Wild weather, wild birds. This week I was out on the marshes of the Alde estuary with The Times sports editor, Tim Hallissey, to show him a bird or two before we sat down to sort out my sporting assignments for the year ahead: and I showed him several thousand. It was that kind of day. The big wind was not really with us just yet: it was just getting its eye in. Instead, we had persistent rain and a stiff breeze, and Tim dealt with them with the majestic imperturbability of someone who has no intention of being called a townie.

Wild weather stirs everything up: and in the distance a wild swirling cloud. Put the binoculars on the cloud: and it is at once transformed into a demented flock of birds, oozing and morphing from one shape to another: now a sphere, now a ribbon, now a wriggling snake, now an amoeba, now a figure of eight. Small waders, impossible to identify with precision at extreme distance, all lost in the excitements of the aerial ballet: but countable. I made it a good thousand, but you always underestimate.

Had a hawk startled them? I looked hard and saw no hawk. Why, then, were they up and flying? How come they don’t bump into each other? Did the dance represent fear? Or was a joyful celebration of togetherness: a mass expression of wonderful feeling of flockhood, an emotion no human will ever know? There is no leader in such a flock, no dominance hierarchy: so who starts it? Why do they all follow? Does an individual ever start a dance and no one follows? Does some standoffish bird, full of existential angst, ever refuse to take part, preferring to stay on the ground in an avian sulk?

Twitchers, the rarity hunters among birding people, have their blood stirred by the sight of a lost windblown scrap of feathers that has just realised it has made a terrible mistake. But for me, one of the greatest things in nature is big numbers: most especially lots and lots and lots of birds. There is something about the sight of nature in all its plenty that touches me more than any lost feathered souls.

And before us, close enough to bung a brick at should you wish, 400 avocet. 400! And these are birds that had gone extinct as breeding citizens of this country. They are now present in almost vulgar plenty; and they too took to the the air, but in a separate flock sticking to their own kind. As they did so, they caught the wild winter light with their sumptuous black-on-white uniforms: common as bleedin’ sparrows, and a sight that 50 years ago, was no longer part of British life and, it seemed, never would be again.

Perhaps the avocets performed their fly-past to celebrate their 60-year run of success, their glorious transition from rarities to that of the exquisite commonplace. We turned and walked back to the pub, discussing why birds go in for this wonderful formation flying. “Perhaps it’s for the same reason that a dog licks its testicles,” Tim said thoughtfully. “You know — because it can.”

• I wish I could say that for the self-same reason — because he can — Tony Blair is going to save the distinguished jumper.

  The distinguished jumper has been described to me as “a charismatic spider”, and it is found on only two sites in Britain. On one of these, Royal Mail plans to build a massive postal distribution centre, presumably because it can. Or thinks it can: if it does, it will be the end of the distinguished jumpers that hang out there; also the end of the brown-banded carder bees, the five-banded digger wasps, the saltmarsh short-spurred beetles and the red-shanked bumblebees.

  Faithful readers of this space will have heard of this scheme for West Thurrock Marshes in Essex, and know of the range of fantastic invertebrate life that it will destroy. This is a stunning site: a cathedral for inverterate life. Royal Mail wants to destroy the spiders’ York Minster. So I am delighted to report that action against the development is accelerating.

  Representatives of the charity Buglife have been to Downing Street to brief the Prime Minister on the importance of distinguished jumpers in the life of the nation. I hope very much that he was convinced.

  Without invertebrates, the ecosystem of the country and for that matter, of the entire planet is destroyed. We need our invertebrates, and we need them in teeming and mind-boggling numbers, because in numbers, there is life. In nature, plenty is not not just a desirable option: it is the only option. Plenty is the way life works.

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