There are moments in a man's life that redefine his relationship with the universe — not violently, not through any dramatic rupture, but through the quiet, surgical precision of an event so perfectly calibrated to his particular misery that he can only stand in the wreckage of it and admire the workmanship.

I have had several such moments. They have, without exception, involved birds.

But the Bearded Vulture was different.

The Bearded Vulture was personal.

The Bearded Vulture, it turned out, was practically a prior acquaintance.

Cornwall in the summer has a quality that the rest of England can only aspire to — a light that comes off the sea with the specific luminosity of a place that knows it is beautiful and has long since stopped being modest about it. We had found, Fiona and I, a corner of it that the more aggressive category of tourist had not yet fully colonised, and we had settled into the particular rhythm of a holiday conducted correctly: late breakfasts, longer walks, the kind of unhurried afternoon that feels, while you are in it, like a natural right, and feels, in retrospect, like a glimpse of a parallel life in which you made consistently better decisions.

We were three days in. The cream teas had been excellent. The light on the sea was doing everything it was supposed to do. A Chough had appeared on a clifftop with the casual magnificence of a bird that knows it is the reason you came to Cornwall, and I had watched it for twenty minutes with the absorbed contentment of a man whose requirements are modest and being met.

Then my phone rang.

The number was that of a friend I shall call Gerald, who regards the communication of rare bird news with the excited urgency of a man reporting incoming weather of a very specific and devastating kind. He had once telephoned me from a hillside in Wales, in inadequate signal, breathing hard, to tell me about a Yellow-browed Warbler in a way that suggested the stability of the nation depended on my immediate response.

"Are you near Beachy Head?" he said.

I should explain something about Beachy Head and its relationship to my daily existence.

Beachy Head is three minutes from my house. It is, in the most literal geographical sense available to the English language, my local patch. I know its chalk cliffs in all weathers and all seasons. I have stood on them at hours of the morning that most sensible people consider provisional. Beachy Head is not a destination I travel to.

We live in Eastbourne.

"No," I said. "I'm in Cornwall."

A pause settled over the line — the specific pause of a person reassessing the geography of a situation they had assumed was simpler.

"There's a Bearded Vulture," said Gerald. "At Beachy Head."