There was a time, back in the 1960s, when if you wanted some art to hang on your wall you went to Boots. You bought either Tretchikoff's The Chinese Girl or a Peter Scott: Ducks Ascending, or Ducks Descending, or something along those lines - a lot of sky at the top, a bit of water at the bottom, and a flock of ducks uniting the two. If you prided yourself on your good taste, however, you regarded both artists as kitsch and naff and otherwise unacceptable.

Me, I had a Peter Scott. My parents bought it for me when I was 10, and I hung it on my wall at home and later in my flat at university, by then with only the merest of irony. Scott may not have been Rembrandt, but he was the better conservationist and he painted ducks and he was all right by me.

A selection of his paintings and drawings has now been gathered together in a book, The Art of Peter Scott, 20 years after his death, and it has taken me back to my childhood with alarming speed: so much sky, so many ducks. I knew Scott best from the television of course, from his series Look, which ran for decades and brought the wild world into my sitting-room in Streatham.

The book contains boyhood sketches, examples of his non-duck work and, delightfully, examples of the doodles he did on agenda papers during the eternal meetings some people are doomed to go through: scorpions, fish, newts, children, llamas, seals, sharks, a redwing, and, yes, the odd duck, all scribbled in with effortless virtuosity. How lovely it must be to do that: it might almost reconcile me to going to meetings.

Cause and effect

Scott was as near as the 20th century got to a renaissance man - privileged background, Olympic bronze medal in sailing, distinguished war career and British glider champion, as well as all the rest. But it's as a conservationist that he mattered. He founded the organisation now known as the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust in

1948 at Slimbridge, in Gloucestershire.

The trust now runs nine centres, and with my mind full of Scott, it was time to make a pilgrimage to the nearest one, at Welney in Norfolk, on the Ouse, there to commune with angels. Well, swans anyway.

There are three species of swans in the country - and the mute swan, with orange bumpy beak, is the one we all know.

The other two species are long-haul travellers who come to England in the winter: the Bewick's swans from Siberia, the whooper swans from Iceland. The latters' journey involves a 600-mile sea crossing, which they do in 12 hours.

At Welney there were a few of each kind under a clear light and a vast emptiness of sky. And ducks. It wouldn't be right if there were no ducks: pochard, teal, mallard, shoveller and wigeons whistling away in their perfectly wigeon-like way. I have an undocumented and unreliable memory of Scott saying: “Every man should have a cause, even it's only bloody ducks.”

Alas, I have been unable to substantiate this, and his widow, Philippa Scott, can only confirm the first part. But I like to think that this classic piece of British self-deprecation is a genuine remark from the king and the champion of the ducks.

Absolutely whooper

The light fell from the sky, and with it fell the swans. They came in late, from a hard day filling their faces on the sugar-beet tops in the farms all around, leaving it till the last moment, playing chicken with the dusk. They travel for choice in tight family groups, usually parents and the year's crop of cygnets, in fours and fives, and in one case, a nine.

Down they came, levelling out over the lagoon and vanishing in the grey light, then turning finals, as pilots say, banking as one swan, causing the white wings to reappear like magic: down went the flaps, in the form of webbed feet, and they touched down, water-skiing a few yards before settling on the surface, tucking away the angel wings, taking a ceremonial drink, and then gathering together to make a family bugle call of triumph.

The air was filled with visible swans descending, and I was living in a Scott painting. The air was also full of audible swans, bugling away, for these are gabby birds who whoop at every moment of excitement - and they live exciting lives.

Swans came and swans came, and it was like being a surfer, unable to leave, always waiting for one more wave. There are 2,000 whoopers here right now, and that should double by the time winter is properly here. And this was just a small aspect of a man's life work: stuff he loved, observed, painted and saved. Not naff, no, not kitsch: it was perfectly clear that this was, and is, a cause worth living for, and worth dying for, come to that.

I left with notebook pages filled with a few scribbled words, wishing that with half a dozen pencil strokes I could re-create what I saw: ducks ascending, ducks descending.

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