![]() ![]() A few of these nature books inspire me because they were there at the beginning childhood favourites that taught me what things were. It took me half a lifetime to understand that each encounter with the natural world pleats together all the things you’ve read and heard, and adds to them, making something more of the bird or leaf or landscape in front of you, so that the older you get the more meaningful these things become. And they’re made, too, of all the times I’ve seen them before, and for an flickering instant as the fieldfares blow in, I’m a child standing on tiptoe on the edge of a playing field, squinting to work out what these bold, patterned birds in the frosted trees might be. They’re built of all the fieldfares I’ve ever known: birds in paintings, photographs, field guides, migration maps, books, conversations, articles in magazines. I love these migrant thrushes because they’re scraps of the arctic flown to my fenland home, and because they bring history with them too, a bewitching mess of it. T hree months ago the fieldfares arrived in rattling flocks through gusts of hail, their chak‑chak-chak calls like handfuls of pebbles flung on a frozen pond. ![]()
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