i am nearly finished knitting a guillemot now .. i hope i have got the shape of the long neck.

i have been thinking of the word guillemot and discovered that guillemot derives from guillaume the old french spelling of William.

Pennant wrote of them in 1768 'foolish guillemots are found in amazing numbers on the high cliffs of our coasts.. they are simple for notwithstanding they are shot at , and see their companions killed by them, they will not quit the rock'

i have made him quite skinny as i had been reading about hungry guillemots

Starving guillemots hint at seabird crisis

,Reports of hundreds of dead or starving young seabirds around Scotland - including some many miles from the coast - and Northern Ireland are leading to speculation among experts that these incidents may be linked to a much larger problem.

Staff from several organisations, including the RSPB, are assessing the extent of the situation. Most of the casualties are guillemots - a type of seabird.

Post mortems on the birds shown that many of the birds are underweight and have empty stomachs, suggesting they are suffering from a chronic shortage of food. Sandeels are a principal prey for guillemots and many other seabirds.

Dr Euan Dunn, head of marine policy for the RSPB, said: 'Able to dive 300 feet for fish prey, guillemots are massively buffered against scarcity, so evidence of starvation signals a desperate lack of food.

'Food shortage has reared its ugly head in a number of guillemot colonies in recent years, but the breadth and scale of these reports of starving birds is more troubling'

'Food shortage has reared its ugly head in a number of guillemot colonies in recent years, but the breadth and scale of these reports of starving birds is more troubling.'

Counts of seabird colonies around Scotland and in Northern Ireland have revealed that they have had another disastrous year with food shortages leading to a low recruitment of young birds.

Commenting on the potential impacts of climate change affecting UK seabirds, the RSPB's Conservation Director, Dr Mark Avery, said: 'The seas surrounding the British Isles are among the most productive in the world and, despite decades of overfishing, they still support internationally important seabird colonies. ,

http://www.rspb.org.uk/action/guillemots.asp