A Rare Bird

Birdwatching is a hobby with a nasty competitive streak, and this episode builds a whole murder inquiry on it. A death among the county's ornithology circles has Barnaby and Jones asking whether bitter rivalry among the birders turned lethal. The death lands in a world of telescopes and carefully kept notebooks, a place where the worst arguments are about who saw what first. The question driving the case is whether the competition did it or something more personal was at work.

The Morgan household sits at the centre of it, with Nina and Patrick Morgan in the middle of the rivalry, and the case pulls in Tim Whitley, Ralph Ford, Michael Hipsman and Dave Foxely, each with a history of glaring at the others over the best sighting. The inquiry spends a good while in hides and village halls, where the talk is all of rare arrivals and old grudges. Every one of them denies having a grudge, then describes somebody else's at length.

Genevieve O'Reilly and Alexander Hanson play the Morgans, with Paul Bigley's Tim Whitley, James Dreyfus's Ralph Ford, Allan Corduner's Michael Hipsman and Paul Nicholls's Dave Foxely filling out the field. Neil Dudgeon's Barnaby and Jason Hughes's Jones run the inquiry, with Fiona Dolman's Sarah Barnaby and Tamzin Malleson's Kate Wilding hovering as usual. Steve Trafford and Caroline Graham wrote it, Nicholas Laughland directed.

The show has always had a soft spot for hobbies that bring out the worst in people, and birdwatching turns out to be one of the better ones. And it's the kind of episode that works because the stakes are small and the feelings are huge, which is the show's favourite ratio. The solution, when it comes, satisfies without surprising, which is exactly right for an episode this gentle. A tidy, watchable mystery, with the countryside doing what it does best: looking beautiful while people behave badly.