Country diary: My dad and I, watching a hoopoe, finally

A stranger in the horse paddocks takes me back to my childhood. I’m 10 and Dad has just returned from a business trip to India. He shows me a photograph he’s taken of the most implausible bird. It has a breast the colour of pale sand, wings that look like they belong to a flying zebra and a flamboyant crest that’s tipped with black. I am awestruck by the beauty of this fantastical beast.

More than 35 years later, in a village just a few miles from home, Dad and I follow the footpath that leads out of Hinxworth churchyard in pursuit of a long-held dream. Just ahead, through a gap between elder and hawthorn, we spy the soil-aerator, the grub-grabber, the prospector of the paddocks – Upupa epops – the Eurasian hoopoe. A solitary bird that has presumably overshot the continent and found itself in unfamiliar lands, it looks completely at home feeding in the rough grass.

The hoopoe probes the ground with precision. Occasionally it pauses, head tipped to one side, decurved bill poised as if dowsing for invertebrates. Then it raises its crest, lowers its bill, and returns to the business of winkling out its prey. Once, it tosses a morsel in the air, catching it in its open bill as it falls.

We watch, enamoured, as the hoopoe spreads bar-coded wings and flies into a mature conifer hedge at the edge of the paddock to preen. Its feeding spot is taken by an opportunist male wagtail. One pied beauty replaced by another. I’m struck by the sharp contrast in the wagtail’s plumage – the white on its face so flawless, its breast like a deep black pool, an absence of light.

When I look up, the hoopoe has faded a little. In comparison to the pied wagtail, its wings now look sooty brown, banded with ivory and soft orange smudges, its colours muddier than I first thought. Then it flies back down to the paddock to feed, and the wagtail is forgotten. I’m lost in childlike admiration and wonder.

Seeing this legendary bird and sharing the experience with Dad after all these years – this is what joy is made of.

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