A Day For Thanks

Wildlife still sparkles through February’s gloom, says NICK ACHESON of Norfolk Wildlife Trust.

- Nick Acheson

IT IS GREY and it is cold and my toes hurt. My nose hurts too, with each intake of below-zero, marsh-damp air. The shortest day was weeks ago but at 3pm, as my friends and I stand in the car park at Hickling Broad rubbing our gloved hands against the cold, it is already the end of a February day. It has hardly been a day – more a watery pause in the winter night – but it has been happy, in the way that old friends, warm soup, and gossiping geese in wet fields bring happiness.

We walk from the car park down a muddy minor road between tall hedges, long since leafless and stark. Leafless they may be; birdless they are not. Noisy fieldfares, coming from the same wide, wet Broadland fields as the geese, skip and flutter along the hedge tops on their way to roost. Each bird, joining the flock from the fields, stalls its fall from the sky with its black tail fanned.