Early next morning and under cover of darkness, I tramp down towards my hide with the frost crunching beneath my boots. By torchlight I manage to locate the tiny wooden hut which will be my refuge for the next sixteen hours, and crawl inside. There is just enough room to sit upright. After setting up my tripod and camera, I huddle in the corner of the hide with my knees up to my chin and try to keep warm. It’s still only 4.30 am, and the air is motionless under a starry sky. Slowly the dawn breaks, and a bittern begins to boom its melancholy call from the reedbed nearby. My lens is pointing towards the lake shore where I expect the cranes to assemble, and although I know there are heaps of grain scattered all over the shore and in the shallow margins of the lake, I’m still anxious about whether the birds will arrive, and if so how they might react to the hide and camera.

At 5.50 the first few cranes fly over and appear to land somewhere behind me. Then there is another wave, and another, and the flock begins to build on a gentle rise to my rear. Immediately they begin to display to each other, at an even greater intensity than I had witnessed the previous day. But this behaviour soon subsides, and the cranes start to feed and pour towards the lake shore, with more birds joining all the time. Within half an hour there are somewhere near 7,000 cranes enveloping the lake shore and the hides. I am blessed with a remarkably clear, fine day and expose my first few rolls of film. As the day unfolds, the feeding activity becomes more relaxed and punctuated by periods of sleeping, preening and bathing. Occasionally a marsh harrier drifts by, but doesn’t disturb the cranes - they only get agitated by golden and white-tailed eagles, I’m told. There’s always something to photograph, so the hours pass without really noticing the discomfort. I have to remind myself that it’s way past time for me to eat.

Indeed, there are so many cranes so close to the hide that at times they obscure some of the activities slightly further away and wreck many potential photographs.Can’t see the flock for the cranes. Suddenly there is a knocking on the door! What on earth is going on? It can’t possibly be a person otherwise the cranes would have certainly flown. Then the rapping on wood sound is repeated, and so it dawns on me that there are cranes pecking away right up to the walls of the hide. No longer able to use my 500mm lens even with an extension tube, I substitute it for an 80-400mm zoom, then a 17-35mm wide angle. Hard to believe that these are wild birds, the same birds as those timid flocks in Spain just a few short weeks before. But of course they have become habituated to these hides over several years, and the disciplined routines of the photographers who use them. And now they have other things on their mind.

The realisation that I can open hide windows and change lenses almost at will leads me to relax. So much so, that in an unguarded moment I sit upright with my face close to an open hatch, whereupon a crane suddenly raises its long neck to stare me in the face, eyeball to eyeball, point blank range. I don’t know which of us is the more shocked, but instantaneously I’m deafened by an ear-splitting sound which makes me jerk backwards on my stool, as the aggrieved bird bellows like a yacht’s claxon. Resisting the temptation to shout back at him, I try to resume normal activity and remind myself not to push my luck in future. Meanwhile, he begins to feed again as if nothing has happened.