BIRD MAN'S BRUSH WITH DEATH - TIMES THREE

*picture: Intrepidcamera.com

DANGLING above the ferocious swell of the storm-lashed sea, somewhere between a trawler and a rescue helicopter, Mike Day may have felt a pang of longing for the pin-stripe suit comfort of his job as a corporate lawyer in Dubai.

A gale was raging, the waves below were immense - the vicious tail of a hurricane that had already lashed the east coast of America, now in its death throes off the north-west tip of Scotland - and Mike, on his first day making his first film, could have been forgiven for wondering if it might be his last.

A few weeks earlier, he'd been tidying up legal wrangles in the Persian Gulf, cosy and cossetted from the elements, a world away from this Hebridean hell where the Atlantic threatened to engulf the fishing trawler, sweeping him and his precious camera equipment to the bottom of the sea.

"I thought it was all over," nods Mike from North Berwick. "The trawler was sinking, I was being winched off and all the kit I needed was still on the deck. Meanwhile, my brother was in another boat in the same storm, in the same situation and with a broken radio. You could say I was a little concerned."

Indeed, his attempt to capture an ancient Hebridean tradition on camera might have been the shortest ever career in filmmaking. Having taken redundancy from his law firm and thrown himself into pursuing this lifelong dream, he was now at the mercy of elements so fierce that even the hardened islanders he'd come to film were shaking their heads and cursing how bad it was.

But it was going to take more than one of the worst storms in decades - and two further agonisingly close brushes with death to come, one of which left him fighting for his life in an Edinburgh hospital - to sweep Mike's plans overboard.

Redundancy cheque in pocket, he had arrived in Stornoway eager to fulfil his ambition to become a filmmaker, a career for which he had slowly been preparing for years.

"I arrived in London from Dubai and went straight to North Berwick to get a boat to sail through the canal to the west coast and then up north," recalls Mike, 31. "I was, literally, a week out of the office and I was on my way to make a film about the disappearing culture of the Hebrides."

He'd heard that every August a ten-man team from some of the smallest villages on the northern-most tip of the Isle of Lewis set sail for the uninhabited islet of Sula Sgeir, 40 miles north, in pursuit of a centuries-old tradition.

On reaching the isolated islet they stay for around two weeks when, much to some animal welfare charities' despair, they perch on the edge of sheer cliffs and pluck 2000 young gannets from their nests, despatching them with a blow to the head then plucking, quartering and salting them ready for transport back to Lewis.

Known as guga, the pungent seabird flesh is an acquired taste but a prized delicacy on the island and abroad. These men of Ness are the only people in Britain allowed to hunt seabirds. And so protective of their tradition are they, that the annual guga hunt has not been captured on film for 50 years.

And after that first terrifying day as he swung from the helicopter winch, wondering if his kit might be rescued too, the guga hunt might well have survived unfilmed for at least another year. But Mike, son of a merchant seaman who'd learned to sail off North Berwick as a lad and already had the Sydney Hobart Yacht Race under his belt, was determined not to be beaten.

Tonight, the results of that journey to film the 2009 guga hunt make it to the small screen, in a BBC2 Scotland documentary, The Guga Hunters of Ness.

But what went on behind the camera is nearly as breathtaking as the hunt itself. Joining Mike on board a 38ft yacht that doubled as the production unit and their accommodation for the fortnight filming, was his brother Matt - a one-time British Olympic sailing hopeful who had joined him on the Sydney-Hobart race - 19-year-old Will Brown, a marine engineer from Edinburgh and experienced sailor Aaron Sterrit, 22, from Kingussie.

And none, nods Mike, was fully prepared for the nightmare conditions they'd endure, from endless hours without sleep to scrabbling over rocks to film and the horrific weather. He says: "The lack of sleep for days on end was tough. Most of the time it was blowing a Force Nine gale and someone had to be on watch all the time.

"We were all nearly killed on the last day of filming when we were hit by a freak wave that came from nowhere and swept us over so we were almost horizontal. When the boat came back up, Will had fallen the full width of the boat and smashed our throttle controls so we were in this monstrous surf with no engine. We had to sail to a nearby island to rig up some ropes and cords which we used to control the engine."

Bad enough, but the drama of making his first film for his new company - the rather appropriately named Intripid cinema - wasn't over yet. He was busy editing his shots when he suddenly felt unwell. He woke days later in the Royal Infirmary, a victim of viral encephalitis.

He says: "It caused my brain to swell so much that it started to push my eyeballs out. I couldn't walk and I couldn't see. I was given a 70 per cent chance of dying or having some kind of brain damage."

He made a full recovery at his parents' Karen and George's North Berwick home.

But he accepts that these first steps into the world of filmmaking were infinitely more dramatic than he'd ever intended.

"It's not put me off, though," he grins. "I've got a very secret project - another quite sensitive topic - on the cards and I'm planning to shoot a feature film, a drama, next year."

And the plan is to avoid any more brushes with death.

"I've had three narrow escapes making this film," grins Mike. "I'm not planning any more."

Historic hunt

SEABIRDS, said to taste like a cross between mackeral and duck, were once a popular delicacy, but in island communities off the west coast of Scotland, guga formed a staple diet.

Hunting for gannets was outlawed in 1954, but the men of Ness were granted an exception - allowed to hunt for 2000 birds once a year on cultural grounds.

The practice has been branded "barbaric and inhumane" by the SSPCA, but the RSPB says it has a "neutral" stance on the hunt as gannet numbers are increasing.



