The sealion rookery consists of three bulbous peninsulae, an island, and a great protrusion. Though I have refrained from giving the sealions such cute names as Sammy, Yolanda or Ivan Vassilievich, I have found it expedient to name some of the significant geographical features of the rookery.
From West to East, the peninsulae are Chaika, Chistik, and Baklan. Chaika and Chistik share a fairly long land border, but are separated by the wide Golfe de Lion. Chistik and Baklan are separated by a long, deep fjord, the Pinnae Sound. To the north of Chistik and Chaika, there is a small inland sea, the Juba Sea, attached to the ocean to the West by the Eumotopian Straits.
Toporik island is to the West of the Sivuchian subcontinent. It is ovoid, with it's long axis oriented North-South.
The arrangement is reminiscent, perhaps, of Sweden, Norway and Finland in the Baltic Seas, or of Iberia, Italy and the Hellenic peninsula in the Mediterranean. Or perhaps even Arabia, India, and Indochina.
In it's own compressed way, the culture of each of these three peninsulae is as unique as Arabia from Indochina. In the space of the sixty days that Sergey and I spent eight hours each looking out upon the rookery, I dare say the ebbs and flows and wars and dramas and catastrophes and extasies of each of the three pensinsulae rival the shifts of fortune of any peninsular triplet known to human history.
Well, maybe not quite. But it almost never got boring.
The great protrusion rises out of the middle of Chaika, and dwarfs everything. It is half as high as rest of the rookery is wide. If Chaika were scaled to the size of India, the atmosphere of the Earth would barely moisten the heel of this massive Himalaya.
I named it Mount Gloopish. I was naming geographical units after birds and, at the time, I felt the gloopish deserved a monument for it's sheer ubiquity.
From the blind, Mount Gloopish merely lookes like a great big, steep triangle with a smooth face that blocks a section of the rookery and makes it difficult to observe sealions. Once a day, one of me or Sergey heads west towards the wall where the kittiwake and the murre live. It is not an easy journey. We brave the fury of the seagulls, the slipperiness of the rocks, the fleas of the puffins, and count the sealions from behind the wall - the Terra Incognita.
There, from the west, Mount Gloopish suddenly takes upon itself a form. It is an imposing, awesome, somewhat spooky form in arch socialist style - that is, with strong angles, a monumental scale, and laden with overt symbolism. Furthermore, it is almost invariably dramatically backlit.
To Sergei it looks like a gauntleted arm half-clenched.
To me, it looks something like an angry salmon shooting vertically up through the water, or like a great patriarch, a bogatyr', reading a book to a child.
One might have hoped that to name a structure so singular and imposing after a presence as vapid and nonispiring as the gloopish might dull it's edge. But, by the time I had seen Mount Gloopish from the west, my own relationship to the gloopish had gotten rather more complex. Rather than mollify the presence of the mountain, the otherwise innocuous presence of the gloopishes name has now acquired a rather ominous core.
In any case, there are only two birds that perch on the very peak of Mount Gloopish and that is the raven and his bride, or the raven and her spouse - or simply the raven and the raven.
The raven is large with black plumage, a black beak, black legs, black claws, black eyes and an aristocratic black forehead. The raven's voice is a sort of clear deep trill at an agreeable register. Dynamically, it is very nicely shaped. The first time I heard it, I wondered what this melodious, rather lovely, vaguely familiar sound might be.
It was only when it flew across my field of vision, with even strong unhurried wingflaps, black fingers flared at the tips, that it occured to me that this noise was what is known in English as a "caw" and in a Russian as a "kryak".
The raven flies across by field of vision and perches on the very top of Mount Gloopish. It give a short call to it's spouse - a call that is heard above the roar of the sealions and the squeak of the guillemots and the khe-khe-khe-ing of the gloopishes.
The second raven flies across my field of vision, lands squarely next to its partner. They dance a dignified little dance. They look out upon their realm.
***
The raven does not use its voice indiscriminately, like the kittiwake, or hyperactively, like the wagtail, or inanely, like the gloopish, or thuggishly, like the seagull. It uses it's voice rarely and authoritatively, with meaning or not at all. They are aristocrats.
I see the ravens fly across my field of vision in the observation booth carrying something in their mouths. Often an egg. Sometimes a newly hatched chick. The ravens do not wet their feathers in the sea, they do not dive or skim the surface or parasite the sealions or harrass the biologists. They collect their tribute from the fisherfolk, the plankterfolk, the seagull mafiosi. They bring their tribute to their nest - high up in the hills, where they raise their young.
There is not a single spot on this island that I have visited where the raven has not been.
Count and countess of Antsiferov. We are all the subjects of the ravens. When, on my way to work I see them flying overhead, I have half an urge to sweep my wide-brimmed hat off my head and kneel at the side of the road.
Thankfully, I do not have a wide-brimmed hat. I say "thankfully" because if I did kneel at the side of the road, as it were, on the way to work, I would probably tumble into the sea.