Before this holiday, I wasn’t a birder.

I knew what a puffin looked like because everybody knows what a puffin looks like.

They appear on tea towels, postcards and calendars. They have colourful beaks and permanently surprised expressions. Beyond that, my seabird knowledge was fairly limited.

I certainly didn’t expect to spend a week discussing the finer points of guillemots, razorbills and possible shag sightings.

Yet somehow, that’s exactly what happened.

The funny thing is that my first puffin sighting wasn’t even planned.

We had only been at Thornwick Bay for a couple of hours.

I hadn’t visited Bempton Cliffs yet.

I hadn’t spent time searching.

I wasn’t even particularly expecting to see one.

I was standing near Smuggler’s Cave, admiring the cliffs and pretending not to stare enviously at people carrying lenses that looked large enough to photograph the moon.

Then I spotted something.

A small black-and-white shape tucked into a rocky nook.

I looked again.

Then I made a noise that was somewhere between a gasp and an excited squeak.

A puffin.

An actual puffin.

Then I spotted another one.

Two puffins.

Just sitting there as though they hadn’t spent years existing only in documentaries and photographs.

I was delighted.

Then one of them flew.

Now, I understand that puffins are birds.
Logically, I know this.

But seeing one fly felt deeply unreasonable.

They look like little potatoes with wings.

Like somebody designed them in a hurry and forgot to consider aerodynamics.

Watching a puffin launch itself into the air is like watching a miracle powered entirely by determination.

Its wings blurred.

Its feet disappeared.

And somehow, against all available evidence, it became airborne.

I laughed.

I think I loved puffins immediately.

The following day we visited Bempton Cliffs.

Unfortunately, Yorkshire had decided to demonstrate every weather condition simultaneously.

The rain was relentless.

Not normal rain.

Not polite rain.

The sort of rain that arrives sideways.

The sort of rain that makes you question your life choices.

The wind was somewhere around thirty miles per hour and my poncho spent most of the day attempting to escape without me.

The sea was grey.

The sky was grey.

The cliffs were grey.

Everything was wet.

Including parts of me that I wasn’t aware could become wet.

And despite all of this, Bempton was incredible.

There were birds everywhere.

Thousands of them.

The cliffs seemed alive.

Kittiwakes covered every available ledge.

Guillemots stood shoulder-to-shoulder on impossibly narrow shelves of rock.

Looking at them made me nervous.

They seemed perfectly comfortable standing on spaces no wider than a digestive biscuit.

The guillemots quickly became my second favourite bird.

They looked serious.

Professional.

Like tiny Victorian accountants conducting important business meetings on cliff edges.

Then there were the gannets.

The glamorous birds of the seabird world.

Bright white feathers.

Golden heads.

Elegant in flight.

I immediately started referring to them as banana heads.

This felt entirely appropriate.

They looked far too clean and sophisticated compared to the rest of the noisy cliff residents.

I also discovered that I may have seen a shag.

A sentence I never expected to write.

It was sitting among the gannets.

Dark.

Glossy.

Almost black.

When my partner looked through the binoculars he asked if it had a purple sheen.

I could see green.

For a while I wondered whether the binoculars were playing tricks on us.

Now I suspect it really was a shag.

The mystery remains unsolved.

The puffins, however, refused to appear.

Bempton had promised puffins.

The puffins apparently hadn’t received the message.

To be fair, if I were a puffin and somebody offered me the choice between sitting in a warm burrow or enduring horizontal rain and gale-force winds, I know which option I would choose.

Fortunately, I wasn’t disappointed.

I’d already seen my puffins.

Two ridiculous little birds tucked into a cliffside nook at Thornwick Bay.

By the end of the week, I realised something surprising.

The birds weren’t just wildlife.

They had become part of the story.

The puffins were wonder.

The guillemots were comedy.

The gannets were beauty.

And together they gave me a reason to stand on windswept cliffs getting soaked while grinning like an idiot.

Looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Not even the rain.

Although I would have packed a proper coat.

— Frost ❄️