Take a stroll through the classic English countryside of West Sussex, and you’ll notice things becoming strange just beyond the village of Dial Post. Here, a patchwork of tidy fields bordered by neat hedgerows becomes a bamboozling maze of flowery glades and thickets of hawthorn, blackthorn and sallow. Rabbits dart between billowing brambles, watched by a fallow deer sporting furry new antlers. Stranger than the unexpectedly abundant plants and mammals is the cacophony of birdsong – the common melodies of thrushes, robins and blackcaps but also songs virtually extinguished across Britain: cuckoos, nightingales and turtle doves. Oddest of all is a clacking noise that sounds like two hollow sticks being banged together.
“Isn’t it a great sound?” says Isabella Tree, landowner, author and now star of a new film, Wilding. “Storks have these pouches that make the sound echo and travel even further.” And there, in an enormous hammock of sticks at the top of an ancient oak, stand a pair of bill-clacking storks looking proudly over a tiny chick.
