Stephen Moss opens with a scene so good it barely needs embellishment: his late mentor Derek Moore, fielding in a cricket match at Lowestoft, unable to concentrate because hundreds of migrating songbirds were landing on the pitch around him. It's October 1965, and what's happening along a 24-mile stretch of Suffolk coastline will become legend — the "Great Fall," when an estimated half a million exhausted Scandinavian songbirds, driven down by cloud, wind, and rain over the North Sea, made emergency landfall on English soil. The meteorology is straightforward. Migrating birds heading south from Scandinavia to sub-Saharan Africa hit a weather system mid-crossing. Many drowned. The survivors — warblers, flycatchers, redstarts, thrushes — piled onto the nearest coast in concentrations that turned cricket pitches into aviaries and hedgerows into holding pens. They rested, fed, and continued south. The event was singular not because the weather was unusual, but because half a million birds were available to be caught by it. That last sentence is where Moss plants his knife. When he started birding in the 1970s, older birders already spoke of falls like veterans recounting battles — events of staggering abundance they assumed would recur. They haven't, and Moss is blunt about why: the weather patterns still exist, but the birds don't. Northern European breeding populations of many long-distance migrants have collapsed over the intervening decades. The pipeline that once produced half a million birds over a single stretch of coastline now produces far fewer. Moss doesn't belabor the data — this is a column, not a report — but the structural point is clear. Falls still happen at places like Spurn Head in East Yorkshire, where the annual MigFest has celebrated bird migration since 2013. The birds still arrive. But the scale is different. Where once birders witnessed a phenomenon that overwhelmed the senses, they now gather in hope of a diminished echo. The piece works because it lets the cricket anecdote do the heavy lifting. Moore couldn't field because there were too many birds. That image is more effective than any graph of population decline. It's specific, sensory, and irreversible — the reader understands immediately that the world has changed in a way that can't be argued with. What Moss is really writing about is the shifting baseline problem: each generation of birders calibrates "normal" against their own first experience. The 1970s birders thought the 1960s were the peak. Today's birders may not even know what a true fall looks like. The essay is a small, well-aimed act of memory — preserving a benchmark so the reader can feel the distance between then and now. The writing is clean and unhurried, the structural argument lands without hectoring, and the piece knows exactly how long it should be. It doesn't overstay.
