It's nae easy being a guillemot, let me tell ye. We seem to be forever mistaken for the other cheeky blokes in the family, the penguins. It's like showing up in a kilt to a pair of trousers party. Ye could be having your pint in peace, one moment, and then you're bungeeing down an oil-slicked cliff in the middle of a 'blinking seabird wreck' the next. This keeps on happening despite Professor Tim Birkhead ballyragging all summer about it on Skomer Island.
His research - of which we're the flapping guinea pigs - has shown, he reckons, the myriad ways we're not penguins. For one, our love life is flashy as a Las Vegas marquee, not monochromatically humdrum. Our ability to recover from disasters and oil spills is legendary – almost a Adam Driver like hardiness, not a penguin's limp waddle.
And yet, we get mixed up. 'Oi, you're a short, fat, black and white bird. You're a penguin, aren't ya?' No, I'm a bleeding guillemot! I have nae brolly or hitch in my waddle.
Even Birkhead himself, despite his defense of our individuality, seems blind to the cheeky mistakes we guillemots go through with climate change. These hotter, wetter, stormier weather patterns - they're not making us confusable with penguins, mates, they're turning us into flamingos!
With rising tides and incessant rain, we're fed up, as wet as a hungry otter's pocket, and our lush black and white feathers have started to take on a peculiar pinkish tone. To make it worse, suddenly we're forced to wade around in water ankle-deep like those long-legs. It's absolutely bonkers!
Birkhead seeks £125,000 to keep us in front of the camera, but what about the cost of maintaining our dignity? Can't the gentleman see the irreparable damage already done? We're disgruntled guillemots on the brink of identity theft and doomed to be portrayed as pink penguins on National Geographic.
In conclusion, perhaps there's a silver lining to this whole brouhaha - maybe it's high time we capitalize on our newfound fame and set the record straight. Let's start our own show: Keeping up with the Guillemots. It's time the world knew what it really means to be a guillemot - a dapper Scot of the avian world, not a confused penguin or a long-legged flamingo.
Based on: 'We've underrated what these birds can do': the secret life of Skomer's guillemots