At Rye Meads RSPB reserve and for the third time this year colder than I ever imagined possible on the mainland UK. An inch thick or so carpet of snow that made it look more like the fringes of Siberia than commuter belt Hertfordshire. No wind, but the evidence of it was there, with reedbeds bent back, splashed with snow as if someone had flung a pot of white paint over them.

Necessity drove the birds out, cold does that. We were fair dazzled by acrobatic tits and finches gyrating around two bird feeders near the reserve's welcome centre.

It was n't too long before a party of female pheasants poured over the nearby bank or scampered through bushes to forage around the base of the feeder. Then with an almost operatic entry, a scowling, blood red-hooded male pheasant strode in the way a hot tempered, over bearing squire would have made his way through the chapters of a nineteenth century bodice ripper.

Contempt in his every move, disdain in every gesture and dominance in every step. He strutted, observed, then left. It could have been the march of some operatic despot. With a scabbard trailing by his side or a dueling scar, he would have been the perfect Prussian army officer martinet. Nature is theatre at times.