Claxton, Norfolk They rose and fell, swaying as if one organism were breathing slowly, and as they approached they never made sound

I saw the goose skein as a tentative line in a southern blue sky and, since it was arrowed straight towards me, I rested arms and binoculars on a gate to ease the muscle ache.



One, two minutes must have passed as the skein slowly grew, before it occurred to me that large birds in flight never rush. The wing beats are steady, solemn, self-reliant. I remember once in eastern Turkey watching a line of flamingos like this. There is an almost identical length of neck and leg fore and aft of those pink flamingo wings and, such was their lack of progress, it was a good five minutes before I could even work out in which direction they flew.

My guess is that most large species – flamingos, cranes, geese – in their several million years evolving on Earth have not changed, unlike our own species, by so much as a metre per second in pace. Cranes from the Miocene would keep time with cranes today.

The wonder of wigeon Read more

It is one of the things to learn from watching birds: to adjust to their timekeeping. In this field I have several heroes. WH Hudson once lay for five hours to listen to marsh warblers singing. More impressive was the artist Eric Ennion, who lay in a gun punt, hidden under canvas, for seven hours while drawing black-necked grebes. And for the two whole previous days he had done the same and seen nothing.

Only by taking time can one lift aside the common cloth that our senses smother over the daily hours. Only then can we get beneath to the real light-loving fabric of life, whose magic is all here now and nowhere else in that star swarm across the night sky.

My geese arrived: 20 birds in a curve, the lead place switching from the 10th to the 14th. They rose and fell, swaying as if one organism were breathing slowly, and as they approached they never made sound above the merest nub of their true music.

Once they’d passed overhead, however, out poured the oiled-metal ank-ang chorus of pink-footed geese on a north wind.

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