This film was shown in October 2005 at the Cinema Muto festival in Sacile, Italy. The festival screened a print from Britain's National Film and Television Archive with stencilled colour tinting and German intertitles. The film's German title translates as 'The Tourists of the Air'.
The festival programme did not state which Saint Kilda was the location for this film: the remote island off the coast of Scotland, or the suburban beach near Melbourne. Both St Kildas are of interest to me, since my family are from a remote area of Scotland and I lived near St Kilda Beach in my Melburnian days.
In the event, this brief nature film turns out to have been shot on the Scottish island. I'm hardly an expert on bird species (although some people claim I'm a bird-brain), so I had difficulty identifying some of the birds shown here. Fortunately, a lady at the same screening kept me up to date: what we see in this film are various species of gulls, guillemots, sparrowhawks and puffins, plus a reed warbler and (to my surprise) a cuckoo. I'd be very interested to know whether these same species are seen in St Kilda today, a century on.
It's regrettable that this silent film does not capture the distinctive calls of these various birds ... although I've heard quite enough guillemots in my time. The colour tinting in this short film is delicate and quite pretty, and very likely it impressed audiences at the time of this movie's original release. However, I suspect that the colour schemes shown here do not accurately reflect the plumage of these bird species: as a birding tutorial, this film would likely be more useful in its original monochrome.