That island day of birds in never-ending raucous splurges set against a huge, blue east-coast sky, or against breeze-bowed, meadow-like drifts of sea campion, finally distilled down to two individuals, one eider duck and one puffin. These caught my admiring glance and held it, and kept returning it again and again, so that the memory of them has become indelible. I have been studying two photographs, remembering, reconstructing their extraordinary moments. The eider duck was sitting on a nest, I think. The doubt stems from the lie of the land, for it masked the entire bird apart from the head, which appeared to me as a left-facing profile. Sunlight lit the top of the head, the forehead, and the upper mandible of the bill, the top of one eyelid, the top of one cheek. The back of the head, the whole of its neck and the lower mandible were in deep shadow and looked black. Every square centimetre of the picture was crammed with swarming sea campion.

The head of the bird was perfectly positioned at the base of a shallow vee in the land that extended from one side of the picture to the other. The edge of the vee was also where the sea campion flowers were in sharp focus. A tiny cluster of seven flower heads was particularly striking because its immediate background was the black-looking mass of the eider's neck. The bird must have been sitting on a ledge, just beyond the vee and hidden by it, which was why only the head was visible. The top half of the picture was the high bank that rose some distance behind the bird and beyond the vee, and it was an abstracted, out-of-focus mass of green and white. From top to bottom and edge to edge of the picture, the only thing not sea campion in various states of sharpness was the head of the eider duck, and even that had lost the tip of its bill because it was masked by flowers. The stillness was somehow unnerving. So was the unshakable confidence of the bird in the sureness of its place on the map, its place in the island's scheme of things.

It impressed me. Not least because such a sensibility is quite absent from my own life. My long-standing admiration for eider ducks just deepened perceptibly. The puffin was also on an edge. But unlike the eider's fragment of the island, it was a cliff edge, and I could see the whole bird. It stood, presenting a right-facing profile, and it looked at me looking at it, and we were about thirty yards apart. After a couple of minutes of this, it flew, and I assumed my audience was over. But it was back a minute later and came into land with orange webs thrust forward and whirring wings held high, to land in precisely the same spot, to assume precisely the same attitude as before.

This happened five or six times over quarter of an hour. Each time it flew, it couldn't have travelled any distance worth speaking of, did not land on the sea or dive beneath for food. I wondered if it was a game, or if it was unpaired and looking for a mate and that my presence and stillness was completely incidental to the ritual.