Why the Coast Is the Best Place to Learn Birds

British coastal waters are among the richest seabird grounds in the world. Roughly eight million seabirds breed around our shores each summer, and a fair proportion of them will cross your bow at some point. The good news for anyone who sails, walks harbour walls or scrambles along clifftop paths is that seabirds are wonderfully predictable. They follow food, and food follows tide and topography. Learn a handful of shapes and habits and you will start reading the water differently — a patch of turbulence, a tide race, a line of disturbed water over a sandbank all become clues.

The best approach is to start with silhouette and manner of flight rather than plumage. At sea, light is flat, birds are often distant, and colour is the last thing you will be able to judge. Get the jizz right and the identification follows.

The Heavyweights: Gannets and Fulmars

The northern gannet is the easiest large seabird to name. Adults are dazzling white with black wingtips, a butter-yellow wash on the head and nape, and a two-metre wingspan. They fly on stiff, straight wings with long glides interspersed with slow, deliberate flaps, often in loose lines low over the swell. The real giveaway is the plunge: a gannet folds and drops from thirty metres or more, hitting the water at something close to 100 km/h. If you see a white arrow falling out of the sky, you are almost certainly watching a gannet working a shoal of mackerel or sand eels.

The northern fulmar looks superficially gull-like but flies quite differently — stiff wings held out from the body, rapid shallow flaps, then long glides banking into the wind. Look for a stout body, a short thick bill with tube-like nostrils on top, and a dark smudge around the eye. Fulmars nest on narrow ledges on cliffs and will see off intruders by spitting a foul-smelling oil, which is a good reason not to approach a ledge too closely.

The Auks: Puffins, Guillemots and Razorbills

Auks are the northern hemisphere's answer to penguins: black-and-white, upright, and superb underwater swimmers. They fly fast and low on whirring wings, and on choppy water they often look like small dark missiles skimming past the hull.

• Atlantic puffin — small and chunky, with a brightly coloured bill in summer that fades to dull grey by winter. Whirring wings, orange feet trailing behind, and a tendency to carry a beak full of sand eels. Seen in rafts on the sea in the early morning or evening.
• Common guillemot — chocolate brown above, clean white below, with a slender pointed bill. Stands upright on the narrowest cliff ledges in dense, noisy colonies.
• Razorbill — similar colouring but with a thick, blunt black bill marked with a thin white line. Less numerous on cliffs but often mixed in with guillemots.

In winter, guillemots and razorbills move offshore and can turn up almost anywhere, often in small loose groups on the sea. A low, fast-flying black-and-white bird between October and March is worth a second look.

Gulls, Terns and the Cormorant Confusion

Gulls are the reason many sailors give up on identification, but a few anchors will steady you. Herring gulls have pink legs and a pale grey back; lesser black-backed gulls have yellow legs and a noticeably darker slate back; great black-backed gulls are far bigger, with pink legs and a jet-black back and a reputation for bullying anything smaller. Black-headed gulls in summer carry a chocolate-brown hood, not black, and have red bills and legs.

Cormorants and shags are a classic coastal puzzle. Both swim low in the water and stand with wings held out to dry. Shags are slimmer, with a thinner bill, a greener sheen to the plumage and, in spring, a small forward-curling crest. Cormorants are heavier with a thicker neck and a stout, hooked bill, and are more likely to be seen inland as well as on the coast.

Terns are the elegant ones — long pointed wings, forked tails, hovering before a steep dive. Most have some combination of a coloured bill with a black tip or vice versa, and they are worth watching closely, as several species mix in feeding flocks.

Offshore Specialists: Shearwaters, Petrels and Skuas

Out past the headlands, the birds get more interesting. Manx shearwaters shear low over the waves on stiff, straight wings, tipping from one side to the other as they ride the wind, alternating dark upperparts with flashes of white. Storm petrels are tiny, dark, with a white rump, and seem to patter across the surface as though walking on water. Skuas are the pirates of the group: heavy, brown, powerful fliers that harry smaller birds until they drop their catch. The great skua, known to most birders as a bonxie, is stocky and broad-winged; the arctic skua is slimmer with long tail streamers in summer.

Watching Well: Practical Tips Afloat

A few small habits will multiply what you see and reduce the disturbance you cause.

• Carry a pair of 8x42 binoculars and keep them in a dry bag. Brace your elbows against the shrouds or a stanchion to steady the view; a boat is never still.
• Look hardest at dawn and dusk, and in tide races, eddies and overfalls where fish are concentrated.
• Watch the direction birds are travelling: flocks heading purposefully often mean a feeding frenzy up ahead.
• Slow down for rafts of auks, and keep well clear of nesting cliffs and offshore islands during the breeding season from April to July.
• Keep dogs on leads on clifftop paths, and stay back from edges — seabird colonies are best viewed from a distance with binoculars.
• Log what you see, along with wind, sea state and position. Patterns emerge quickly, and a good notebook is worth more than any app.

Seabird watching rewards curiosity more than equipment. Learn five species well, add a couple each season, and every harbour entrance, headland and long passage will start to feel richer for it.