The Elephant Seal. A small dark shape in the water.

One Fur Seal pup, clearly doing important field research for the Department of Bad Ideas, kept inching towards the gatecrasher in the rock pool.

A puffin disagreement, a possible romantic scandal, and an entire cliffside audience behaving as though someone had shouted “fight!” in a school playground.

Over four months at Cape Palliser, I kept returning to the fur seal pups in the rockpools. At first they scattered whenever I arrived. Then, slowly, they forgot about me and returned to the important business of bubbles, seaweed, tiny teeth, ambushes, and small wet chaos.

For four evenings, I drove out to Látrabjarg in search of puffins and found only wind, burrows, and nuffins. On the fifth evening, the cliffs were suddenly full of them; calm, golden, unhurried. I had the quiet privilege of sitting among them for a while.