The car door opened in a farm layby and the fat bird sang. Described in ornithology books as sounding like the jangling of keys, the two-second salvo always seems higher and looser to my ears, and is more of a jingle than song. I find I can reproduce it best with four 10p coins shaken in a half-closed fist.
The jingle-jangle rang again and I spied the corn bunting – the “fat bird of the barley” – near the crown of a blossoming hawthorn bush, perched between two thorny sprays. Its slack-jawed beak moved, the lower mandible oddly placed as if it had been unhinged then badly refitted.
Cries of alarm out to the right drew my eyes to a strip of finely tilled bare earth, where a lapwing was leading a rolling potato across the field. Binoculars focused on the “vegetable” identified it as a hatch-and-run chick, all down and no feathers, just a day or two out of the egg.
The parent bird, padding light-footed over the soil, turned its head to cast anxious looks back. A bleated warning or instruction caused the chick to squat, so that it then resembled a stone – or tapas for a crow.
But there were no crows here, or foxes, or anything that might prey on the grey and red-legged partridges that whirred in front of me with breathy “who!” wingbeats.
Whatever I might think of the farmer’s policy of extermination I could not help observing that there were more skylarks than I had seen anywhere outside the Outer Hebrides. They were criss-crossing the path, chasing each other, making little wing-fanned hovers.
And there were four, five, no, six hares here. One crouched, jutting its nose into the breeze to taste my scent.
Bizarrely, there were two close-knit pairs of mallards too, bolting out of the wide, weedy, margins that the farmer had been paid to maintain as wildlife cover. A pair of lethargic greylag geese stomped flap-footed in slow motion over stubble. And, in just four fields, I counted six pairs of lapwings. Here was a giddy, dizzy, vision of abundance, an oasis in “barren” East Anglia.
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