While I was in Beijing reporting on the Olympic Games, I kept myself going with music, retreating to my room in the Media Village when work was at last done to listen to my favourites - the sort of stuff that you know well, but is always surprising. And always inevitable, simultaneously reassuring and amazing, calming and thrilling.

In other words, a bit like watching wildlife. So I went to the RSPB's great Minsmere reserve in Suffolk to get properly earthed after my travels. And I sat here for a bit and it was nice, and I sat there for a bit and it was nice, and then I went and sat there for a bit and it all went off at once. Amazing. Yet utterly inevitable.

I was in the eminence known as Bittern Hide, listening to the pinging of bearded tits in the reeds and the tittering of dabchicks in the pools: and there, walking along the grassy trail, two red deer, hind and fawn, the mother gleaming red in the sunlight as if freshly groomed, the fawn still pale-spotted.

Utterly oblivious of my gaze, they picked their way along the trail, grazing with that air of perfect contentment that herbivores have at times when everything they see is edible. The entire world is made up of things to eat, although their wariness suggested that they have yet to come to terms with the fact that there is nothing out there to eat them. Their bones remember the wolves.

Once bittern...

Then, with an extraordinary inevitability, a large tawny bird got up as they passed - not a harrier, as I expected, but a bittern, the burly brown skulker of the reedbeds, a heron-like beast that hates to be seen. But up it got and performed a long flight across the reeds on arched wings before landing in front of the hide, more or less uncoiling itself from the air, merging with the reeds and becoming instantly invisible, almost a clump of reeds himself.

This has been a stunning year for bitterns, as reported in these pages yesterday. It is estimated that we have the highest number of them in this country for 130 years, an increase of 581 per cent since the 1990s. I was at Minsmere in those years, while researchers were working out what bitterns needed and practical conservationists were working out how to provide it. Wet reedbeds were the answer to the first question, and bulldozers were the unexpected answer to the second.

A ferocious assault on the habitat allowed it to regenerate, young, green and wet. The bitterns loved it. This last uncommonly wet winter gave birds a boost as they went into the spring, and Minsmere has been jumping with bitterns.

Other places have followed. They are spreading out from the bittern heartland in East Anglia. It is an example what good conservation is all about- a good deal of money spent well by very intelligent, seriously committed people.

No place like home

My eyes turned back to the hind and fawn, the hind alert as new visitors ascended the steps of the hide, her eyes huge, ears ditto, pale, black-ringed. Another bittern got up and performed a flight away from us, every dark streak on the honey-coloured body picked out by the sun, like a monstrous owl.

And then a further treat. A marsh harrier, a female, dark with a creamy head, flew by so close that I could almost reach from the window and stroke her as she passed. Certainly I could count every feather of her big, wide wings as she cruised across the reedbed, cool, menacing, self-certain.

All of this took about 15 minutes. The other three hours of my visit - and a full day is not enough to do Minsmere justice - were much quieter, far less spectacular. Sometimes a wildlife trip is very quiet indeed and you have to take your pleasures in quieter ways.

But every now and then - and there is no telling when, for there are no certainties in the wild world - you will get a boon like this, perhaps a single great sighting that lasts for a couple of seconds and which will stay with you for ever, sometimes an explosion of action when one delight crowds in upon another.

It was good to be back. I saw 13 species of birds in my three-and-a-bit weeks in Beijing; I had more than that within 10 minutes of arriving here.

It's not comparing like with like, I know; the point is that I miss the green and the wet and the wild whenever I get too urbanised. So I think does everybody else. There are two classes of city-dwellers: those who miss the wild and know it, and those who miss the wild and don't know it. These last suffer a continual sense of anxiety, dislocation and edginess and alienation, all the stuff that is accepted as an inevitable part of city life.

Beijing was great - and I'm quite glad that I'm no longer there.

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