Incoming

R and I had an excellent day today. Immediately after breakfast we headed for the RSPB reserve at Bempton Cliffs, where we spent the morning watching the gannets, guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes and fulmars. The wind was blowing strongly onto the cliffs from the north east, and the updraught as it hit them was ferocious, but this gave me some great photo opportunities, as various birds spread their wings, stepped gently off their cliff ledge perches, and hung almost motionless in the air. On our last visit R surprised me by being relatively uninterested in the gannets, but after seeing them on the wing at such very close quarters today, he revised his opinion: they are truly impressive birds.

There were some puffins on the RSPB reserve - looking very small indeed in comparison with the other cliff residents, but managing all the same to hold on to their tiny territories - but a woman with whom we got into conversation near one of the viewing points advised us to go to Thornwick Bay on the north side of Flamborough Head, where she said they were much more numerous. We've both loved puffins since we spent a day on Skomer a few years ago, so after lunch we decided to take a chance and follow her recommendation, and we had the best afternoon imaginable.

There are no gannets this far along the cliffs, but there are a good number of the smaller birds, including puffins, nesting around the bay - razorbills, guillemots, kittiwakes and fulmars on ledges, and puffins in crevices in the chalk cliffs. When we arrived there wasn't much to see out on the water, though birds were regularly flying back and forth over the bay, but as the tide came in it got steadily busier, with some birds simply zooming around and others, including some of the puffins, coming down onto the sea to bathe and preen. R and I had been doing some rockpooling (for the first time in decades) while keeping only half an eye on the birds, and it wasn't till the advancing water began to push us up the beach towards the cliff steps that I realised how much activity there was now both on and above the sea.

Having spent the morning photographing down onto most of my subjects, it was interesting to take a second set of images from ground level, and I had fun - as well as frustration - trying to track puffins and razorbills as they circuited the bay. Both are fast and manoeuvrable, and often unpredictable, but this individual flew a relatively smooth circuit and the camera tracking held onto it pretty well, only losing it momentarily a couple of times as it passed in front of the cliffs. As it flew towards me above the surf, I wanted this shot so much I could feel myself tensing, which is never helpful, and by the time it scorched past me I was almost squeaking with excitement.

Given the intensity of the experience, this image simply has to be my photo of the day. The first extra is for R, who I think might like kestrels even more than than he likes puffins. We first spotted her hovering over the cliffs when we were down on the beach, and were amazed that as we climbed the cliff steps and came level with her she carried on about her own concerns and completely ignored us. At one point we were actually looking down on her, but when I took this photo we were level on the cliff top, and just a few metres apart. The second extra, which was my final shot of the afternoon, shows a juvenile grey seal, which appeared quite suddenly as we were climbing the steps and hauled itself up onto the beach. I was concerned about it because there were still a couple of families with children down on the sand, but they kept a respectful distance away from it, and by the time I took my photo from the cliff top it had moved above the tide line and was settling down for a sleep.

I still have several hundred photos to process, including all my shots from Bempton Cliffs, and when I've been through them I'll put a few on my Facebook page, but these three will always remind me of the unexpected bonus of our afternoon at Thornwick Bay, and the happy time we had there.