They’ve got sea eagles down there now,’ says pilot Joop Peek, indicating a patch of rough grassland and trees adjoining Holland’s Markermeer lake, near Amsterdam.
‘You wouldn’t want one of those to hit the aircraft,’ he adds, jovially, ‘they’re the size of a door. And they can easily fly up as high as we are now.’
We’re looking down, slightly nervously now in my case, on the nature reserve of Oostvaardersplassen. From 400 metres, we can see a group of wild Konik ponies moving en masse across a patch of mottled green grass – providing a brief glimpse of ancient Europe on one of its newest expanses of land.
Five minutes earlier we had taken off from the airfield at Lelystad, from which you climb for 13 metres before reaching sea level. This whole region, Flevoland, was reclaimed from the sea in the 1950s and 1960s.
