Recent winter storm-surges from the cold north brought with them surprising visitors. Walking the coast path westwards I looked up and studied a clamorous swarm of gulls, vivid against a gunmetal sky. One, singled out in my glass, was bulkier than its companions, translucent somehow in the subdued light, its long wings white-fringed – a glaucous gull, Larus hyperboreus.



I’ve seen these fine seabirds before, squabbling around rubbish-tips at Iqpiarjuk and Pangnirtung on Baffin Island; or bathing in turquoise pools atop icebergs in the Davis Strait; or following the boat in which I crossed Admiralty Inlet when bound for the Brodeur Peninsula in quest of narwhal. Until now I’d never had a clear sighting of one in Wales, though it’s merely uncommon rather than rare as a visitor here.

It stood out among the flock of common gulls and silvermews (an old name for herring gulls, and one I far prefer). Would it, I wondered, stay with them for the breeding season and perhaps produce one of those puzzling hybrids that make the gull family so fascinating and frustrating an object of study? Or would some new tempest soon bear it back to its northern breeding grounds?

A great crested grebe. Photograph: Ray Wilson/Alamy

I walked on, musing. Venus glinted through a rent in the clouds. Alongside a rocky cove near Morfa Bychan, in a channel where red buoys listed before the outrush of the tide, was another emblem of startling purity, another marvellous otherness.

Sitting low in the water was a great crested grebe (Podiceps crystatus). Its long neck and breast were brilliantly white against the surrounding mud tones, its spikey twin crests clearly visible. It travelled fast on the ebb towards a green buoy whose light winked amid the wide sands.

The season’s too early for these exotic birds’ strange and snake-like intertwinings of courtship. I watched until it dwindled to a dot in the encroaching gloom, and was gone. A bitter wind watered my eyes. Closing them, I could fix in memory a lasting image of that small horned god, solitary under the bright star of love.

• The Hills of Wales by Jim Perrin, published by Gomer Press, has been shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year award

