ichaboe.

Headmen were first posted to these bird islands

in the late 1800s,

after guano harvesters mined the islands flat

and left nothing for the birds to nest in.

By the time Yves got there,

industrial fishing was forcing the birds

to travel further and further to find food for their young,

threatening their survival even more.

By protecting the seabirds,

my enigmatic brother had found his niche as a conservationist,

and it was heart-warming for me to see.

In the morning here,

it's the best time to come and check who's male and female,

because you can see all the footprints

on the females' backs. You can see all the footprints.

From the males when they copulate with females.

Then the male actually on the female's back,

standing on the wings and the back there.

And when the ground gets nice and moist, like it is now,

you can see who's been banging away at night.

Yves's exhilaration with the natural world

was contagious.

I encouraged him to video his experiences,

and I would film whenever I could visit.

Later, he entrusted me with his diaries.

After my visit, he wrote, "14th September, 1988."

"My sister came to visit."

"At last, I could reveal Ichaboe to someone else."

"There were bird densities like I hadn't experienced."

"The cherry on the top was when the gannets

obliterated a crayfish boat from view."

"The snow-white orchestra showing off

just before she left."

After I spent four years on Ichaboe Island,

there was a survey vessel going up to Mercury Island.

Mercury had been abandoned for nearly 20 years,

and there was a seal problem developing there.

Since I was the conservator on Ichaboe,

my boss, Dr Williams, said, "Can you please come with me,

and do an assessment and a survey of the island,

and go and look what's going on there?"

I was very excited to go there.

So I said, "I'm jumping on that boat."

Of the island, author Lawrence Green once wrote,

"Some forgotten shipmaster

showed a touch of genius when he named Mercury Island."

"That bare rock with the birds crying onto it

shakes like quicksilver

whenever the sea comes in from the south-west

and dashes into the cave."

"This is the place

where one man after another has gone mad."

Wildness. Utter wildness.

I was absolutely astounded.

You don't get wilder than this.

Mercury is so remote and so far from civilisation.

That augmented the feeling of wildness.

It looks like a sleeping, kind of crocodilian,

dinosaur-ish, weird creature.

The whole place was cosmic.

They dropped me at the bottom of the jetty

and I climbed up the stairs,

and I was faced with this wave of seals coming straight at me.

And I just stood there, frozen.

There was nobody on the island.

The whole settlement was deserted.

We walked around the island, went right up to the top,

and as far as we could go.

All we could see was this complete imbalance,

with a seething mass of seals everywhere

bumping into every seabird colony.

It became a competition for space.

We realised then that the whole thing

would eventually be colonised by seals.

No gannets, no penguins,

the whole island would have just gone to the seals.

Should we just allow nature to take its course?

Since we were the ones that put it in the wrong place,

now there's only one species on this planet

that can make it right, and that's us human beings.

Then we made a plan, right then.

Mercury Island has to be manned,

and the seals must be chased off,

if we wish to prevent this local extinction.

I was the perfect person at the perfect time

to go to the perfect place...

which was in total disorder.

[animal noises continue, muffled]

"17th October, 1990."

"Animal and wild surround."

"The seals, like the sound of a nightmare on repeat,

seem to be talking in human sentences,

in between the growls, burps, farts, whines, squeals, snorts,

raucous shouts and hysterical laughter."

"How the birds have managed to survive these conditions,

I don't know."

"Let me leave it at that for tonight."

Yes, good morning, pal.

I'm here on Mercury Island. It's unbelievable.

Un-believ-able!

What an absolutely...

...beautiful ball of a planet this is!

I just can't believe it, man. It's absolutely stunning!

And... there they go.

And now it's just me and the dudes.

"Shout, scream and whip."

"I've got 15,000 seals to deal with."

"Ichaboe is a civilised world compared with this lot."

"Once, this island would have had a myriad of species

living in equilibrium."

"Unmanned, the seals have made it their domain."

"With no one to deter them, and no predators,

their numbers grew and grew."

"Their heavy bodies destroy everything in their path."

Shoo!

Shoo!

And here we are!

The harsh realities thereof.

Had a wash, shower, washed my hair.

Put on a set of new clothes. Clean.

All spruced up and brand new.

This is where I am the king.

This is my domain.

It's out of the wind. My perfect bowl.

We're in a little amphitheatre, out of the wind.

Bank Rock...

and the sky!

Let... Let us walk along this intricate little path here.

It's really a kind of path that, er...

You need to have goat's feet, man! Goat's feet!

You gotta be nifty on your toes,

you gotta make sure you land with your...

Your foot's gotta be...

Sorry, just need to...

Yeah, sorry, Vid, I can't hold your hand now, eh, because...

That's fair enough without a video in your hand,

but when you have, er... Phew!

I really thought I was gonna fall.

And I'm stuck here now.

I've just about had heart failure here,

because I didn't have my feet in the right place.

They have to be...

in the right place!

Shit!

So you see, that's the goat path.

Part of the Earth