If you find yourself walking along the Tyne between March and August and wonder what the racket is above your head, the super sweeping white winged wonders calling back and forth are the infamous inland breeding flock of Kittiwakes.

They are sea birds at heart and ordinarily have no business building their nests so far inland, 11 miles from the North Sea as the crow flies...or the Kittiwake! Love them or loathe them (I'm a lover), they need somewhere to nest and raise their chicks safely, so here is one of their purpose-built palaces, the Kittiwakery!

It's an unusually shaped artificial platform found in the Saltmeadows, on Gateshead's riverbank. Look at the pointy, pokey angles of this tower, nosing out into the Tyne towards the fancy fronted flats in the Ouseburn opposite.

Before it became heavily pitted with industry, this area was a grassy floodplain, which swallowed up the brackish, salty waters of the North Sea tide that slid up the Tyne.

The Hawk's Iron Works built houses for workers here in the 1830s, and the area was formerly named Saltmeadows. Now the clank of hammers has been replaced by the calls of Kittiwakes.

The Newcastle and Gateshead flock of Kittiwake is the largest inland breeding colony in the whole wide world! What a Tyneside claim to fame!

In 2016, Kittiwakes were in decline. Many birds suffered food shortages when sand eels were scarce due to rising sea temperatures. This led to low breeding rates and a drop in overall population increase, and the species was added to the Red List of endangered species. However, due to the care and consideration afforded to these specific feathered friends, the population on the Tyne continued to thrive.

The normal front door for a Kittiwake is a sheer cliff or sea stack out in the North Sea, so for them to buck that trend and fly inland was really something. It started in North Shields at the Old Bonded Warehouse in 1949. Then they flew further inland in the 1960s, with many taking up residence on old buildings, on window ledges and the towers of the Tyne Bridge.

Some took to nesting on places like the disused flour mills, now Baltic, which today host a viewing platform with nest cams.

With so many inland visitors, and in trying to maintain the balance between preserving buildings, maintaining repair work, and genuinely trying to provide a safe home for the Kittiwakes, the Kittiwakery was designed by Nathalie Stevenson of Shoney Wind Ltd to mitigate Kittiwake loss at sea with wind farms. This gives breeding pairs a fighting chance of bringing new miniwakes into the world.

Look at the interesting structure of these curious artificial nesting platforms. Notice their very lofty positions, keeping birds safe and aloft from ground-dwelling predators and people. I wouldn't be volunteering to climb up all of those steps, but some people researching the life cycles and habits of these gulls are clamouring up the ladder to get a slice of seabird science to ensure their longevity.

Two structures are offering slightly different levels of avian accommodation. Both are modular and can be de-installed and re-erected elsewhere with minimal disturbance, or easily altered to experiment with different nesting ledge positions. The angles of the structures are well thought out and offer protection from harsh winds and severe sun glare, both of which could easily deplete a nest.

Kittiwakes are beautiful, gentle-headed true gulls. They are an annual marker for me, driving to work under the Tyne Bridge and checking from the end of February to early March to see if they've turned up. I can almost set my watch by them.

And it's such a pleasure to see their gentle heads, white as snow, as they build their little precarious nests on ledges. Then, after a few weeks of feeding up, they lay their eggs, usually between one and three. They're a bluish, green...obviously, to camouflage with the Tyne Bridge right?

The eggs taper to a point, so if they're knocked, they spin instead of slipping out of the nest. Clever eh?

The best time to spot them on their high-rise des res is late June to July when they're actively feeding chicks and swooping in and out of nests. There are now around 1,600 pairs of Kittiwakes, with around 135 pairs living on the Kittiwakery. It's lovely just to pitch up, and sit and listen to their onomatopoeic call...Kittee-wa-aaaake, kittee-wa-aaaake, and watch them effortlessly glide between the banks of the Tyne, real icons of these Geordie shores.