A heron shook the feathery stick of itself. When the sun came out, the air was so hot and muggy that leaving the shade of trees in the afternoon was only for mad dogs who, unlike their Englishmen and -women, had the good sense to run into the water on the pretext of retrieving sticks. The open pools at Brown Moss felt as if they had slipped a long way further south.
The heron was perching, in that half-folded-deckchair way, on one of the fenced enclosures built for breeding waterfowl. It was at the centre of a group of companions gathered around its celebrity. The mallards were uncharacteristically quiet, standing around as if waiting.
On a day like this someone was going to do something daft. One of the Canada geese took the plunge and submerged completely, flapping its wings underwater as if drowning. The mallards and grebe watched with sullen lack of interest, but the coots did that laugh and whirligigged over the pool, bobbing like black apples.
The birds seemed to be struggling to fit into the skin of this August afternoon. They stood at the water margin, where it was hottest, occasionally venturing to ripple across the mirror. Other warm-blooded creatures retreated to dappled shadow in the trees.
The insects had a different reality. Heat and humidity gave the dragonflies speed and flash, as if some ancestral memory jolted them into a Carboniferous world where they, not birds, owned the air and the waters harboured their monstrous youth. That may have been 300m years before this peatland was created by the ice age 10,000 years ago but, although much reduced, they are still here. Hawkers and darters hunted like drones through bur-reeds, flag iris and floating bog bean, for which Brown Moss is important, looking for flies while the waterfowl and the rest of us went into dozy torpor in the heat.
The heron unfolded slowly and stretched. The shake began at the tip of its javelin beak, flashing its crest of black aigrettes, shuffling throat, neck and upper-back feathers, through the blue-grey cloak of lanceolate plumes and wing pinions, and down the knobbly rods of its legs. Now it was ready.
