This was in today's Guardian, a lovely peace by Mark Cocker. I know I'm not supposed to reproduce stuff like this in full, but in mitigation I beseech you to buy Mark's sublime book, "Claxton: Field Notes From A Small Planet". You might well decide that it's the most beautiful book you'll ever own. Anyway, savour this lovely writing and ponder the complete absence of or need for magic!

As I sat in the garden I could hear what seemed like the rustle of some mysterious animal right behind me. That puzzle continued for a while until the penny dropped: the noise was not in the hedge but on top of my head. So I painstakingly lowered my cap until, sure enough, there was a common darter dragonfly blithely sunning itself still in my cradled hands.

I could appreciate how the faint rubbing of those plasticised wings was the source of the intermittent message. And as we observed one another I wondered what its compound eyes, inheritance from the Carboniferous, made of its admirer.

I doubt there was much sentiment on the part of one of us, but I was moved. Why are these moments of close connection with wild creatures so special? Yet they are. On his Twitter page, a friend still commemorates the moment a lime hawk moth deigned to use his nose as a perch. Thoreau had a sparrow land on his shoulder and "felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn".

The best story of this kind I've heard recently was one by John Lister-Kaye of his friend, the naturalist and writer Gavin Maxwell. The former had found a fox with its leg cheese-wired in a snare. Despite his best efforts he couldn't free the snarling, man-hating beast and went to Maxwell, who leapt into the boat to go to the rescue.

When they approached the wounded animal there ensued the same routine of agonising interspecific bad blood. But slowly, Maxwell, talking, reassuring all the while, moved closer and closer and, as he spoke so he soothed the victim, until eventually trust blossomed and the man painstakingly opened the wire and freed his friend.

Maxwell's private and business life were a trainwreck, but with this tale he has never seemed more admirable or more human. It's not just that we join the other animals in such moments, it's that we lose that birthright, old as a sharpened stick, that all our species inherits.

I was so moved that I added a comment on the Guardian website. If I have a religion at all, this article is a bloody good articulation of it!