Think Like A Puffin

 


THE sun had not shared its warmth with the island for weeks but this morning it rose over the eastern side of the bay into a crystal-clear sky. The sea, which had not settled for months on end, now rested in a quiet calm. A gull drifted silently across the cliff face, following its own distorted shadow cast by the early morning sun. The only sounds to break the stillness were the piping calls of oystercatchers on the rocks beneath the cliff and the gentle lapping of the wavelets as they gurgled between the boulders. The stillness of the day was demonstrated by a whiff of smoke, rising vertically from the chimney of a lonely cottage which nestled into the cliff top. Far out at sea, a white speck appeared for a moment or two. Within an hour, the silent gull had been joined by others of its kind on the west side of the bay yet, although they now squabbled amongst themselves over some trivial matter, their cries did not destroy the harmony of the island. 

The speck on the sea, which was in fact a puffin, was now only about a kilometre from the bay. As the puffin rolled on his side to scratch his head, his white belly caught the morning sunshine as it had an hour ago. He continued to preen for the next 20 minutes or so, not with any urgency but with a laziness of content that fitted the day. It was not that he needed to arrange his feathers for quite so long but the air between them, and the warmth of the sun, felt good. He was not a lonely bird and so, having settled his plumage into place with a few violent wing flaps, he gently paddled his way to a group of puffins that had landed on the water about 15 metres in front of him. Feeling content to be with company, he tucked his head back under his wing to rest. Yet, even as he rested, every movement of his feet beneath the water took him a little closer to the island. 

The 7 months since he had last seen the island had been a period of struggling against, or perhaps bending with, the forces of nature, for he was well adapted to do so. He had wintered 300 kilometres, sometimes 800 kilometres, to the west, far out in the North Atlantic. He knew the greyness of the sea in a howling gale, when the wind drove waves higher than the cottage on the cliff, slicing the tops off in a white spume, spraying his very soul with its chill. 

David Boag

https://sites.google.com/view/skomerisland/hyperbooks/the-puffin-hyperbook


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