Rainy days looking through the archives of springs gone by including this moment...

Clad in heavy-duty yellow waterproofs against the questionable weather conditions, our little boat of a dozen set out on a journey to the promised land of puffins. I'd seen these comical seabirds before, but this was an altogether different encounter. Arriving between stepped columns of hexagonal rock, we clambered up to the clifftops. And there we waited among the tufts of pink sea thrift and yellow bird's foot trefoil.  

Way down on the water below a raft of bobbing birds took flight and soon we were surrounded. Their orange legs splayed in that most iconic and endearingly clumsy way, it was hard to know where to look as they seemingly crash landed around us. Some peeked out from hidden crevices, some waddled about like little gentlemen under our noses and some intimately clacked their bills together before retreating inside a burrow. Remarkably uninterested in us, their privileged observers, who were lost in their detail and beaming at their antics.