Vesper Flights, p. 190-1. Helen Macdonald too writes from Wicken fen, it’s almost a literary salon! see notes on bird hides and on rewilding. She’s among the reeds: I learned to listen, to tune into noises and let them guide my eyes. I’d hear the faintest creak or splash or call, and fix on that spot… I’ve learned how to identify birds in pieces, through scraps of colour and shape glimpsed through undergrowth: an eyebrow stripe, a wing-bar, an up-cocked tail… It is an older way of observing animals, distinct from the way they are usually observed today, through binoculars, from behind hides and blinds, or in close-up footage on television screens…. This way of watching wildlife is full of difficulty and mystery…

Yet she also says: As we crossed one of the fen’s ancient waterways, a barn owl floated past us, mothy wings shining through particulate mist. That sounds easy. Why have they not floated past for me? Maybe I’ve not tried hard enough, been patient enough, or I’ve been distracted by dogs, but I get the impression from Tim Dee and especially from Eric Ennion that birds flock to them like they are said to have flocked to Saint Francis. Ennion doesn’t just see a bird in isolation. He knows what it’s eating, where it’s nesting, and how many curiously marked and coloured eggs it has, where it’s come from and where it’s going. For me they only appear like that through my intervention, the garden bird feeder near the kitchen window, packed with easy sunflower seeds. Give a bird an easy life and it rewards you with intimate bird watching. The books have a new category: garden birds, the ones who have chosen us, learnt not to fear us, and maybe become dependent on us. I’ve only just learnt that wild ducks really are wild ducks: they don’t behave like the ducks in Clissold park. I saw some pochards from a hide at the Ouse washes. The hide sits up on top of a high bank which encloses the flood waters. I thought that if I walked hidden from them along the path below the bank and then cautiously climbed up I might be able to see them closely, maybe if I just slowly poked my head over the top. But they were instantly aware of me and gone in a trice. It seems that only mallards have little fear of us either in the park or in the wild.

While Ennion drifted inconspicuously, silently, low down, in his punt, Wentworth Day, the fascist of the fens, was a horseman. In fact during the war he travelled England on horseback, reporting on the state of the nation’s countryside, his eyes at a height of about seven feet. I don’t know how big his horse was, but obviously a pony brings you closer to the earth, a big stallion gives a commanding view. (I can’t imagine a fascist and an aristocrat, or would-be aristocrat like Day on a pony.) John Stilgoe writes about Thomas Cole the landscape painter walking in America in the 1830’s, in his brilliant essay, Walking Seer, Cole as Pedestrian Spectator. He is compared with Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College, who rode on horse back and occasionally in a carriage and eventually published Travels in New England and New York, 1769 – 1815. Dwight is concerned about the state of the roads, is held up by broken bridges, and often anxious to reach his destination before the weather breaks. He is thorough but in a hurry. He is able to ride to the top of the Catskills and back in a day by the new turnpike road, (just as I was able to drive to the car park near the summits of Falakro). But Cole on foot wanders freely, feels more intensely, often leaving paths behind. He endures and delights in the weather. Stilgoe sees him as a member of Thoreau’s elect, as ‘The Walker’, free, noble.

from the notebook, christmas day.

oh, the horse! Is it in another notebook? Is it he or she? I am greatly taken by the fact that a big horse can be nose down grazing among grasses, nuzzling the flowery sward, and then so quickly with a swing of its neck up high, its head possibly almost nine feet in the air. Such breadth of experience, of vision. I am shy and wary of horses but I do recall gratefully a few occasions when a horse has ambled across a field to the gate and graciously but almost indifferently lowered its head so that I can stroke his cheek and look into those black eyes just for a few seconds before he coolly tosses his head and you sense that power, but also you’ve felt that shiny short-haired coat which lies so flat and smooth but sweats apparently like us and means they must be cared for after vigorous exercise, rubbed down, bedded on dry straw, fed with grain, grass is not enough, may even be too much, horses according to signs on Walthamstow marshes have been killed by being fed the wrong kind of food by ignorant passers-by: horses are not like dogs. I wanted to give more precise dimensions to that movement of a horse’s head, that leap in perception from the ground on which we all tread up to the tops of shrubs and the lower branches of trees, and so I googled the height of a horse’s head, a big horse of course because there are so many sizes, but everything that came up was about horses’ heads being too high or too low, their posture or deportment being at fault, which is no doubt connected to having people sit on them all the time or else from pulling heavy loads, and how to correct these failures by adjusting the bit, in case they are chomping on it maybe, or by the correct use of the reins or by seeking help from internet forums or equine osteopaths or behavioural therapists. If most of the little you know about horses comes from westerns, where they just run and run and run and descend icy rapids or clatter down steep loose scree and dodge between trees while the rider clings on sometimes desperately sometimes lovingly to its mane, and are shot and fall so awkwardly, so heavily, with such pathos: horses are not made to fall, they can’t even lie down elegantly, and if they break a leg they have to be shot and this might be the most tender moment in the whole film; and if you have never been interested in gymkhanas or point to points, not even in their strange terminology, or in olympic equestrianism, except maybe you heard about that recent scandal of the English gold medal winner who beat her horse in anger; and if you never cared for circus horses strutting and dancing, all those plumed equine barbies with their knees-up stiff routines, then it’s a surprise to come upon a world of horses behaving badly and what to do about it.

Anyway, the height of a horse is measured from the ground to the girth, which I thought was a measure of circumference, used especially of the trunks of trees, but which in the case of horses is the point where the back meets the neck, so just in front of the point where a rider sits. So the length of a horse’s neck is discounted when measuring its height, which would make me about, what, 4 foot 9?, but would maybe explain why I have often felt somehow complete with a small child sitting on my shoulders. And horses’ height is still measured of course in hands, the width of a hand, about four inches, all across the metrification defying english speaking world, from New Zealand to the USA.

The horses on which public, usually military, almost invariably male figures sit in public places, on pedestals, are tall, but of course not as tall as the man with a straight back who sits on them and looks out well above his horse’s head which is brilliant if you’re Napoleon and very short. The horse confers power and authority to the man to which he or she is subjected.

In Alan Bloom’s account of restoring Adventurers fen to arable land at the beginning of the second world war, the unwilding which destroys everything that Ennion had loved, a horse dies. It fell into a drainage ditch and the cart it was pulling landed on top of it and though two men instantly jumped in and tried desperately to wrestle its head above the water it drowned. And Bloom says that a boy who was working with them – his workers at that time were nearly all too old for military service or too young – the boy wept. Long after reading this it came to me that he wept for all of them.