One of the best places to go to see birds in autumn and winter is the island of Islay off the West Coast of Scotland. Fifty thousand geese from Greenland descend on this beautiful little island every October. There is an RSPB reserve there, but the geese do not just stay in that. They feed in the fields everywhere, and you can see dozens and dozens of small flocks of them just by passing in a car.

There are white-fronted geese feeding at the edges of the fields by the burns and ditches, and neat little black-and-white barnacle geese grazing out in the middle. The sky is also full of them, the barnacles chattering, the white-fronts making wild laughter. They are a very romantic spectacle as they stream down on to the lochs in the sunset. Also on the island there are choughs, which are rare crows with curved red beaks, and many duck on the lochs, including scaup and redbreasted mergansers.

The moors in the South of Scotland provide both birds and good, easy walking. A route I love in the Lammermuir Hills starts at Carfraemill Hotel just off the A68. You follow a burn with dippers bobbing on the rocks, and are soon up in the heather heading towards Lammerlaw. In summer the sky is full of singing curlews, but by now they have left for the coast.

The red grouse are the great birds here, and they stay all the year round. They fly up from the heather under one’s feet, or sit on a ridge calling out to you “Go back, go back!” A buzzard may go over, and on a sunny day even in winter the skylarks will be singing.

Coming south, there are superb places for birdwatching along the North Norfolk coast. Perhaps the best is Snettisham, where on a lonely beach in autumn you can see enormous flocks of waders flying up from the mudbanks of the Wash as the tide comes in. Thousands of knots come speeding overhead in dark clouds. Then they swing round with perfect coordination and, as the Sun catches their white breasts, they sparkle like a fall of stars. Silvery bar-tailed godwits fly past, and little white sanderlings run with twinkling feet along the sands. Later in the autumn the pink-footed geese roost out on the Wash. When they flock inland at dawn to the sugar-beet fields, it is as though a bawling army of birds is passing overhead.

The estuary of the River Exe is a bird and birdwatchers’ haven. Waders are also the main thing here, and the local branch of the RSPB arranges winter boat excursions from Exmouth dock to see them. You pass one flock of waders after another: bar-tailed godwits, blacktailed godwits, golden plovers. But the ultimate goal is the splendid flock of avocets – shimmering black-and-white birds which prance along in a line, and sweep their beautiful, upturned beaks from side to side in the mud.

With all these exotic locations to go to, one should not forget the charms of English farmland. I love walking over the chalky hills along the Hertfordshire-Cambridgeshire border. A small flock of yellowhammers mutters as they search for food in a hedge. Skylarks swirl over the fields with lilting calls. A kestrel hovers. Then there are some loud, clattering calls in the sky, and a flock of fieldfares – handsome winter thrushes from the Continent – drop down into the winter barley.

A classic English bird scene, but one that never fails to delight me.

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