APPEARED EDINBURGH EVENING NEWS 20 JAN 2011

A CENTURY COLLARING CRIMINALS

A COLD, clear Sunday morning in January 1911. City insurance clerk Eric Wilson strode along a cinder path in the Braid Hills, contemplating the rural landscape.

He was walking along a path in the shadow of the Hermitage Woods when something odd caught his eye. On a patch of land in the valley that dips between Blackford Hill and Braid Hills, on a field known to many locals as the Hermiston estate "bog" or the "sheep park", lay what looked disturbingly like the figure of a woman.

Lying on her side, her face covered by her hat, she was respectably if a little shabbily dressed, with her gold wedding ring glistening on her finger.

At first Wilson hoped she was just in a deep, probably drunken, sleep. His hands gripped the fence that separated the path from the field and shook it as hard as he could, yelling out to her.

There would be no answer.

He dashed to a nearby dairy farm for help. Now with farm labourer William Fleming by his side, the lifeless woman's light blue hat was lifted to reveal her features. Both must have reeled at the sight of the blood which had seeped from her staring eyes and streaked her lifeless face.

Now it was becoming horribly clear. This unfortunate woman, only around 30 years old, had been murdered.

Who she was, exactly what had happened to her and, most importantly, at whose hands she met her end, was now a matter for the police to solve.

It was Sunday, January 22, 1911. Generations have come and gone and what shocked Edinburgh at the time is now largely forgotten. But while this was a tragic, wasteful end to a young woman's life, the crime heralded the dawn of a whole new era in police detective work. For the officers investigating the murder victim's grim death on this picturesque landscape, did what none before them had attempted in Scotland.

They called in the hounds.

Today police dogs play a fundamental role in helping to patrol our streets, their unique skills a key weapon in the battle against drugs, in the search for missing people, in crowd control and on the scent of criminals.

It's hard to imagine a modern police force without its unit of highly-trained sniffer dogs and handlers.

But in 1911 when Edinburgh's police force asked for bloodhounds to be brought to this stretch of hillside in the hope they might sniff out the perpetrator of such a dastardly deed, it was the stuff of a Sherlock Holmes story.

While some at the time may well have questioned whether dogs could really help bring a criminal to justice, there was no doubting that the unusual decision to use them helped change the face of policing forever.

Not that the startled insurance clerk or the grim labourer from Braid Hills Dairy Farm had any of that on their minds as they gazed at the lifeless body of 30-year-old Maria Jane Boyle, a mother of two who lived with her husband, a platelayer, in Leith.

Poor Maria must have been a desperate sight for those two startled men as she lay on the cold, hard ground, the pocket of her brown skirt ripped off and lying near the body - the only sign of a possible struggle - her deathly white cheeks stained with blood that had trickled from her eyes, and angry marks on her neck where her attacker had squeezed the life from her.

Within an hour, Edinburgh University's Professor Harvey Littlejohn had confirmed she had been strangled. But it was the remote location of where the deed had been done and the potential that the area still harboured the killer's scent that immediately raised hopes that a new and largely untested method of detective work - using "sniffer" dogs - might well help.

Within hours, a call had been made to Frank Raynor, an accountant from Haddington who had spent five years attempting to train five bloodhounds in tracking scent. He was told to bring his bloodhounds to the scene as soon as possible. They came, one a large black beast called Warboy, by taxi cab.

It was so unique that The Scotsman at the time reported the appearance of the bloodhounds in fascinating detail: "An unusual development in police investigation work in Edinburgh was the requisition of bloodhounds for the purpose of tracking the assailant," reported the paper the day after the murder had taken place. "No sooner had the hounds been set to work than they went off keenly upon what appeared to be a very hot scent."

Police historian Alastair Dinsmore, of the Glasgow Police Museum, says dogs were a rarity in police work in those days. "London police used privately-owned hunting dogs to try to find Jack the Ripper. That was probably the first time dogs had been used in that way. But it was very new for this country. We were well behind the Continent
In Belgium and Germany dogs were used regularly by police to look for murder weapons."

Sadly, Edinburgh's first murder search involving dogs would end in failure. The scent took the dogs, detectives and various other officers for half a mile through the Hermitage Woods. But as they trudged across open ground and over burns, initial optimism faded as the dogs struggled to keep track of the scent.

Miles of ground were covered, but it was eventually assumed the killer had escaped over the burn, unknown to him at the time, a move that earned him his freedom as it washed away the scent and defeated the dogs. Maria's killer was never traced. Even a £100 reward put up by the city magistrates failed to turn up any clues.

It could have been an embarrassing failure for the force. But, as The Scotsman confirmed: "The authorities intend to resume operations with the bloodhounds as they are of the opinion that the possibilities of these agents have not been exhausted."

Precisely when the Edinburgh City Police - later part of Lothian and Borders Police Force - welcomed its first official canine recruits is unclear.

But what is known, is that on a chilly January day, 100 years ago, police found themselves on the trail of a whole new era in fighting crime.



LEAD ROLE

THEY were first used in fighting Edinburgh crime 100 years ago this month, but today's police dogs play a key - and varied - role in keeping our streets safe.

Today's hounds are usually German Shepherds trained in anything from crowd control to finding missing people, sniffing out drugs and even finding buried bodies.

There are 17 "general purpose" police dogs at the dog unit at Fettes, along with five which specialise in finding explosives and eight trained in finding narcotics.

Sergeant Duncan Sutherland, one of the force's dog trainers and handlers, says: "Like every area of the force, the dog unit is looking to the future and how to evolve. One of those areas is wildlife crime, one of the dogs is now trained to sniff out poisons.

"It's hard to imagine a modern force today that wouldn't use dogs."

APPEARED Edinburgh Evening News Jan 13,2011.