Reading the Cliffs: Why It Pays to Learn a Few Seabirds

Stand on any UK headland in late spring and the noise hits you first — a rack of shrieks, purrs and clacking bills coming off the ledges. To the untrained eye it can look like one great mass of grey and white. Spend a little time learning half a dozen species, though, and the cliff face resolves into distinct neighbours with very different lives. You start noticing which birds are feeding chicks, which are resting between fishing trips, and how the whole colony shifts as the tide turns. It also makes a coastal walk far more entertaining when the weather closes in and the birds are the only things still busy.

Guillemots, Razorbills and Puffins: Telling the Auks Apart

The auks are the ones most people muddle. All three nest on narrow ledges or in burrows, all fly fast and low with whirring wings, and all stand upright like tiny penguins.

• Guillemot: slim and upright, chocolate-brown above and white below, with a fine, straight, pointed bill. It looks as if it has been stretched. On cliff ledges they pack in shoulder to shoulder, often with an egg balanced on their feet.
• Razorbill: stockier and blacker, with a heavier head. The giveaway is the bill — thick, blunt and slightly arched, crossed by a fine white line near the tip. If you can see a white stripe on a dark, chunky bill, you have a razorbill.
• Puffin: unmistakable in summer, with that striped, triangular bill in orange, blue and yellow, plus a white face and clownish eye markings. Outside the breeding season the bill dulls and the face greys, so winter puffins are far less showy.

A useful rule of thumb: if it looks thin and elegant, guillemot; if it looks thick-set and blunt, razorbill; if it looks like a toy someone has painted, puffin.

Gannets: The Great Plunge Divers

Britain holds the great majority of the world's northern gannets, and there is no spectacle quite like them. An adult is snow-white with black wingtips, a creamy-yellow head and a pale blue bill edged in black. They are big birds — almost the size of a goose — with a wingspan around 180 centimetres.

Watch offshore with binoculars and you will see them patrolling high in long, straight lines, wings held stiffly. When a fish shoal is spotted, the bird folds its wings and drops. From 20 or 30 metres up, it turns into a white spear and hits the water with a crack you can sometimes hear from the clifftop. Repeated dives mean there is a shoal below, so keep scanning that patch of sea. Young birds are sooty-grey all over with white speckles, and they dive with the same enthusiasm.

Gulls, Kittiwakes and Terns: Sorting the Crowd

Most birds called "seagulls" are herring gulls or lesser black-backed gulls, and they are genuinely tricky because they take four years to reach adult plumage. A stroll in June can therefore show you a confusing range of mottled browns.

• Kittiwake: the true ocean gull. Smaller than a herring gull, with fearless black wingtips, a yellow bill and legs so short they are barely visible. Its name comes from the call, a ringing "kitti-wake".
• Sandwich tern: large and pale, with a black cap and a heavy black bill tipped in yellow, and a loud, grating call.
• Arctic tern: slimmer and greyer, with a blood-red bill, a black cap and long tail streamers. In summer it hovers, dips and stabs the surface with an anxious screech.

Look at the bill, never the size alone. Bill colour and shape are the most reliable clues out there.

Cormorants, Shags and Fulmars

Two dark, snaky-necked divers often perch on rocks with wings held out to dry. The cormorant is larger and heavier, with a thick, pale bill and a hooked tip, and a yellow patch at the base of the bill. The shag is smaller and slimmer, with a thinner dark bill, a glossy bottle-green tinge to the plumage and, in spring, a jaunty crest on the head. Cormorants often fly inland; shags stay coastal and nest on sea cliffs.

The fulmar is a different creature altogether — a tube-nosed seabird that looks like a stiff-winged gull. It glides on board-straight wings, banking and shearing without a single flap, and nests on bare ledges. Given a chance, it will spit a foul-smelling oil at you, so admire it from a distance.

Practical Fieldcraft on the Coast

• Timing: May to early July is peak season for nesting, noise and activity. Early morning and the two hours around high tide often bring birds closest to shore.
• Optics: a 10x42 binocular is ideal. A telescope turns a distant stack into a living wall of birds.
• Etiquette: keep to paths, never climb over fencing and keep dogs on a lead. Disturbed birds abandon eggs and chicks quickly.
• Safety: check tide times before walking below cliffs, and stay well back from crumbling edges — the best view is rarely the closest one.
• Weather: after a westerly gale, sit on the sheltered side of a headland and watch for Manx shearwaters and storm petrels being pushed close inshore.

Learn these half-dozen species and you will never again see a cliff as a blur. You will see individual birds, each going about its own particular business, and that is the real pleasure of it.