Six, seven, eight, nine long‑tailed tits are on a foraging flit through hawthorn bushes, and the straggler drops obligingly on to a berry‑stacked twig before my eyes. Its tail works like the hand of a clock as the clinging bird jiggle‑jumps through a full 360-degree rotation, beak pecking for who knows what. The twig is unmoved by such exertions, for the bird weighs the equivalent of seven paperclips. What must it be like to inhabit the insubstantial ghost‑world of a long‑tailed tit, where you can leap and land all you like with no discernible impact?
Ahead and above, a bird 100 times its weight is weightless in the sky. The soaring buzzard masters gravity with its “fingertips” – the deeply separated primary feather tips on the wings. I cannot see the little flicks and tilts that enable it to descend in controlled steps; drop and hold, drop and hold.
