Abundance can seem a dry notion in ecology textbooks; the reality is mesmerising. The sky in front of me is thick with thousands of birds, guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes; the sea, 100 metres below my feet, is smothered in them, the air filled with their cries.
Where the sheer chalk cliffs angle back a little to form broader ledges, northern gannets have made their home and I feast on the sight of them, the sky-blue ring around the steel-blue eye, the bill and head defined in black, like art deco, against the dusky mustard-yellow of the crown and neck.
Hundreds of thousands of birds nest at Bempton, an uplifting sight in an era of long-term decline, the cliffs an overcrowded tenement, the acrid stench of guano gusting up the rock face, all the individual dramas of birds preening each other, or squabbling, or checking on their young.
But such abundance is always an opportunity for someone or something. Where I’m standing, close to Danes Dyke, was, 100 years ago, the patch Henry Marr and his crew of “climmers” would go to work, swinging down the cliffs on ropes to collect the eggs of “scouts”, as razorbills and guillemots are known locally. One 18th-century Scots writer called them “a rare Dish right drest”, but the beautiful veiny shells, from turquoise to white, attracted collectors too. Along these few kilometres of cliffs, four bands of such climmers would collect tens of thousands of eggs each spring.
The climmers are gone, but other opportunists are close by. I notice a woman training her binoculars not at the cliffs but inland, and catch sight of an aerial struggle, a gull and a predatory owl, too brief to be sure what sort.
“Tawny,” the woman says, as the owl disappears behind trees that cover the dyke, but a short-eared seems more likely. The path along its crest is overgrown and awkward, but after a couple of hundred metres, I make a grim discovery: the elegant heads and wings of half a dozen razorbills, and all else consumed.
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