I am watching hares at rest in the growing wheat through my binoculars. One pulls its long, sundae-spoon ears through its paws to clean them. Another stretches like a dog, yawns and lies down, when something glides behind the harbour of its back like a yacht. There is no rise and fall in the movement of the body, with its short, cryptic, brown, black and white strokes. I blink and look away, refocus. There is a hare-like goggle-eye between wheat blades; a wild little sun with a small black planet dotted within. Pictures in field guides pop up like sleeping tabs in my brain: a stone-curlew. Two. Two stone-curlews.
The first bird sails slowly back into view, the plimsoll line of a wing bar of white feathers aligned with the top of the young wheat. It stays straight as a spirit level as it cruises through the field. At a gap in the precision-drilled crop, it suddenly stands tall, and I realise that it has been travelling along in comedy subterfuge on bent knees, or hocks; these are the “thick knees” of its family name (Burhinus oedicnemus); it is not, in fact, a curlew. There is something else maritime about it; not just the smooth movement, or the white wing bar of fluttering bunting – its long yellow legs and its wader-short thick bill are in the same yachtsmen’s welly yellow. It makes me smile.
