The first wildlife seen were lined along a low steep headland - over a hundred nesting guillemots. Their shrill calls always evoke a feeling of early summer, it's always saddening at the end of July when the guillemots depart their nests and swim offshore with their young, and the cliffs fall silent. Shelves of rocks jutted from the base of the headland and we drifted past harbour seals lazing in the morning sun, they glared intently at us as we passed. So far so good - suddenly it got even better. I saw my very first great skua. It drifted up behind and was only spotted once above my head. It lacked the graceful shape of an Arctic skua, in fact, I thought it looked a bit dumpy (I realise me saying that is like a hippopotamus calling a pig 'Fatty'). Great skuas have brown plumage with white patches on their wings, and these flapped gently as it glided.

I was excited about seeing my primary great skua and announced it to couple beside me - they were both blasé. I suspect it wasn't their first encounter. The guy sneered in the bird's direction - perhaps he'd recently been beaten up by one and was still resentful of the incident. The boat pursued the great skua around the headland and as we turned, we accessed a huge cove resembling the inside of an enormous amphitheatre. It was like entering The Colosseum packed to the rafters with birds in superlative numbers. Sight was the first overwhelming sense, then the warmth of the sun's heat captured within the cove, followed by smell. The temperature and odour were comparable to sticking your nose into an oven filled with fish and camembert. I managed to hold onto my breakfast and after a couple of minutes, acclimatised to the aroma.

Thousands of gannets greeted us, mostly on the cliffs with others spiralling above. The boat's skipper maintained a running commentary on his speaker system, he explained that Bressay and Noss were home to as many as 25,000 gannets. I think most of them were there in front of me. Some of the cliffs resembled white marble, but it was sandstone rock and the whiteness was caused by gannet poo. The towering cliffs were stratified with smelly white bands and crowded with birds; it was like being beneath a block of flats with dodgy plumbing. The headland echoed with the reverberating sound of 'Carrr carrr carrr carrrr.' It was continuous and repetitive - reminiscent of the laughter of The Count on Sesame Street.