You’ve got good eyes, people sometimes tell me. On the contrary, I reply. I have a great brain. That’s physiology, that is. For it is one of the gratifying facts of life that the more looking you do, the better you get at seeing. If you do a lot of good looking at the wild world, you cannot help but see more things in it.

So there I was, walking along, the sea on my left and Minsmere nature reserve on my right. And as I looked into the reeds that guard the northeast corner of the reserve, I saw something that nobody else did. Partly because of my great brain, partly because I am so good-looking.

There were birdwatchers, maybe a dozen, looking at birds or hurrying to the next hide. There were dog-walkers, there were non-dog-walkers: a busy scene on a lovely day in a place much visited for the beauty of the land and the life it bears. And still no one saw it but me.

It? Her. A deer, red deer, a hind: just picked out from the pattern of the reed stems, making that characteristic alert-deer silhouette: head high and still, long line of the neck, the big rounded ears. That was all I could see. She played statues in the reeds: secure in her invisibility.

Deer are not much for being seen in the middle of the day. They like to keep themselves to themselves, on the whole, and to be in little groups. But this one was alone (or were there more of them hidden even from me?) and gazing with that wonderful mild-eyed gaze that only a female deer can manage.

And I felt delight in her presence, and a little delight at my own cleverness, if you can call it cleverness. But certainly, there was a little of the pleasure of discovering: a private Barnes-deer moment. And then she somehow faded into the reeds and was gone: dematerialising in the way that Jeeves was so good at.

I say that my brain is good, not my eyes, and that the reason for this is that I have done a lot of looking. This has given me the ability, in certain wild circumstances, to interpret small and scanty pieces of information in a meaningful way. A brain thing, not an eye thing.

It is the same trick that allows you to go for a midnight pee in your own house without switching on the light: that tiny gleam is the doorknob, that shadow the step down, that slightly lesser darkness the passageway, not the wall.

When I go to a new place, I struggle to see the most ordinary things. When I go back to a place I haven’t been to for a while, I am like an out-of-form batsman: I have to work to get my eye in. I am planning a trip to my beloved Luangwa Valley in Zambia: it will be a day or two before I am seeing things as I used to.

Everyone who has been on safari will be familiar with the conjuring-trick eyes of the game guides: how they see lions and elephants from vast, impossible distances. It’s not that their eyes are physically better: it’s just that they can interpret the landscape and its small clues by means of long practice. Their brains are in better shape for the place than yours.

Then there’s a birdwatcher’s expression, “jizz”, which means being able to identify a bird from its general vibes. It’s how to recognise a bird when you only see it badly. Once you have got the concept of jizz logged into your brain, your pleasure in wildlife enters a new plain.

I am setting down all this stuff as an encouragement for all the people who want to look at wild things but don’t believe they have the talent for it. There is, in truth, no talent easier to acquire: the gift of seeing is the inevitable result of the task of looking. Many people are infinitely better at it than I am: despite all that pluming myself about my deer, I am in truth not quite as good-looking as I like to think. Which of us is? But looking for wildlife is like looking for stars on a cloudless and moonless dusk: the more time you spend looking, the more stars you will see. Or, in the case of my deer, the more superstars.

It’s a sad thing to say, but I don’t have much of a pond. I haven’t dared to put one in, because of the stone-cold certainty that my younger boy would be up to his waist within half an hour. But I do have a kind of pondlet, more a puddle with attitude: and I went to check it.

And, of course, it was quivering with the stuff. Frogspawn: like a nightmare semolina, every glutinous bubble just dying to become a tadpole. It’s a poor pond, but it’s good enough for life. And that’s not a hard thing to see. But very satisfying to see so much life that wasn’t there the other day.

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