I don’t know who the woman was, but I remember her words exactly. She’d signed up for a bird walk as part of the Galle Literary Festival, a celebration held every year in the fort town on Sri Lanka’s south coast. For most of our walk she’d seemed vaguely baffled. But then she’d looked through borrowed binoculars at the paddy-field marshes across the road. There, softened by mist and distance, was an extraordinary number of birds: pond herons, black-tailed godwits, greenshanks, wood sandpipers, pheasant-tailed jacanas resembling animate china ornaments and little green bee-eaters that glowed like neon bulbs. Flocks of whiskered terns rose and fell like slow breaths in the dusk air.

When the woman lowered the binoculars her face was bright with revelation. “Oh,” she breathed, “I get it now.”

I grinned, because yes. Five years ago my life-long love of birding was wrecked by a tour that raced around a neotropical country searching for as many species as possible to tick off our lists. There was no time for anything else. By the end of the first week I was in a sulk, by the end of the second, depression, and I got home just in time for the pandemic. The experience was so grim that when the celebrated Sri Lankan naturalist Gehan De Silva suggested I join him and his wife Nirma for a few days of birding after my appearance at the literary festival, I was so hesitant I didn’t reply to his email for weeks.