Country diary: a kind of heaven in avian form

Shapwick, Somerset: Hundreds of thousands of starlings reduced by distance and number to something like smoke

In any other place a great white egret passing overhead would have commanded all our attention. The national breeding total for this species was just seven pairs in 2017. Here, however, at dusk it was an incidental detail, a stately white shape rowing quietly through the binoculars' orbit, as we focused on something far more captivating.