Bempton Cliffs

After several aborted attempts to view sea birds at Skomer and around the Scottish Isles, I finally settled for a trip to Bempton Cliffs, which plays host to one of only two Gannet colonies on the UK mainland. Basing myself near Scarborough for a week, I planned to spend a few hours puffin-spotting with the wife before being left alone for some serious photography time.

Little did we know how addictive watching the antics of sea birds could be. From the huge, beautiful snow-white gannets performing their courtship routine (although we later found out that all gannet behaviour is actually an expression of agression!) to the tiny puffins and razor bills who compete for the best nooks and crannies in the cliff face for nesting, it's non-stop action from dawn to dusk.

Over the course of the week, we racked up around 24 hours of observation, the wife (who's only a happy snapper) managed 722 frames while I clocked up 32GB of pictures (just shy of 3,000 frames - which I now have to process!) and we can't wait to visit again. In fact, we're tempted to abandon our summer holiday in Antigua next year to visit Farne and Bass Rock instead.

We were privileged enough to share this spectacle with some very friendly and knowledgeable people who helped us to appreciate the slight vagaries of the different species - and that not all the middle-sized white birds are seagulls (there were herring gulls, kittiwakes, fulmars and lesser black-backed gulls); the best places to observe - such as on the day we were about to give up because of rain, we were pointed to a patch of cliff-top where the gannets systematically stripped every blade of grass and stem of red campion for their nest building activites (and provided much amusement with their less than gracious landing technique); and finally that seeing a puffin is just a matter of patience and rather than getting over-excited, hanging precariously over a cliff-top fence, D3 and telephoto lens your around neck in a force four gale is not always necessary because if you're patient enough, one of the little blighters will happily perch on a small, flowery outcrop for you while you fire off another few hundred frames. If only I'd been told that on day one because my wife's hair is much greyer since we came back!



Please check out my latest images gallery and keep any eye out for the Bempton gallery which will appear once I've had a moment to wade through a few of those pictures.