Getting weather wise

By Jon DunnNovember 22nd 2021

Shetland's weather can be unpredictable but intuitive islanders can learn to read the signs in their natural environment to forecast what's to come, as natural history writer and photographer Jon Dunn explains.

The view from my kitchen windows is, even by Shetland’s maritime standards, quite a lot to take in. They say that nowhere in Shetland is more than three miles from the sea, so fractured is our coastline. Viewed from above, the edges of the islands form an intricate interstice between land and sea, with barely a straight line in more than 1,600 miles of coast. Deep voes punctuate a mosaic of small bays, headlands, holms and offshore skerries. I can see all of that from the kitchen, and more besides. Sitting on top of a peninsula that extends from the eastern side of the island of Whalsay, I am surrounded by sea on three sides, and girdled by other islands.

Mainland Shetland sits on the near horizon, with Shetland’s highest point, Ronas Hill, looming in the distance. To the north is the dark mass of the island of Yell, too far away to afford any shelter from the northerlies that sometimes sweep down here straight from the Arctic. With the naked eye, Yell seems to continue further than it really does – I can’t differentiate where it ends and the island of Fetlar begins from my Whalsay perspective. However, on clear days, and with the help of a pair of binoculars, I can see the distinctive Georgian façade of Belmont House and a little of the island of Unst behind it – it’s Unst that fills the small gap on the horizon between Yell and Fetlar. Then, with a large body of water separating it from Fetlar, and set some way to the east of Whalsay, there’s the small island community of Out Skerries.

A sighting of a Glaucous Gull could signal that an Arctic blast is on its way | Jon Dunn

As I say, there’s a lot to take in. The area of sea encircled by all of these islands is vast, populated by fishing boats, seabirds, a resident population of Harbour Porpoises, and just occasionally much larger cetaceans indeed. This past week, I’ve seen four Humpback Whales feeding just offshore from home. That’s the exception though, rather than the rule – it’s only the third time in the past 20 years I’ve been so blessed. What I do see, every day, in this natural amphitheatre of land and sea is the weather.

By that, I don’t mean the weather one steps outside the door and finds all around you. With views that stretch for miles, I can see the weather that’s in the post, presently bathing my distant island neighbours with sunlight, rain or snow, due to arrive with me in the next hour or, when the wind is blowing keenly, maybe in just a few minutes time.

The sight of a wall of rain advancing across the sea from the north, issuing from clouds as dark as a bruise, and obliterating sight of the islands beyond, is surprisingly threatening. There’s a sense of imminence, of promise, and not of a pleasant nature. Even less pleasant when there’s laundry hanging out on the washing line… Then, I know I need to hurry outside with the wash basket and bring the laundry in before it takes a fresh soaking, hasty fingers fumbling with storm pegs as the weather front draws ever closer and the air temperature drops just a little bit in the moments before it hits.

(Storm pegs? I learned a long time ago that normal clothes pegs don’t work here, or at least, not for long. The Shetland wind blows laundry clean out of them, their grip insufficient for the task at hand. Sturdy plastic storm pegs clamp the laundry to the line, ensuring it stays where I left it and doesn’t whirl away across the fields. Early on, I rescued one pillow case from a fence where it was fraying to pieces. Its counterpart was never seen again, blown out to sea, bound for Norway.)

A red sky at night usually means high pressure is coming from the west | David Gifford

Such domestic dramas pale against the memory of what the weather meant, decades ago, for the Shetland men who took to the sea in open wooden boats or sixareens to fish, at times well out of sight of land. Back then, forecasting the weather was, in a very literal sense, a matter of life and death, yet could be a desperately imprecise science.

20 July 1881 dawned clear and relatively calm, after a spell of days of strong winds. Nobody had been able to get to sea to fish, so the men of Gloup, a coastal community in the north of Yell, were understandably keen to return to the fishing. The day would, tragically, prove to be a day atween wadders – a brief lull of calm before the resumption of bad weather. The sixareens were some 40 miles offshore when unforeseen, hurricane force winds came upon them, a fast-moving depression that had formed deep in the North Atlantic. Taken by surprise, the boats strove to return to land, but 10 boats were lost and, with them, 58 men lost their lives, leaving behind 34 widows and 85 orphans.

Judging what the weather had in store was, back then, a matter of experience and judgement passed from father to son and acquired in the course of a lifetime living in the islands. It was, of course, no different anywhere in Britain at the time. The plethora of weather-related proverbs stands testament to that. Many of us learned, as children, the mantra of “Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning.” The saying was commonplace throughout Britain - in coastal communities, the shepherd was usually supplanted by a sailor.

And there was a grain of truth in it – red skies form when dust is held in the atmosphere by high pressure. A red sky at sunset means high pressure is coming from the west, so the following day should be clear and calm. A red sky at dawn signals that high pressure has moved east of us, and what follows in its wake will probably be low pressure bringing stronger winds and rain.

A Red-throated Diver feeding a fish to its fluffy chick | Jon Dunn

In Shetland, the red sky in local weather lore was replaced by something else – the comings and goings of the Red-throated Divers that breed on small lochans throughout the islands in the summer. In Shetland Folklore, a collection of sayings and beliefs gathered in 1899 by author John Spence “from the lips of the old folk”, the Red-throated Diver, known locally as the rain goose, was at the heart of a proverb that endures to this day:

If the rain goose flees ta da hill,
Ye can geng to da haf whin ye will;
But whin sho gangs ta da sea,
Ye maun draw up yir boats an flee.

In other words, if the Red-throated Diver flew inland, the weather should be favourable to go to the haaf, or fishing; but if the diver flew out to sea, it was time to draw the boats into their sheltered noosts on the shore, and stay safely at home.

Unlike the red skies, the Red-throated Divers would have been somewhat less reliable instruments of weather forecasting – in the summer, they fly back and forth from their inland nests to catch fish at sea to bring back for their chicks. If you live on a diver flight-path here, they go to sea and back inland overhead several times a day. I can almost set my watch by them, so regular are they – but I wouldn’t want to forecast the weather from their comings and goings.

That said, a glance out of the window can tell me something of what’s in store when I set foot outside. For starters, in the absence of trees with tell-tale movement in their branches, the behaviour of the local Shetland sheep speaks volumes about the wind speed and direction. Crucially, if they’re clustered together downwind of a drystone wall, I can be sure the wind is strong. I can tell the direction it’s blowing from by the direction the sheep are facing – they always put their heads downwind. Sheep facing south means a cold northerly outside, and is a day for a woolly jumper for me.

The arrival of white-winged gulls in Shetland is also synonymous with an Arctic blast. Iceland and Glaucous Gulls, northern near relatives of the Herring Gulls we’re all familiar with in towns across Britain, are swept down to us when the wind comes from the north. They’ll be here in Shetland every winter in small numbers, but in some years, when the northerly winds are sustained and prolonged, their numbers can swell considerably, especially around Lerwick, where they hang around fishing boats in the harbour hoping for scraps.

We’re fortunate to live in a world of constantly updating, detailed weather forecasts. The natural world was always an imprecise gauge of the weather to come here, but is always an accurate testament to what has just passed. In that sense, we’re no different to the wild birds. Our lives in Shetland are dictated by the weather too. Sometimes the inter-island ferries have to stop running during big storms, or the ferry to the Scottish mainland runs late or is cancelled altogether. Empty supermarket shelves here are simply a fact of life at some point in most winters. We know that’s coming and, a bit like those Shetland sheep that know how to minimise the impact of the wind, we adapt.

Please note: Red-throated Diver images were taken under an approved Schedule 1 licence.

Jon Dunn

What next?