The marsh was as silent as I’ve ever known it to be. A distant brent called with a guttural ‘unk unk’ and the choking yelp of a herring gull seemed to be the estuary’s answer. But neither bird could be seen in the pre-dawn blackness and, besides their far-off calls, the wind and the water, the saltings and the frozen splashes seemed lifeless under a suffocating frost.
Many years ago, a veteran wildfowler told me about a flight he’d once had on the point of land that protrudes into the estuary where I live and where I now stood, allowing my eyes to adjust to the darkness and listening for signs of life. “It was bitterly cold,” he remembered. “The weather had been in the north-east for weeks. The whole country was frozen. This was in the days
