Every day, Antipodean albatrosses touch webbed feet to tussockland, adjust from sky to ground, and greet each other. The winds bring them home from west or south, or north or east. The skies over the plains fill with long silhouettes, high against the bright sky, or low through the murky mist. Clattering calls and sky-pointing screams are caught on the wind and dragged across the golden land.

Every day, swells slap the cliffs and toss kelp fronds in an endless slide, strap over strap, writhing together, given life. The sound is a constant rushing breath, in and out, sometimes cracking like muffled thunder, sometimes whispering. Each swell is a flicker of light in the dark cliff shadow, patterns forming and reforming, never exactly the same.

Every day, elephant seals haul out and doze on the rocks, noses wrinkled against the splash and foam of waves, unwilling to crawl further up the beach away from the spray. They grunt and grumble to each other, but snuggle together, simultaneously comforted and irritated by each other’s touch.

Every day, the sun sets. It slinks grey and vanishes in the mist, or fires the sky with hot colour. Giant petrels bomb down to roost on the still waters of the bay, screaming their last hoarse calls of the day into the darkening air.

Every day, the moon rises. Petrels skim in the silver light, beating hard up the steep cliffs to soar over the island. Crooning and whistling, white-headed petrels catching moonlight on their white bellies, soft-plumaged petrels swift as shadow. Clouds pool across the face of the moon, and the night is full of shifting dimness and brilliant light, the stars striking hard through gaps in the mist.