Puffins captivated my imagination from the first time I saw pictures of them in one of the many library books I devoured as a child. With their distinctive orange bills, they were magical and unique, but I was an adult before I got to view them in the wild. The first time was in the waters around the Farne Islands, off the Northumberland coast, but it was the end of the season and most had already left to winter out at sea.   

My childhood love affair with books and imagination continued into adulthood. I write fiction for children aged five to nine and my stories are heavily influenced and inspired by the natural environmental around me. Hiking is my salvation and it’s my ambition to walk the coastline of the UK. I’ve made a start but there’s still a long way to go! While hiking, I’ve become very conscious of the urgent need to protect our planet, and I was keen to write a story for children that highlighted this without being didactic. So it was a natural progression that I’d choose to write a novel with puffins taking a starring role. 

It was important to me and Penny Thomas, my publisher at Cardiff-based Firefly Press, that the story was as realistic and accurate as possible, and it led to my most recent face-to-face encounter with puffins, this time on Skomer Island. Skomer is located less than a mile off the Pembrokeshire mainland but it might as well be another world away. It’s a haven for breeding puffins, as well as thousands of Manx shearwaters, guillemots, razorbills and kittiwakes.

‘Major and Mynah: Project Puffin’ is the fourth instalment in my junior detective series and is based around Skomer Island. My main characters find themselves in a race against time to solve a new mystery. When they discover puffins coated in waste oil that has been dumped in the sea, they must uncover who is to blame before more damage is caused to precious sea life and the Welsh coastline.

What makes my stories unique is that one of my main characters, Callie Major, is hard of hearing. She communicates with one of the other detectives – a raven by the name of Bo – via her hearing aids. Her hearing loss in not the focal point of the drama but including it was important to me because I’m partially deaf.   

I write the stories I wanted to read when I was younger, with characters like me. I never found one, despite years of trying. As a child, one of the things I hated was being left out of things or singled out because I was ‘different’. I remember my primary school was lucky enough to have its own swimming pool. My whole class splashed around and had fun learning to swim but I wasn’t allowed in because of the danger of getting water in my ears (this was the 1970s so ear plugs weren’t so efficient and advanced). I was only allowed in for a few minutes to have a careful paddle once my classmates had got out. So I used to sit there in a huge huff and imagine I had a superpower, an ability to hear something that no-one else could. It was the spark for the idea that years later became Major and Mynah.

Like many partially deaf people, I depend upon hearing aids and lip-reading, so my visit to Skomer threw up some challenges, like listening to the welcome talk in the windy weather. But I'm pleased to see that The Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales are making efforts to make the island more inclusive. I look forward to returning in 2025 to see these changes in action.

We’re working to make our Skomer Island as accessible and inclusive for deaf and hard of hearing people as we can. We have created a ‘Know Before you Go’ video guide with subtitles so all our visitors know the most important details ahead of booking. We have a printed-out version of the welcome talk available to all visitors on arrival. We welcome suggestions of how we can make Skomer more accessible and inclusive. Please get in touch with our Skomer Island Visitor Officer, skomer.vo@welshwildlife.org, with your questions or feedback.