Every year a colony of puffins returns to nest on the cliffs at Flamborough head on the Yorkshire coast. As a child i was taken to see them and still have vague memories of it however i had not been back in the nearly 2 decades since then.
This year, as we are living up this end of the country again, my partner and i decided to go and see if we could spot any. We armed ourselves with a pair of ancient faulty binoculars that only really work as a monocular and two cameras along with a single telephoto lens, with this level of preparedness how could we miss them.
We had nearly given up, we had walked across the length of the usual nesting site and spotted nothing. Thinking that we had arrived too early in the season and may have to come back we spotted our first and last puffins nesting on the cliff face.
We were lucky, they were camped right at the top of the rock face and fairly close to the edge of the path allowing us to easilly observe them and capture some high quality images with the 200mm lens(300mm on our Fujifilm crop sensor cameras).
It wasnt until we got home and reviewed the images on the computer that i realised my mistake, we had infact seen countless puffins that day. Between the crap binoculars and the thousands of sea birds I had simply failed to recognise that some of the birds we were looking at were our target. At the time I took the image below i had thought that there was not a single orange foot in sight.
Update 04/09/24 – I have added new photos from this year below
Attempting Art 
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