I love those chance moments of wildlife - those moments when, without your seeking it, wildlife suddenly imposes itself on your ordinary life: the intersection, if you like, of wildlife and tamelife. I cherish these moments not just for their serendipitous beauty, but also for the way they tell us, sometimes quietly, sometimes stridently, that wildlife and tamelife are inextricably intertwined, that wildlife is not to be confined to some ghetto, either of the world or of your understanding of it.

It's a theme for a book, and rather on my mind, because I've just started writing it. So it was rather fine, then, to have confirmation at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. So picture your correspondent, having given his little all for the sports pages of this newspaper: 900 words filed after 80 minutes (yes, while the match was still going on, that's what we do) and then a certain amount of reworking once I knew the result.

It's an absurd, and rather draining business, especially with the beauties of an Aeroflot flight to look forward to on the morrow, and with at the most three hours' sleep between then and it. So it was with a certain amount of self-pity that I left the stadium and looked, without undue optimism, for the bus that was to take me back to the press hotel.

The path led through the complex built for the 1980 Olympic Games: the last big propaganda coup of the Cold War. There was a few trees and bushes lining the path, and suddenly from their midst, strong and marvellously sweet, as unexpected and as affirming as the nightingale that sang in Berkeley Square, rose the voice of a bird.

It was now getting on for three in the morning, not a glimmer of light in the sky save the sulphurous glow of the streetlights. Yet this glorious voice sang our utterly undismayed by Chelsea's defeat or by the jubilation of the Manchester United supporters. I knew it and yet I didn't know it; it was familiar yet not familiar; it was nightingale yet not nightingale.

So without ever having heard the song before, I knew it was a thrush nightingale: close relative, and rival in song; more measured, more thoughtful, more restrained; a less-is-more version of the tumultuous singer of the English May, but equally in love with the dark and the the darkness's opportunity to solo. I didn't dare't linger: what if my bus went without me? If I were Keats I might have written an ode to a thrush nightingale I listened to it without breaking stride.

The following night, stranded in Amsterdam (thanks, Aeroflot), I was anxious to check my diagnosis in case, perish the thought, I might furnish you with a faulty diagnosis. So my wife did the research and, down the mobile phone in a pizza restaurant, I heard the confirmation I sought. (FYI: she entered “song of thrush nightingale” on YouTube and found a genuine Muscovite bird.)

These stolen moments fill me with an obscure delight. We can't escape wildlife, no matter how rigorous our tamelife. And even when we seem most cut off from the comforts and excitements of the wild world, the wild will break through and sneakily lift your heart. Now, as I write these words in Amsterdam airport (another delay), I look back on many other of these inadvertently wild sporting moments: the lesser kestrel at the Stadium of Light, the crested oropendola at Queen's Park Oval, the shikra at the Wankhede. And know I have another great sporting moment to treasure.

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