I am standing on a knife edge. The sea breathes below, hushing into narrow inlets through tumbled stone and washing quietly against steep cliffs. The breeze is gentle, a welcome relief from the heat of walking while kitted up for a night in the open, exposed in the dark. Soft, golden light is pouring across the wide sky, slanting along the rock-faces and glittering off the ocean surface.

As a child, I was terrified of heights. Sea cliffs terrified me, wide empty spaces yawing perilously down to jagged rocks and seething white water. As a family, we traveled places and did walks that sometimes wound along rugged coastlines. Fantastic views, lost on a child that was afraid of losing herself.

Heights no longer scare me. Learning how to abseil replaced fear with exhilaration. Now, I love being up as high as possible, seeing as far as I can. Chasing the horizon. Flying on the wings of birds that circle and soar and dance in the air above. I trust myself not to fall.

Which is handy for being a seabird scientist, who spends a large amount of time on cliffs overhanging the ocean. Clambering in somewhat precarious locations to find burrows and bundles of love. If you’d told me as a child that this was where I’d end up, I probably wouldn’t have believed it.

But I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

We’re winding our way back in the dark, clambering slowly along the narrow tongue of rock that connects the headland to the rest of Burgess island. The canyon that was full of golden light is now nothing but darkness, and…noise. The song of a thousand seabirds, echoing and reverberating through the air. The crazed high laugh of Fluttering shearwaters – pakahā   and the crooning, whistling ‘oooooor-whik’ of Grey-faced petrels – ōi, as they skim high above the cliffs, shadows in the dark sky.  There’s the purring call of diving petrels – kuaka, a curious, tentative burr rolling along the cliff-faces from where they’re hiding in burrows. I switch my headlamp off and blink a few times. It makes no difference whether my eyes are open or shut. A chorus of seabirds brings the darkness to life, with the gentle undertone of the sea still breathing below.

Even in the darkness, there’s no fear of falling. Because I know I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.