The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy

Rumpelstiltskin legend, set in Norfolk when Norfolk had a king, and I had ever after felt that curlews were creatures set apart. But it was another bird that moved me most.
    It was a sandpiper, the redshank; and it had a call which, unusually, the bird book then used by every birdwatcher seemed to have set down accurately. I say unusually, because transcribing bird calls into human sounds is very much an inexact science, but The Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe , by Roger Tory Peterson, Guy Mountfort, and P. A. D. Hollom, had with the redshank pretty much got it right.
    ‘Usual call,’ it said, ‘a musical, down-slurred, tleu-hu-hu .’
    I thought it was amusing to see it written down baldly like that, in consonants and vowels. Tleu-hu-hu : it could be a verb from an exotic language. But it did convey fairly closely the lilting, mournful sound the birds gave when they took flight, which could be borne far over the marshes on the wind, andwhich I found touched me more than anything else – finding that for sure one day which I know was in October, although I kept no specific record of the date.
    October 1962 saw several great events full of contingent influence upon my life. There was the Cuba crisis, the cold war’s most perilous nuclear stand-off, when I lay on the floor of the bathroom saying rosaries like other people were smoking cigarettes, and begging God to save us – no one not alive then can imagine the terror of that week – and the Second Vatican Council, opened in Rome by Pope John XXIII, Papa Giovanni, who began a rethinking of the severe creed in which I was being brought up, that eventually led me to rethink it myself – and the release of a first record, Love Me Do , by a local rock band from across the Mersey (although in those days we didn’t call them rock bands, we called them beat groups) whose name was The Beatles, a record which by December had reached Number 17 in the national charts – something I remember chattering about excitedly at the school Christmas fair.
    You might say it was the month that the sixties began, October 1962, when the great gates of change began to creak open. My own significant event from it holds no significance for anyone other than me, but it does still resonate with me strongly. I remember about the day itself, that I saw a goldeneye first. I had biked to Burton Point and started trudging down the embankment to Shotton pools and halfway along, I slipped down to the marsh itself so that I would not be silhouetted as I reached the pools and could come back up with stealth; and when I eventually did, and peered over the embankment top, there was a real prize: not fifty yards away on the water was the goldeneye, a splendid duck from Scandinavia which I had never seen before but recognised at once from the Field Guide .
    I spent, I suppose, about an hour watching the pools and then headed back, and the weather was somewhat unusual for Britain: sunny, with a stiff breeze. The whole of the Dee wason my left hand, at peace in the golden light of October, and I began to hear faint sounds: redshank calls. Tleu-hu-hu . The birds were calling from somewhere invisible to me, out on the marshes, but their voices were being carried on the north-west wind which was blowing straight down the estuary’s whole length towards me, and looking at it all, I stopped, sat down on the embankment and listened, and another call drifted to my ears, and it suddenly seemed to be pulling everything together, this ethereal mournful fluting, all the beauty of the untouched estuary and the great skies and the distant mountains, all its richness of life, and I realised for the first time where it was coming from: from the very heart of wildness.
    Whatever it was that had captured the spirits of Thoreau and his successors, looking on the untouched landscapes of nineteenth-century America, in that moment on the Dee estuary captured mine. I saw a part of the earth in a way I had never