I HAVE to hold my hand up and admit that this is not my favourite time of year.

For my least likeable feature of a North Yorkshire winter its a toss-up between seemingly incessant wind and completely waterlogged ground. Unfortunately we seem to have both at the moment.

Of course there is always a consolation where nature is concerned and early this week I enjoyed one of the benefits of our recent exceptionally wet weather. As the famous saying puts it, "great weather for ducks".

It doesn't take much for low-lying, flat land to turn squelchy, especially if the area concerned happened to be a lake in the not-too-distant past. What we now know as the Vale of Pickering didn't contain just any old lake but the largest expanse of fresh water anywhere in England, stretching from where Hackness is now to the site of Ampleforth village, 25 miles west.

Lake Pickering has not been a permanent feature for thousands of years but the water table still lurks just out of sight. November's downpours have brought it to the surface, turning everything to "clart" or even pools of standing water.

These winter water-meadows are the habitat of choice for many migratory birds that visit us during the cold season. Most of these are from sub-arctic Scandinavia but also from lower latitude continental Europe where distance from the sea means hard winters with regularly frozen ground.

Ryedale's current acres of soft mud are a magnet for various wading birds like curlews, redshanks, godwits and snipe, which use their long, thin bills to probe for worms and other tasty tit-bits.

The most obvious recent arrivals though are ducks and geese, partly because there are so many of them but also because they are noisier, usually announcing their presence with a clamour of quacks, honks and whistles.

My recent sortie through fields adjacent to Marishes Lane, though technically a walk, was in reality more of a wade-cum-slither but rewarding all the same. Mallard, teal and a pair of shoveller ducks dabbled for dinner in the shallow water that covered most of the far side of my current field.

Other flocks of birds decorated the blue skies above; an arrowhead skein of geese heading east, a swirling mass of lapwings and then a small party of ducks descending to land. As they slowed, stalled and water-skied to a stop on the pool they whistled their identity – wigeons.

If that had been it then I would have been more than satisfied, but the highlight of the day was still to come. Scanning neighbouring fields through my binoculars revealed seven large, pale shapes cropping the grass. They were too white for sheep and the one watching me sported the long, slender neck of a swan.

These were no tame park birds but wild whooper swans, recently arrived from their breeding grounds in Iceland and very alert to danger in their new environment. During the whole time I was watching them, six grazed and one kept lookout, but they all took it in turns to do guard duty.

Eventually something spooked them for, accompanied by a chorus of yelps and honks, they ran across the grass and laboured into the air. I held my breath as the squadron wheeled to the left and passed directly over my head, still low enough for me to hear the rush of air from their huge sail-like wings.

They headed west down the Derwent Valley and I followed them until they were a faint, flickering line of white which finally disappeared over the distant horizon.