The Gifts of the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 264

long neck. It had a sharp little head, no tail, long, pale pink legs. It
looked like a pullet on stilts. I tried to persuade myself that it was a
water rail or even a partridge. But it was not. It did not try to fly away.
Instead it made little panicky darts between the boulders, slipping and
scrambling, one moment trying to run away from me along the beach,
the next trying to scurry up the cliff, but slipping down, wings flap-
ping furiously. I drew level with it and stood in the surf while the bird
tried to flutter up the boulder clay, perhaps seven or eight yards away.
I could doubt it no longer. I saw the chestnut flash on the wings, the
sharp chicken's beak, the low slim head, the beautifully netted plum-
age on the back - black and buff - feathers ruffled by the wind as it
turned and tried to slither away up the beach. It was a corncrake.
Though common in other parts of Europe, it is exceedingly rare in
Britain, and has not lived in Wales for many years. There is a farmer,
now well into his eighties, living in the Desert a few miles inland from
my home, who recalls hearing them in his youth, but they have not
bred in these parts since that period. Their decline, throughout Britain
and Ireland, was, from the 1970s until the 1990s, precipitous, 1 though,
with the help of conservation programmes, they are slowly beginning
to recover. 2 The nearest populations to that lonely stretch of coastline
in mid-Wales are in western Scotland and (though fewer still in num-
ber) in northern Ireland.
At first it just seemed wrong. That this delicate creature should
pitch up on a grey, boulder-strewn beach, so far from home - it was
as if nature had fused, short-circuited: 'A falcon, tow'ring in her pride
of place, / Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and kill'd.' 3 But then an
explanation occurred to me. It must have been migrating south, fol-
lowing the coast, when it ran into the wind that had foiled me and
was grounded, exhausted on the beach. Perhaps it had read the same
misleading forecast as I had. As understanding dawned, so did the
thrill of what I had witnessed. I felt, too, a sense of solidarity with this
frail little bird, battling the same forces as me, trapped on the same
diminishing strip of beach.
In pursuit of one returning animal I had encountered another. And
this encounter was just as gratifying, just as enchanting, as contact
with an albacore would have been. I had set out to find an early result
of a fractional rewilding and, despite everything, had found it. Had it