The middle of river in Norfolk is a good place for sky. Eddie and I had taken the canoe to a spot with open water on one side and a treeless grazing marsh on the other: sky was almost the only thing you could see. The sun was bright, the clouds in a hurry.

One marsh harrier. No, two. Hang on…. it was like counting stars at dusk. We could see five of them, wheeling, manoeuvring, negotiating, assessing, rising on the rising air: fine raptors making that distinctive shape: long, square, narrow wings, long tail, wings in a shallow V.

They were at 500 feet or higher. Mostly harriers like to be down low, but this was spring and there were important decisions to be made: decisions that would affect the rest of the year. The big birds made their patterns, Eddie and I stopped paddling to watch and the boat slowly drifted broadside to the stream.

At the very top of the stack one bird approached another, did so again and then again… and all at once they were falling: two birds as one: talons locked so they formed a giant, spinning, ferociously armed shuttlecock. They separated with some reluctance and without crashing, glided apart and then back again, as if it was a sequence of movements long rehearsed: the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of the Norfolk skies. This was surely total commitment: to the season and too each other.

Here, then, was the famous skydance: the courtship of the harriers. The equinox was still a week off but the sky was full of spring. The season of seasons was back and dancing in the sky.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/spring-is-the-only-season/simon-barnes/9781526667359