A young Patrick Bateson watched the ivory gull soar 1,000ft above the icy fjord and, for the next five weeks, thought about nothing other than observing this rare, snow white species.
Little was known about the gull except that it nested on cliffs. The 21-year-old Bateson’s decision to travel to a remote Norwegian archipelago, 400 miles from the North Pole, based on sightings 30 years earlier, had excited even the Dutch Nobel-prize winning ornithologist Niko Tinbergen. By birth three-quarters Norwegian, Bateson had learnt the rough speech of fishermen a year earlier during an expedition to Norway before going to Cambridge.
Bateson and some university friends landed on an island at the edge of the archipelago. Unable to enter the fjord, they had to wait for