The bird stood huddled in the bare tree, its head and beak tucked into its wing. Its feathers were puffed up, presumably to keep it warm as it slept. The effect was to give it a scruffy, tumble-dried sort of look. The odd swoop of a feather near its neck suggested its regal plumage.

I’d never seen a sleeping heron before. I’ve seen plenty of herons fishing. Both along the river and in another life, living on the harbour of a seaside town in Scotland. I watched them fish in admiration: their heads never darted beneath the surface without a fish to show for it. They tread carefully when they walk in the shallows, and somehow never seem to be looking directly into the water.

The tree was one of those by the bandstand on the Chiswick side of the river, just before the rail bridge. Those branches all curl down towards the current, well beneath the high tide line. You’d think trees drank through their boughs and leaves rather than their roots.

They reveal so much at this time year, the trees along the river. And not just sleeping herons or nesting Egyptian geese. They show the wild convulsions and erratic, mesmerising paths their branches take, eliciting thoughts of spasms taking place slowly over the glacial pace of tree growth. An ancient plane tree contorted to such an extent that the evolutionary compulsion to seek sunlight feels unlikely to be the sole guiding principle to its expansion. Branches double back on themselves, tumble into awkward angles, rising and falling and enacting some manner of modern dance or abstract art. Following one with your eyes never takes you to where you expect to go. It’s quite intimate, really, to see the trees in such a state of undress, to see their raw nature and not understand how it came to be thus. Or, for that matter, to see a heron napping, its feathers a touch scruffy for warmth, ensconced in a tree for safety but laid bare for all the world.