My back's gone. Bloody uncomfortable. After a brutal bout of osteopathy I am fairly mobile again, but any minor miscalculation can impart a red-hot needle of shock. The worst thing is to take a step down without realising it. I did that at the junction of two fields: I uttered a loud and vile blasphemy.

Instantly, like a moral force, a bird materialised before me, clearly shocked by this intemperate language: a bird fierce, wise and exotic, one that has triumphed over persecution to become part of the daily life of this country. Small, tubby, fluffy, with a distinctly cross expression, it looks like a flying teddy bear, with wings apparently too small to support its rotundity but whirring gamely as it went to cover, from which it no doubt glared at me with yellow eyes, daring me to profane the country air again.

Little owl. Or if you prefer, Athene noctua: Athene's bird, the bird of the goddess of wisdom. They are improbably small, and they abound around my place in Suffolk.

They were introduced, mostly in the 19th century, and were the subject of ferocious opposition from the game-rearing tendency, who believed (don't they always?) that the birds were voracious killers of pheasants. But research on little owls discovered 343 earwigs from a single one of its pellets, and 2,000 crane-fly eggs from another.

I take a rather special delight in them. Their yelps can be heard at any time, but especially dusk, with autumn being particularly noisy as the young birds move about and seek territories of their own. The sound is rather like a Yorkshire terrier that has got trampled underfoot.

They can be hard to see, because they don't move much when you're looking. But you can get a knack: at dusk, on the top of telegraph posts along country roads, most often in the bottom half of England, you can pick out a dumpy shape, hardly interrupting the straight line: a sweetly ferocious little owl.

A word on the wise

I don't know how wise they are, but they are certainly wiser than the people who persecuted them. I am always deeply suspicious of those who have it in for “foreign birds”, and advocate a final solution for them. I have rather a soft spot for the unlikely escaped and released creatures that find a way of thriving.

It's not very sound ecologically, I know: a great deal of serious damage has been done by introduced animals. But when I look on ruddy ducks, parakeets and Canada geese - not to mention muntjacs and Chinese water deer - I cannot help but feel a sense of wonder that creatures so alien can adapt so readily. It is an inspiring insight into the tenacity of life.

The list of introduced animals is longer than we think. It includes rabbit, house mouse, black and brown rat, as well as grey squirrel, red-necked wallaby and wild boar (once a British mammal, of course, then extinct, now found in feral populations escaped from farms).

But the most populous and obvious of all introduced birds are pheasants and after that, red-legged partridges, another gamebird. It is estimated that 20-30 million of these birds are released into the wild every year. The truth of the matter is vast swaths of the British countryside are effectively managed - in ways that include the legal killing of predators - for the pleasures of shooters. And people get tense about Canada geese and parakeets.

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