A late walk along the clifftops to where the fulmars nest. It’s mildish for a north-east April evening, but a purposeful sort of southerly is blowing hard up the coast. The fulmars, dropping and rising from their nesting ledges, show me what they can do, riding the back of the wind, wings stiff like Stuka bombers: zoooom, they go, in raking diagonals across the parallel of the cliff edge.
In the grass fields and turned soil on the other side of the path, beneath the shivering hawsers of the Old Hartley communication masts, there’s a covey of grey partridges. They are red-listed birds, endangered, but they don’t seem to know it: they fuss and bicker, scuttle grouchily through the clods, and now and then straighten up to give a call – a curious, ratcheting cluck-cum-squawk like something you might wring out of a rusted-up old item of machinery.
