Most 21-year-olds probably get cash, a watch, maybe a car on their birthday. Adam Nicolson got three islands. In 1978, he inherited the Shiants, a group of uninhabited islands in the Minch, the stretch of sea between the Outer Hebrides and the Scottish mainland, from his father, Nigel Nicolson. There was no jetty, no electricity. But the islands did have birds, more than 150,000 seabirds gather there to breed each year, according to conservation reports on the project, and a smaller, less welcome population of black rats. In a 2002 study titled ‘ Stable isotopes reveal evidence of predation by ship rats on seabirds on the Shiant Islands, Scotland ’ in the Journal of Applied Ecology, ecologist Paul Stapp used chemical traces in rat tissue to show that the rats on the islands had been feeding on seabird eggs and chicks. That discovery helped shape later conservation work on a patch of rock most people will never set foot on.
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