Country diary: Claxton, Norfolk

It may be a projection of my own sense of seasonal change – such as the crocuses in our hedge and the song thrush shouting from the wood – but I cannot help thinking that there is a definite edginess in the birds gathered on the Yare floodplain. It is as if they know themselves that it's in the air – a kind of pre-migration tension – and it will soon well up and drive these wigeon and lapwings north for their breeding grounds. The mood is stirred further by a male peregrine, who rises above the woods and glides south so smoothly that it feels as if I'm watching a floater pass gently down the curve of my own eye, rather than a distant physical object. The anxiety among all the 5,000 ducks and waders across the marsh wells up in a great symphony of flight. Momentarily their lives are shaped and answer to the beating of one falcon's heart and I wonder how we should process morally that all this glorious spectacle of the rising flocks is a product of raw fear? Can something so dreadful truly be beautiful? The most compelling part comes when about 2,000 lapwings lift in a single elongated group. As they rise so their upper wings are tilted towards me like a billowing sheet of black. Then, as one, they present their undersides and rise higher in a broken veil of white. From below and almost through the middle of these lapwings blasts a denser flock of wigeon with even greater urgency. They cross. I can hear all the woodwind chaos of their wings. Out of this terror they build upwards into a great momentary cathedral of birds and the peregrine, shining powder-blue even in this flat light, twists down upon them. Yet he fails. They scatter and in sub-groups slowly they simmer back down until all are once again spread across the marsh. Still nothing has happened.