The walk wasn’t planned around birds — it rarely is.
It was one of those late autumn afternoons when the sky feels thin and undecided, pale with mist, as if the day is already halfway gone.

The fields were quiet at first glance. Flat, open, muted. But after a few minutes, movement started to reveal itself — dark shapes settling on wires, lifting briefly, then returning again. Crows, mostly. Many of them. Feeding somewhere out there in the soil, on whatever was left after harvest — seeds, insects, small remnants of summer.

They didn’t feel restless. More like busy. Focused. Evening routines already underway.

I stopped without really meaning to and watched them from a distance. From here, they were part of the landscape — small marks against the sky, spaced along the lines, turning the ordinary geometry of poles and wires into something almost deliberate.

Further along, a bare tree held even more of them. Its branches, stripped of leaves, seemed to exist for this moment alone — a temporary structure for wings and silhouettes. Nothing dramatic happened. No sudden flight. Just presence.

As I kept walking, the noise faded again, and the gathering dissolved back into space. That’s when I noticed a single bird on a wire — isolated, still, almost abstract against the fading light. One shape instead of many. A pause rather than a pattern.

And then, further off, a kestrel.

It sat on a distant pole, between the lines, watching — not the field, but me. Too far for any real encounter. I could see it holding something in its claws, feeding calmly, methodically, as if the rest of the scene didn’t exist. I stood there longer than I needed to, hoping for a closer moment that never came.

After a while, it finished its meal, shifted its weight, and flew off toward the forest at the edge of the fields. Just like that.

The walk continued. The sky kept dimming. The birds settled back into their places — or disappeared entirely. Nothing remarkable had happened, really. And yet the evening felt fuller for it.

If you’d like to see more moments like this — quiet, unplanned, and somewhere between landscape and wildlife — you can find more photographs and stories on the blog.