The wind was bitter and ice-edged and it inflicted a final layer of melancholy on the dank marsh, the slumped reeds, the plain of grey overhead and the river Yare, which was just leaden ooze twisting on an outgoing tide. Eventually I felt it all as the cold ache at my temple.
But other creatures seemed to catch the same mood. Swans in the fields were all gangling necks and heavy waddle, while a buzzard, bulked up with air and feathers as it perched in the copse, flew off with that plodding tempo of its species. Then I climbed the riverbank and suddenly there were the wigeon.
There were 500 spread evenly and receding upstream until they were just pepper spots before a last meander. The current downstream and their foot movements cancelled each other so that the flock looked static. Among the nearest the colours of the males had a lapidary trueness even in this light: hand-cut lozenges of silica and white marble at the rear, the polished sandstone of their heads, that flake of brightness on the forecrown. They milled and turned, heads up, males and females, and while a flock of teal clattered up and bolted in a globe of fright, the wigeon paused.
Then near birds peeled upwards, luffing into the breeze, catching that lift and rising steeply. Wigeon in flight seem finely engineered, slender winged and pre-oiled so that all parts slide freely through the air.
Birds left. Others returned. Some stayed. But in all the entropy of a wigeon flock in wild motion there was also a sort of warm-blooded joy that even December grey does not extinguish. Then they began to call. A wigeon’s base note is a companionable high whistle – “wheee” – with something of the child down the slide.
It is contagious, passing to neighbours, until all catch hold and occasionally the notes run together and rise over them as a high-silvered chorus of togetherness and panic. Eventually the whole flock broke through it in a churn of feet, wings and water drops shining like mica: a glittering outburst in a dying season.
