Tis the year's midnight and it is the day's. One of my better intros, I'm sure you will agree, although not entirely original. Tomorrow, at four minutes past noon, the sun will decide that it has had enough of the day and start to sink back towards night, the lowest point in the sky at which it will do so for the next 12 months. It is the shortest day, the longest night, the darkest 24 hours of the annual round.

It will be noticeably lighter even in the week that follows - it is here that the year makes its handbrake turn and begins its slow-motion progress towards summer. We creatures of the light cannot help but rejoice. It is as if the balance of existence is tilting back in our favour.

We need light to understand the world around us and to feel comfortable in it. That is why we have built a raft of superstitions about creatures that work the opposite way, creatures that are happy in the night.

Owls are witches' familiars, Harry's letter bearer, and they land a part in every Hammer horror film. And over the past week, I have received a solstice garland of owls. Three species, all recorded from the finest birding observatory known to Man - my bed.

Silent nights

One of the things occasionally noticeable about the dark is that you don't see very much. For this reason, owls have developed two equal and opposite talents. They are very silent and very noisy. Uniquely they fly on silenced wings fitted with feather mufflers. It is useful that their prey cannot hear them: it is even more useful that owls cannot hear their own passage. In self-generated silence, their undistracted hearing can pinpoint a target and with supreme exactness. Since owls don't make any sound as they go and you can't see them in the dark, it is hard for them to get in touch with each other casually. So what they do, quite often, is to broadcast their position. They alternate silence and din: mystery and blabbiness. That is why you can sometimes do a useful night's birding without stirring a muscle.

Barn owls are among the more visible owls, as regular readers of this space will know. But although they are often seen hunting at dawn and dusk, it doesn't mean that midnight rambling is unknown or unattractive to them. The violent hissing scream of a barn owl is close to indescribable, certainly inimitable - I've never heard any one get it even remotely right. I heard it a couple of hours after midnight from the direction of the barn owl box in the big meadow. Perhaps he is considering moving in, a cheering thought for hours of darkness.

A night or so later, some little owls gave me an extended Jack Russell duet, a couple in sudden yelping frenzies. These enchanting birds are local stars: tiny, fierce little teddies that lurk about the place with what they imagine is terrifying ferocity. They have a glare like Paddington Bear.

Finally, I heard the wavering, questioning hoot of a tawny owl. This is the real night owl: the owl of midnight, that does voiceovers for every graveyard scene. It woke me from a troubled doze, reassured me that life carried on outside and resumed its nightly ramblings. That was my lot. We don't get any others here - unless Hedwig delivers the Christmas post.

Lapping it up

A bend in the road, a big field of winter wheat, and all of a sudden, for no reason whatever, a thousand lapwings. The sort of thing you used to see all the time, and now don't. As a result, a lapwing flock has become something special, something to lift the heart and make the day. But why were they here? Why this field? Why not my field, far more wildlife-friendly?

But there they stood in these unpromising circumstances: birds whose decline has let us into the secret of their beauty. They stood all facing the same direction in the charming habit always adopted by birds of open country. They do this not to make a pretty pattern, but to get their bums into the wind rather than their eyes.

Lapwings are declining. A European Commission report has found that things are going backwards. The number of globally threatened birds in Europe has risen from 37 to 47. We have known about the decline of farmland birds, such as lapwings, for years: yet between 1980 and 2006 - years of enlightenment, for God's sake - farmland birds declined by 50 per cent.

And so, on a small green desert, a flock of a thousand lapwings cheered my heart. People in sport are always telling us how they concentrate on the positives. Me, I'm concentrating on the lapwings.

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