The Puffin Watcher

By Christina Riley:

In the early hours of a midsummer morning before any other eyelashes began to flicker open, I rolled onto the cool side of the pillow and felt the warm air shift beneath the covers. Not in my city bed, not even in my city; I awoke on a fold down mattress in the middle of a seaside hotel room in Cannon Beach, Oregon. Or, almost seaside. Nestled between the road and the ocean it stood just far enough from the water on one end for the cars on the other to drown out the waves.

The days were busy and my mind chose to mirror them, leaving the usually fierce ocean struggling to get a word in edgeways; today I’d let it speak first.

There was no time for a shower or contacts and it was considerably too early for coffee – those are all markers for the start of the day and that wasn’t quite what this was. This was a secret window, hidden somewhere between night and day, swaying between them in a haze of slumber still lifting. In a jetlagged dreamstate I picked up the clothes that had been laid out across the arm of the couch the night before and layered up the best I could using the contents of a summer holiday suitcase. The sandals sat by the front door were slipped on and I tiptoed out into the west coast air.

Holding down the handle to silence the click, I closed the cabin door and snuck across the courtyard, through a narrow path that hugged the last house in the square. It was signposted for the beach not with words, but with a knee high spout over a metal grate for any returning sandy feet, and beyond a quiet street led the way with pastel porches and the drifting smell of seaweed.

Darkness had passed but it’d be wrong to call it daybreak. The night didn’t snap open and pour the sun over the town. It was more of a day bending, a soft thawing as the last shadows of twilight warmed and melted over the rising sun like butter into the sea.

Upon reaching the end of the street, the air felt freer and swam between the tall thin grass of the dunes and through my hair like an otter. Moving from tarmac to sand with my sandals in hand I took the biggest breath of the morning so far, and whispered good morning to the waves. 

The sand felt cold and a heavy mist was still hovering above the horizon, desaturating a sky not quite as eager to roll back the covers as I was. The whole beach sounded distant somehow, as if it courteously turned down its own volume so as not to wake anyone.

Along the shore the high tide line presented an array of treasures just as on the west coast of Scotland, though its offerings here were notably different; fragments of sun bleached sand dollars, frosted sea glass and one slight white feather, translucent, a whisper diffusing morning light like breath on a cold day and defying gravity in my hand; tracing its spine I couldn’t be sure I was touching it at all. Pristine and unweathered by westerly winds and waters, I imagined it ruffling free from the round belly of a gull. Further down the beach a garden tiger moth splayed flat on its furry chest, shining bittersweetly orange and smooth cream in its sandy resting place. A little further still, a small bird lay neatly on its back with wings by its side, head tilted up towards the houses and black webbed feet pointed towards the sea. Side by side along the beach, they could have been sunbathing.

Up ahead the imposing Haystack Rock shot up through earth, sand, sea and fog, towering over the beach like a mountain peak piercing through the clouds; a reminder to breakable bodies that something much bigger is happening. Initially a dark mass to my tired eyes, one by one its crevices revealed themselves with each bird that fluttered out from its sheltered nook or circled back in from the sky, disappearing into the basalt.

Moving closer to the rock my eyes traced higher and higher as if the stone continued to rise up from the ground before me, until eventually, something invited my gaze back down the horizon.

Drawing nearer, the low mist between us dissipated to reveal a man. Sitting on a camp chair in the middle of the beach he faced the rock purposely, the sand beneath his seat still holding residual puddles from the retreating tide. Unconsciously slowing my stride I watched him; the only other soul I’d seen so far without wings.

Within moments he raised his arms and a pair of binoculars were brought to his eyes, fixed on something at the very top of the sea stack.

He lowered the binoculars, though not his gaze.

After a few minutes of my own hushed observation (and quick weighing of shy trepidation against eager curiosity) I decided to approach him, feeling intensely that I would regret it later if I didn’t.

Conscious not to disturb what looked like a perfectly peaceful morning I approached slowly, rolling over the wet sand to mute my squelching, and all too late became a little concerned that my careful act of consideration could be made redundant by giving him a heart attack. Fortunately he noticed me from the corner of his eye and rested into the back of his chair as I stopped alongside him, letting my feet sink into the ground and deciding to stay. He tilted his head towards me just an inch and squinting up to the bright white sky behind my head, raised the corners of his mouth like they were attached with little strings. Welcoming, almost as if expecting, the company he said “Good morning” with such sincerity in the word ‘good’ I saw it float towards me and make the salty air between us glow a little warmer. 

Glancing at the binoculars resting on his lap, both hands still readily placed upon them, I asked what he was looking for. “Puffins”, he told me.

I listened intently as he gestured to the impressive 235ft shard of volcanic rock and explained that it’s home to around 120 tufted puffins; he was recording their numbers for a local conservation group. 

Puffins! Up there! I’d never been near a single puffin in all my life and here above me perch 120 of them. 

“They’re actually doing quite well this year”, he reported proudly, comparing his findings to other years, other hopeful mornings, he’d spent monitoring the bright billed characters from his camp chair on the edge of the sea. Together we froze the space around us, spellbound — he with the puffins and I with him. I stood in awe with the sheer simplicity of it all. Of all the options presented to us every time the sun rises, of all the ways we’re told to spend the fleeting hours, productivity and progress and escape and repeat, this is what he chose. To think how much we could do if we just sat still and looked closely once in a while. 

With my mind fluttering I wished him good day and good luck, and turned back towards the house just as the sky finally decided to draw back the curtains, letting the light spill through windows and dance on eyelids all along the shorefront. 

Looking down at the sand I searched for feathers and wondered if I could find any plumage belonging to one of the tufted puffins. Holding my feather from earlier I brought up an identification website on my phone to figure out who it belonged to, selecting ‘White’ and confidently clicking ‘Next’. But is it a primary feather or a secondary feather? Juvenile or adult? I’m not sure, after all it was on the ground (and the bird was nowhere to be seen to ask). I put it back in my pocket where it remained as a gull’s beaming underbelly.

Holding down the handle I crept back into the still silent house and thought of birds for the rest of the day. I thought about the gulls overhead, dazzling white against the velvety grey sky, swirling through the last of the mist to dust off the morning. I thought of feather patterns and of everything I don’t know, of everything I can’t see above and beneath the water’s surface. I thought of how much more there is. 

When I could no longer hear the waves the words of the puffin watcher replayed in my head, and when I was out of sight of the rock I closed my eyes and saw the auks above a gleaming silver sea. 

120 puffins. 

He’d counted 20 so far.

***

Christina Riley is an artist and writer based in Glasgow. She is currently working on her debut collection of essays, At Tidelines, which was long listed for Canongate's Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing 2019, and has created artwork for The Frayed Atlantic Edge (David Gange, Harper Collins), Gold Flake Paint, Lagom and The London Reader. In 2019 Riley began The Nature Library, a reference library and reading space installed in public places across Scotland. 
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