DISCOVER THE COAST
Mad hares, bold birds and a spring-clean to welcome visitors - springtime arrives at our coast
It comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. It’s the perfect description of March, the month in which (hopefully) winter takes its final bow and somewhere, somehow, suddenly, there are signs of spring every where – a joyous process which will accelerate when, on Sunday, March 31, British Summer Time starts and the clocks go forward, giving us precious hours of extra daylight.
And this year, that’s a doubly significant date – it’s also Easter Sunday, a time when we celebrate rebirth and new beginnings (and some of us eat our own body weight in chocolate, but that’s a whole other story).
Right across the Yorkshire Coast, properties are currently being spruced up for the onset of the main holiday season. Attractions are getting a fresh coat of paint and festival organisers – the main festival season starts in April – are putting the finishing touches to their plans.
Lambs are gambolling, wild flowers are blooming, and beekeepers are eyeing up sites to move their hives to for the first, early season, honey of the year – later in the year, some of them will send their bees for a brief holiday on the purple-clad North York Moors to produce that extra-special heather honey.
If you want to easily see nature at her brilliant, chaotic best at this time of year, take a trip to Bempton Cliffs – how lucky are we to have this natural display right on our doorstep? These magnificent 400-foot high white chalk cliffs are home each spring to one of the UK’s greatest wildlife spectacles, and it all starts about now as over half a million birds, many of which have spent the winter months out at sea, head back to their precipitous nesting sites.
Visit this RSPB reserve (there is an entrance charge if you’re not a member) in the spring, and you’re pretty much guaranteed great views of penguin-like razorbills, guillemots, kittiwakes and fulmars, along with ever yone’s favourite, the colourful puffin. King of the cliffs, though, has to be the glorious gannet, the UK’s largest seabird – Bempton is home to the country’s largest mainland colony. Seeing this huge bird (it has a 1.8 metre wingspan) hunting is truly awe-inspiring – it folds back its wings and plummets into the sea from heights of up to 30 metres like a heat-seeking missile.
And Bempton isn’t just
