In 1988, at the height of my avian obsession, I was taken with the idea of living among birds. I signed on for a two-week research stint, the first of a summer-long relay of teams that would study Foula’s sea bird colonies. Foula was inhabited then, as now, by a handful of people who are joined during the summer months by throngs of birds returning to terra firma for the first time in almost a year. A speck of land three-and-a-half miles long and two-and-a-half miles wide, Foula cuts a jagged silhouette as it rises from the Atlantic. Foula is Norse for fowl, and may have been the last place where Norn was spoken.

~ Lynne Shapiro @ Terrain.org