The first time I saw a Northern Gannet, I cried. It was a warm July afternoon at RSPB Bempton Cliffs, as I stood facing the restless North Sea. I was 20, and I had driven five and a half hours from my home in Sussex, and would drive the same distance back that night, just to see them. As I followed the path toward the cliff edge, the air began to change. I could hear their guttural calls echoing from the rock, the percussion of wings cutting through the wind and then, suddenly, there they were. Hundreds of them, suspended in the updraughts. Great white birds with wings spanning nearly two metres, moving in and out of the light with effortless precision. Occasionally, one would tilt its head as it passed over mine and an ice-blue eye would meet me, fleeting and curious. I remember standing there for hours, my eyes stinging from the salt, air and tears. I had never seen anything so beautiful, nor felt such an immediate, unspoken connection to another being.

At that moment, I knew I would spend my life among seabirds. Enamoured by them. But it is not only their abundance in summer that holds me. It is also their absence in the deepest of winters.

If you were to ask me my favourite thing about Gannets, I would tell you this: it is searching for them when they are gone. Standing on the shoreline in the colder months, fingertips curled around my binoculars, I scan the horizon. Left to right. Right to left. Between the white horses breaking across the English Channel, most days, there is nothing; but sometimes, there is. Far out, they are almost unapparent, yet instantly recognisable to me. Not by detail, but by movement, rhythm, by its flash. I’ve never heard anyone describe the way a Gannet flashes above the horizon, but once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Its white back and black-tipped wings catch and release the light in alternating beats. On, off. On, off. Like a distant signal, like a lighthouse cutting through storm-dark air or a star flickering in the night sky.

Almost a decade has passed since that first encounter. In that time, I have stood on cliffs from Shetland to Bass Rock, Orkney to Aberdeen; travelled to the Cape Gannetries of South Africa and the remote coasts of New Zealand. I have watched the precision of a Gannet’s dive, the choreography of pairs exchanging duties at the nest and the resilience of colonies clinging to storm-lashed ledges. My camera has been a constant companion through all of it, allowing me to translate the intangible, the intimacy, the intelligence and complexity of life at the edge of land and sea, as well as man-made disasters that devastate their humble lives.