Part 2 · Sentence completion

Narrator: You will hear a woman called Fiona Grant talking about the year she spent as a warden on a remote Scottish island. For questions 7 to 14, complete the sentences with a word or short phrase.

Fiona: Hello, everyone. Last year I spent eleven months living on a small island off the north-west coast of Scotland, working as a seabird warden. When people hear that, they usually ask whether I was lonely. The honest answer is: less than I expected. There were two of us on the island, and in summer we had a steady trickle of visiting researchers. What I found hardest to cope with wasn't the isolation at all – it was the wind. It never stopped, and after a while the constant noise really got to me.

Fiona: My main job was monitoring the puffins. Every morning from April to August I'd walk the same route along the cliffs and count the burrows that were occupied. You can't just peer down a burrow, of course, so we used a small camera on the end of a long pole – rather like the ones plumbers use to look inside pipes.

Fiona: I'd trained as a primary school teacher, and I'd never done anything like this before. What got me the job, I think, was that I'd volunteered for three summers with a bird charity, so I had a lot of experience of handling birds safely. That turned out to matter far more than any formal qualification.

Fiona: Supplies came by boat once a fortnight, weather permitting – and quite often the weather didn't permit. The longest we went without a delivery was nineteen days, and by the end we were living on porridge and tinned sardines. I haven't eaten a sardine since.

Fiona: The most memorable moment? People expect me to say something about the puffins, but actually it was a night in October when the sky was lit up by the northern lights. We'd been told it was possible that far north, but I'd assumed it would be faint. It wasn't. It filled the whole sky, green and violet, and we stood outside in our pyjamas for over an hour.

Fiona: Coming back to the mainland was harder than I'd imagined. Supermarkets felt overwhelming – all that choice, all that noise. It took me about a month before I stopped feeling like a visitor in my own life.

Fiona: Would I go back? Absolutely. In fact, I've applied to do another season, this time on an island in the South Atlantic, where the birds I'll be counting are albatrosses.