We are mammals, you and I, and if you find this hard to take, then I draw your attention to page three of The Sun. Our closest wild kin suckle their young just as we do, they urinate, defecate, copulate and parturiate just as we do.

But our non-human fellow mammals are not much part of our lives. They like to keep out of our way, while we like to keep the idea of our kinship at arm's length. Not me: my life's plan, when I was at Sunnyhill Primary School, was to be “a bird-watcher and an animal-watcher”. Watching mammals is pretty hard, though. They're an elusive bunch. It's not often, outside the great plains of Africa, terribly feasible to go out animal-watching. You just don't know if you'll see any. In this country, apart from bunnies and squirrels, you come upon them only by chance. Animal-watching is not so much a project as a state of readiness.

So there I was, riding out on my spotted mare. She is not only a lovely mammal in her own right, she is also a disguise. When I'm with her I become a quadruped. As a result, my fellow quadrupeds become a little bit more confiding than usual.

There was a hare, taken aback by our skylining presence. But instead of making a break for it, as hares will, he was filled with understandable fascination. He sidestepped neatly into a field of corn - corn that was a good foot and more in height. And here he kept us in sight by bouncing.

You know how a dog will jump repeatedly in long grass to keep the world in view? The hare did the same in the corn, bouncing up and down like a furry ball, appearing and disappearing from the green sea, one eye focused on the unfamiliar quadruped. I had never seen a hare behave like that, still less so closely; a great leaping group of all us mammals together.

Then the hare took to the open grass track and belted, perhaps just for the sport of it, and the red mists descended on both parts of the second quadruped and we had an enthusiastic chase. Never got close. The hare knew what he was about, all right.

God speed

A short while later, a car came bombing towards us, doing a good 60mph, too fast to be safe. What's more, I had just noticed a small, slinking, undulating gracile presence along the roadside, and because I was a quadruped, I was taken at face value as a mammal, not as an interfering human. So it stayed in sight.

It was - not it wasn't - a weasel, there was a black tip to the tail, so it was stoatally different. It was a small stoat and, therefore, female. I knew this because I had been reading an excellent new publication from Suffolk Wildlife Trust, The Mammals of Suffolk, by the excellent Simone Bullion, old friend of this column.

I gave an urgent signal - to the driver, not the stoat - please, please slow down. To my amazement he did, and the creature dodged death beneath his wheels by about 6in. A couple of hundred yards on, the driver stopped altogether and looked back in bafflement. I was too far away to explain, but if you are reading this, let me explain now: you saved a fellow mammal. You did well.

A little night music

Noise pollution. How I hate it. In whatever form: traffic hum, the tss-tss of your neighbour's iPod, mobile-phone bellowers, music in pubs and restaurants: we are deafening ourselves with stuff we no longer even hear. So let me tell you about a concert I heard this week. A lot of it was silence interrupted by cars and aircraft, but for all that, sensational.

Just after dusk, just away from the Suffolk coast, the wind had dropped and the night was warmer than expected. So let's hear them, birds first: nightjars, the strange radiophonic, constantly changing key and long ecstatic chur; two or three males competitively establishing territories to be in prime position when the females arrive. They were joined briefly by the boom of bittern - the great foghorn roarers of the distant reedbeds, a sound like blowing over the neck of a monstrous bottle. After that, nightingales, two or three males, not really in full voice, but whistling pointedly to remind each other they were still there.

Then a stone curlew, the mysterious goggle-eyed bird of wide open places, of dry plains and wild, ravaged landscapes, sending out its mad range of whoops and yodels and whistles. And if that wasn't rich enough, in came the natterjack toads, churring a bit like the nightjars, but with a sense of rhythm foreign to nightjar nature, a rare and difficult amphibian in full bellow.

No mammals among this lot, but all vertebrates, and as fellow vertebrates, we can all empathise with the beauty of their concert, and with its essential meaning. Sex! Sex! Life! Life!

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