Miracles...Part II

II.
All this talk of noticing miracles reminded me of why I started birding in the first place--to learn to see again, to pay attention to the extraordinary world around us, a world that is passing away because of our carelessness and violent indifference. Birding usually requires a lot of patience, attention, and luck. Time spent with the bird book. Time spent staring at the bushes with your binoculars, then without them, then with them again, trying to find the winged creature making all the noise. Some days it's as if there are no birds left in the world. Some days, as Melissa would put it, it's all just yellowbums (a very common kind of bulbul). And then, sometimes, out of nowhere, darting past, comes someone extraordinary, fixing you with a dazzling eye.
My encounter with puffins wasn't like that at all. It was absurdly easy. It required, first of all, a voyage across the open sea, for which I drugged myself, to an island made of honey-combed basalt pillars called Staffa. There were small wonders on the way--fat sleeping seals, wheeling shearwaters (like a brown seagull), and lots of auks way out in the waves--guillemots and razorbills and puffins--exciting black and white birds, all of them, but very distant indeed. Patrick, the boat guy, told us that if we just climbed to the top of the island and walked to the cliffs on the far side, and sat down at the edge of the cliffs, and just waited, that the puffins would come in from their rafts on the sea. (Raft here means 'clump of birds.') They would feel safe from the seagulls and come right up to us and be friendly and access their cliff burrows. I confess that although I hoped this were true, I didn't fully believe it. So my father and I hiked across the cliffs with one other family. We got to the edge of a cliff on a green hill above the sea. Down below us were some fulmars tucked up sleeping on the ledges of rock that they use as nests. We weren't sure whether this was the right cliff. The puffins were out in their raft, wee dots on the water. They seemed perfectly indifferent to us. I decided to test my faith in this matter, spread my coat on the green grass, about a metre back from the edge, sat down and waited. Dad scaled the next hill to see if the puffins would come to that point instead. I sat by myself on the green hill and waited. After a while some of the puffins started lifting out of the water and flying around in ever increasing circles. This went on for some time. Yet they appeared to be about to fly out to sea, and I remember feeling very sad about this. Then they changed direction. They started flying in large arcs, getting closer to us on each pass. Toying with us, perhaps, or thinking they were clever little puffins fooling the seagull ruffians. Then, abruptly, they fluttered down out the sky all along the cliff's edge. Right in front of me. Orange feet first, wings up and behind, landing with a bit of a thump. And then all these wonderful little birds looked oddly at you and went about their bird business. It was absurd and wonderful. All I had to do was sit there and be surrounded by puffins, by a crowd of whimsical affectionate many-colored little angels. My eyes were open--I saw, and I marvelled. I still do.