Mousa and Moose-key

Aside from a hundred sheep and a handful of storm petrel watchers from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Mousa Island, at 60 degrees latitude off the coast of Lerwick, Shetland, is uninhabited. JG and I were touring Mousa, home to one of the largest and best-kept brochs in Scotland. A broch is a double-walled dry-stacked stone Iron Age tower from 400-200 BCE. No one really knows what a Broch was used for. The best theory I heard was that it was the home for a chieftain.

 Mousa attracts bird watchers for the arctic terns, puffins, and storm petrels.

“Breton folklore holds that storm petrels are the spirits of sea-captains who mistreated their crew, doomed to spend eternity flying over the sea, and they are also held to be the souls of drowned sailors. A sailing superstition holds that the appearance of a storm petrel foretells bad weather.” I am not impressed by the local lore. There are visible storm petrels and it is often windy and rainy. Correlation is not causation, as they say. Here is my view of the puffins. Yes, those white blobs stuck on the cliff are the charismatic, sought-after originals of plush puffins.

Shetland wool is world famous. The Shetland sheep, however, look very much like Watsonville sheep.

It was Sunday and all the shops were closed. Our Shetland tour guide related that her town, Lerwick, hosts a wild costume and dance party every January called Up Helly Aa.

https://www.uphellyaa.org/ As well as tanker lorries full of beer and grown men dressed in fake-fur vests and loincloths, the festival features squads (they’d be called Crewes in New Orleans) of partiers performing a routine that is a cross between a flash mob and a mock battle. Then a stylish wooden Viking galley is ceremonially burnt by the revelers. As she narrated this story of torch-lit parades, of joviality and of stirring pageantry, we looked out at unbroken kilometers of rainy windswept sheep pasture. My hike was enlivened by a whimsical fellow tourist from Chicago. In his backpack, Jerry carried a plush moose in a Finland T-shirt. The moose, named Moose-key, was looking for a plush puffin friend. I understood completely.