I am in heaven in recent days. Buckenham marshes, across the river, is a mosaic of temporary splashes and mud-edged pools and, from the Yare’s raised bank, I can see how it’s smothered in late-winter pre-migration waders and wildfowl. All the flocking thousands are in turn the trigger for the presence of harriers and peregrines.
While the former circle continuously over the marsh, swinging and twisting in cold air, the peregrines are no more than ghosts, spooking the others into wild free-ranging chaos. However, I did have one extraordinary sighting: on the evening of the new moon, a male and female peregrine spearing in tandem towards the southern horizon. Both closed their wings into a long stoop and they fell across the sky until I could see them only as two unequal-sized drops of mercury, pulled by gravity into an ellipse.
Best of all are the churning masses that the peregrines leave in their wake. Wigeon boil up from the pools in fractal patterns and the white lines across the males’ wings flash and re-flash in the grey waves of their panic. Thousands of lapwings are spread in smaller units across the marshes, but no matter how intense their own anxieties, lapwings can only look elegant.
Lines of them slowly lilt and buckle in the sky, and when each bird comes back down to land its wings close over its white body like black shutters. There was one remarkable moment I noticed, when the stolid swans were utterly oblivious and head-down feeding as a great rush of starlings passed overhead and brushed up into their midst dunlins and ruff, until all these birds were globed together in one fear flock.
It is extraordinary stuff, and afterwards I head home with my brain full of it. I can sense all the exact sounds and sights sloshing out even as I rush down the beck, through the gate, up the glade, past the houses, to the front door. By the time I click the computer and press the first keys there is so little left of all the cold wind and wild bird blood except, perhaps, enough for one short prayer.
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