In the midst of Winter, when the ground is frozen, the Wild often comes to call.

It is notable that, while we live on the edge of a great forest, we choose to holiday, not in alternative terrain, but in another great forest. On holiday, though, cars do not trespass more than they have to, and humans are benign.

Consequently the Wild is much less abashed than it  might be, and simply ambles around us fellow residents.

The rabbits come to breakfast and supper outside the windows. Deer think nothing of sampling the contents of shopping bags, but do not have the dexterity of the saucy squirrels.

And the bird life is abundant. All over the park there are lavish banqueting points, and bird hides where one can watch without fear of frightening them away.

The other day Maddie and I trotted off to her favourite moment of the holiday: a chance to work with rescue owls.

The Potter films have not been good for our Strigiform friends. There has been a surge in the wrong kind of people wanting to possess these wild spirits, who belong in forests and open spaces.

There are tales of cages, and no flight for days on end. Modern-day Sycoraxes are rooted out, and their Ariels freed whenever possible. But the owls will never be truly wild again. They are imprinted: they believe humans are where they belong. It is heart-breakingly irreversible.

The humans who devote their life to these little waifs are faced with simulating as much of that wild environment as possible.

There is something magical about being in the presence of an owl. They may be imprinted, but tame? Never. Those wild eyes may even make eye contact, but really they are staring past you, far, far beyond to updrafts and hunting grounds.

My daughter has always been captivated by this world. The joy as she flies these spirits is utterly unaffected. She is assured, and in complete sympathy with each bird as it balances and flies. I watch her and I am in awe, and my heart overflows. No extension of me, this one: her own person, and very different.

On our way home we popped into the biggest bird hide. Think of Waterloo Station on a busy day, and you will have an idea of the volume of traffic coming to the tall suspended tubes of bird food stuffed with good things.  The humble sparrows came, the quarrelsome blue tits and great tits, the flamboyant chaffinches: even a lesser spotted woodpecker.

We have never forgotten the time a kestrel appeared like a missile from nowhere and helped itself to a small diner at the avian restaurant. The diner became the dinner, but such is the circle of life, and Maddie took it as part of the way of things.

Today, however, a most unnatural usage of a feeding point occurred.

We had elected to eat at a restaurant which looks out onto a rather chic little avian eatery. As we ate, we watched them dine.

The feeders are on tall posts. When the post reaches about six feet it branches into three, each hosting a three-foot tube stuffed with wild bird seed.

Each bird feeds with its own character. The blackbirds meticulously take a small portion at a time. The blue tits distribute the seed everywhere except the one place it is meant to go. The robins duff up any bird who dares approach.

Last year, with the same vantage point, Maddie and I noticed another visitor who never made it up to the trident.

A great pigeon was waddling back and forth. I couldn’t hear it wheezing but if pigeons could wheeze, it would have been.

It clearly did this every day: waited for the tiny wild birds to drop seeds to the floor, and then circulated, Dyson-like, removing any evidence anyone had ever dropped anything.

That was a year ago. Today, we, and it, were back in the same place, doing the same old thing; with one fundamental difference.

The pigeon, some time during  the year 2010, had become a little more limber.

Oh, we scoffed openly, as it waddled back and forth, adding to its truly magnificent girth seed by seed.

But then our jaws hung open as – somehow – it managed to take off like a helicopter, straight up, swaying wildly from side to side.

Douglas Adams, somewhere in his splendid writings, once envisioned that flying was possible for humans. In an entry in his Galactic encyclopaedia, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, he said it was just a case of throwing oneself at the ground: and missing.

This pigeon made me consider, briefly, whether or not Adams might be correct. What I was watching seemed to defy scientific law. This great wobbling pigeon rose improbably upwards, towards the crossbar between the three feeders.

Life is a decision tree. One is constantly watching events happen which have more than one possible outcome.

In this case, when that stout pigeon reached the bar, the frail metalwork might hold it. Birds could continue flitting in and out of its feeding points; life could go on much as usual.

Alternatively, if one sits an elephant at the top if a lamp-post there can be only one outcome, and it could prove much the same as the scenario which was playing out before our eyes.

We held our breath. Life seemed, for an instant, to hold still, as we waited on this portly interloper’s fate.

And this is what happened. He lowered himself, and settled smugly there, ready to plunder the tubes. We all thought, for a short time, that he would get away with it. And then, slowly, inexorably, the central, vertical bar began to list to our left.

As we watched the angle of the bar became more and more acute. the pigeon seemed unconcerned: but maybe this was simply a cover. Maybe, underneath, his overworked pigeon heart was hammering like the clappers. Or maybe he was just very, very dense.

Just when I thought it would go completely, it came to a halt, swaying dangerously. And stayed there, suspended at an angle which defied gravity.

It reminded me of that moment at the end of the Italian Job, when the bus is halfway off a sheer cliff, suspended. One false move, and that pigeon and the entire birdie restaurant were toast.

I could almost hear the pigeon addressing those whose dining plans he had ruined.

“Hang on a minute, lads, I’ve got a great idea!”