When people imagine birdwatching, they usually picture sunshine.

Blue skies. Gentle sea breezes. Perhaps a flask of tea.

Nobody imagines standing on a cliff in Yorkshire while rain attempts to enter your bloodstream.

Yet that is exactly where I found myself.

Bempton Cliffs had been one of the places I was most excited to visit.

Home to puffins. Gannets. Guillemots. Thousands upon thousands of seabirds.

What I had not fully appreciated was that Bempton Cliffs is also home to weather.
A lot of weather.

The forecast had warned us.
In fairness, the forecast had practically begged us not to go.

But we had come all this way.

There were birds to see.

So we wrapped ourselves in varying degrees of waterproof optimism and headed for the cliffs.

I had prepared.

Months of holiday planning had ensured I was ready for almost every possibility.
I had packed a purple poncho from Temu.
Not only that, I had packed a thick waterproof bag specifically for storing the poncho afterwards.

This was the kind of planning that made me feel secure.

The poncho worked remarkably well.

My torso remained almost entirely dry.

Unfortunately, the rest of me did not.

My arms got wet.
My hands got wet.
My face got wet.
My legs got wet.

At one point I suspected the rain was finding entirely new and innovative ways to reach me.

The wind wasn’t helping.

Every time I thought I had successfully arranged the poncho, Yorkshire disagreed.

The fabric flapped dramatically around me like a distressed sail.

I spent much of the day fighting weather and losing.

The birds, meanwhile, seemed completely unbothered.

Thousands of them covered the cliffs.

The guillemots stood shoulder-to-shoulder on ledges no wider than a paperback book.
The gannets soared effortlessly through conditions that felt personally offensive.
The kittiwakes carried on as though horizontal rain was perfectly normal.

Perhaps it was.

I looked through binoculars.
The binoculars got wet.
I wiped them.
They got wet again.

At some point I gave up and accepted that seeing damp birds through damp lenses while being damp myself was simply part of the experience.

The strange thing is that I loved it.

Not because it was comfortable.
It absolutely wasn’t.

Not because it was easy.
It wasn’t that either.

I loved it because I was there.

One week earlier I had been sitting at home imagining every possible thing that could go wrong.

Now I was standing on a cliff in a storm looking for puffins.

The weather was terrible.

The view was magnificent.

The sea stretched endlessly into the distance.

The white cliffs seemed to glow against the dark sky.

The birds filled every available space.

For a few moments I stopped worrying about being wet and simply looked.
Really looked.
And it was beautiful.

The rain never stopped.

The wind never calmed down.

The puffins mostly remained sensible enough to stay hidden.

None of that mattered.

Because sometimes the best memories aren’t made in perfect conditions.
Sometimes they’re made while your poncho is attempting to achieve flight and your waterproofing strategy is experiencing catastrophic failure.

Would I do it again?

Absolutely.

Although next time, I might pack a coat.

— Frost ❄️