A brisk walk along the Tyne to the coast began as penance for an overindulgent birthday lunch of North Shields’ finest fish, chips and mushy peas. Wavelets on the river, ruffled by a breeze, sparkled in the afternoon sunshine. A returning fishing boat, trailing gulls like confetti, crossed paths with the Port of Tyne pilot vessel heading seaward to shepherd an inbound merchant ship past the treacherous Black Middens reef.
A magnificent coastal panorama beckoned from the lighthouse at the end of Tynemouth north pier, but we had also come to see the kittiwakes that nest at Tynemouth Haven, on sandstone cliffs below the ruined priory. There are reckoned to be about 350 pairs in the colony, easily viewed from a platform at the pier’s entrance.
Their dark eyes and slender yellow bills, curved at the tip, give them a gentle countenance that some of the more hatchet-billed gulls lack. There is something relaxing about watching their graceful, buoyant flights, launched from nesting ledges, arcing with shallow wingbeats over breaking waves. Endearing and surprising too, with a raucous bonding ritual when they return: they bow, rub beaks, then raise their heads with an onomatopoeic kitti-wa-a-k call, revealing a startling scarlet tongue and beak interior.
These cliffs are also home to a small colony of sand martins, hyperactive coastal breeders that have excavated tunnels in the soft rock. Today, a chattering, tearaway group of these agile hirundines hurtled towards the cliffs, averting disaster at the last possible moment by deploying flexed-wing and fanned-tailed airbrakes as they settled around nest holes.
Why did so many gather around each tunnel entrance? Was it competition for a home and a mate, or cooperation? While we watched, each bird crawled in, then emerged, sweeping out a shower of sand grains as it left. It’s tempting to believe this might be collaborative spring cleaning, clearing weathered debris from winter storms. Lapsing into anthropomorphism is so easy when watching birds that fly with such apparent joie de vivre, so fast and close together that it is hard to imagine how they avoid collisions. Smooth-feathered, streamlined masters of flight, delivering an unforgettable after-lunch display: a memorable birthday present.
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