The cliffs at Bempton are made of hard chalk. They run roughly ten kilometres from Flamborough Head north toward Filey, in places over a hundred metres high. The chalk resists erosion well enough to hold the cliff faces upright, but it weathers into a tangle of ledges, shelves, and shallow crevices - perfect real estate for nesting seabirds. Each species has staked out its preferred architecture: kittiwakes glue mud-and-grass nests to narrow ledges that would terrify a goat, guillemots crowd standing-room-only flat shelves where they incubate a single pyriform egg balanced on their feet, gannets claim the wider promontories where they can land into the wind, and puffins squeeze into rock crevices instead of digging the burrows their species typically prefers. Bempton's chalk gives them all what they need.

Northern gannets breed in just a handful of British colonies - mostly remote sea-stacks like Bass Rock and St Kilda, where they are safe from land predators. Bempton is the exception. The cliffs are so high and the chalk so sheer that even foxes cannot reach the ledges, so the gannets nest here on the mainland as if it were an offshore stack. The colony has grown steadily since the 1920s, when there were perhaps a handful of pairs, to thousands today. The birds arrive in January, raise a single chick each through summer, and depart in August and September. Up close, a gannet is an alarming creature - heavy-bodied, blue-eyed, with a sharp dagger of a bill - and watching one fold itself into a dive from a hundred feet above the water is one of the best free entertainments in England.

Atlantic puffins are the colony's celebrities, the birds people drive hours to see. Bempton's population - around 958 birds, 450 breeding pairs at the latest count - is harder to spot than at most UK sites, because they nest deep in rock crevices rather than in the more visible burrows they dig elsewhere. The puffins along the Yorkshire coast are now classed as endangered. The Bempton birds fly forty kilometres east to feed at the Dogger Bank, and their numbers are tied to the abundance of sand eels - small silver fish whose populations have been crashing as warming North Sea temperatures push the plankton they feed on further north. The two-degree rise in local sea temperature is, in effect, pulling the food chain out from underneath the puffins. The RSPB monitors them closely. The trend line is not reassuring.

The cliffs have been an RSPB reserve since 1969, and the organisation has built fenced walkways and several observation points right at the cliff edge - close enough to look down into the nests, far enough back from the unfenced sections to stop visitors testing the geology with their own bodies. The visitor centre, comprehensively rebuilt in 2015, sits on top of the cliffs with a cafe, telescopes, and information about what is in season. In 2017 the RSPB installed twenty-two panels of phonetic birdsong by the artist Adrian Riley along the cliff path; each one transcribes the call of a different species into letters you can attempt to read aloud, then hear answered from a nearby cliff. In 2025 the cliffs played a role in Belinda Bauer's novel The Impossible Thing, about a hunt for a rare red guillemot egg robbed from the colony. The cliffs themselves are indifferent. The birds keep coming back.