This is an open-access version of my weekly column in The National, published Saturday, 1st August, 2026
Update: Nature Scot’s board decided on Monday 3rd August not to grant a license to the Men of Ness to hunt the Guga (young gannets) on the island of Sula Sgeir, this year
THE deep Atlantic waves from The Minch batter madly at the shores of Sula Sgeir, 40 miles north of Lewis.
A decent-sized fishing boat sends a dinghy out, landing provisions for 10 people, to be brutally hauled up the rock. One adventurer points at the outlines of centuries-old cairns, built by previous generations of hunters: “It’s quite a haunting place to arrive in.”
Those are a few scenes from the lambent documentary The Guga Hunters Of Ness, shown on BBC Two in 2011 [buy or rent it here]. Guga are young gannets; their hunters are 10 men from Ness, the most far-flung community on the island of Lewis.
I’ve downloaded this for background, because of the following news story. On Monday, NatureScot looks like it won’t be granting the Ness men their licence to kill their quota of birds this year – stopping a centuries-old tradition.
The official reason is that even a cull of 500 birds, let alone the usual 2000, will have an “Adverse Effect on Site Integrity” – reducing the colony’s numbers over a longer time period.
A “perfect firestorm” (in NatureScot’s words) of avian bird flu and wind farm disruption has also contributed to the instability. They’re also considering how a foot-stomping cull also damages breeding prospects for fulmars and storm petrels.
There’s a range of animal welfare campaigners – OneKind, The League Against Cruel Sports, Protect the Wild, Abolish the Guga Hunt, and green celebs like Chris Packham – that are already claiming victory.
Quotes like “a grisly piece of history to be retired”, “2000 young gannets will now get to spread their wings and fly instead of being beaten to death for an archaic tradition”, and “no animal should die like this for food in Scotland in the 21st century”.
Strictly speaking, there are many animals in Scottish factory farming – shit-covered, crippled and fearful, killed by a captive-bolt gun – that shouldn’t be dying “as they do”.
But “grisly piece of history” and “archaic tradition” need more explanation and context.
Mike Day’s documentary makes it clear that, in the second decade of the 21st century, there’s something compensatory about these Lewismen’s hazardous trips to killing fields.
Middle-aged male Niseach after Niseach laments the loss of the “young folk” leaving the islands and its crofts for cities like Aberdeen “or even further away”, never or rarely to return.
Ness is still majority-speaking Gaelic, but the men of Ness can’t enforce the Gaelic-speaking rule of the trip, given they now have to pull in hunters from beyond the Gaeltacht. The story of overall decline is pointed.
Yet it’s also clear that the harvesting of these young gannets is an act of patriarchal renewal, in the face of all this falling away. The fishing boat trip to Sula Sgeir is beset with flooded decks and vertiginous waves: it’s very Odyssean.
Having survived that, they settle in for weeks of subsistent living, practising the methodical cruelty of guga hunting and preparing.
It’s a gruesome wee world.
Young fluff-covered birds are looped by their necks, stunned then beheaded, their wings snapped behind their body to make them tractable.
Their carcasses are smoked and salted there on the island, piled up in grotesque mounds, then sent down a rickety chute and thumped into the floor of the main boat. Incongruously, the air is thick with youthful gannet fluff, dusting the hunters.
There’s not much grace, and too much effort: you start to wonder what the real gratifications are here.
All the way through, the Ness men gruffly work together (though resting for the Sabbath). The filmmaker gets little scraps of transcendence from them – mostly on the theme that it’s a place and moment where “you can forget about everything else”.
In poet Donald Murray’s book The Guga Hunters, one of the documentary’s leads, Dods (John MacFarlane), is asked what he enjoys most about the hunt.
“It’s that sense I have of following in the steps of my ancestors”, replies Dods. “Thinking to myself, ‘I’m going over the same places they did and doing the same things they did when they were here’. It’s like being away from the ordinary world, the world of here and now ... That’s not a feeling you get in many places these days.”
The documentary is careful, even tender, as it allows for bathos. Heroic, ancestral Dods is running a faltering food van business, unable to compete with Tesco and the Co-op. His final shots see him building a breeze-block extension, doing the dull grind until next year’s revivifying carnage.
There are clips intercut from an earlier documentary made in the 50s. Busy streets teem with kids, boats, crofters’ turfs. It looks as if there would be enough nutritional family demand for protein to justify the guga hunt.
But even if the need was more acute back then, it still seems like some kind of masculine energy was being expended. We see men in flatcaps and ties, reckless and nonchalant, skipping down the face of Sula Sgeir’s cliff in pursuit of plump young gannets.
Among the current men of Ness, there’s a certain service sector, white-collar restraint, even irony. “I haven’t seen my face for weeks, but my eyebrows will probably be burned off”, says a roustabout responsible for charring the birds over a Hades-like pit of flame. “Ma surname’s Burns, but that’s just taking the piss.”
How can this masculinist tradition persist, faced with detailed ecological assessments on one side, and objections from animal welfarists and liberationists on the other?
THE argument from indigeneity is available. Whales and other cetaceans are permitted to be hunted by groups in Alaska, Greenland, St Vincent and the Grenadines, the Faroes (the last is the topic of Day’s follow-on documentary). These are officially judged to meet the conditions of “traditional subsistence hunting frameworks”.
Certainly what comes out of the final plastic-packs of guga don’t seem to be spreading much beyond the Lewis community itself. (You can easily find a Gordon Ramsay social media clip which largely trashes its taste possibilities for high cuisine.) In general, I am personally ambivalent about the hunting impulse. Hunting is so deeply a part of humanity’s evolutionary history that it seems perverse not to expect it to surface in cultures and societies.
However, send them out with Paleolithic equipment like spears, arrows and nets – not modern guns that take fat birds and muscular deer out with a relatively easy shot.
But the guga “hunt” is hardly that kind of natural contestation between species. It seems more like a brutal, one-way harvesting of the vulnerable. And also a pretext to therapeutically exercise male power over organisms, under conditions of profound loss.
Every major climate report I read says the same thing: we need to shift to a mostly plant-based diet, in order to mitigate climate breakdown. So, ultimately, I think it’s good for us, as a planet, if carnivorous human traditions are downgraded, bit by bit.
The industrialised meat, fowl and fish that come to our tables are mostly the output of incredible cruelty. We can hardly isolate and derogate the practices of the men of Ness, while we’re living in such a systemic, everyday, background abattoir.
So I hope the NatureScot board confirm that the guga hunt should take a pause this year, on a pathway to proscribing it altogether. But I also hope the sheer humanity and history that suffuses this practice gets its due respect.
How do we move on, with dignity, from being defined by the old exigencies of survival? What’s the transcendence available from nature, that doesn’t involve coshing, beheading and wing-snapping young birds?
A discussion that these poetic, haunted Niseach men could potentially have, I am sure.
The Guga Hunters Of Ness can be downloaded on Vimeo here.
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