Tuesday, February 3, 2009, should perhaps be remembered as the most wonderful winter's day in a generation.

It was quite clear, from the disorderly mob of birds that were rioting at the window-feeders, that something unusual was coming.

Throughout this winter, even on cold days, the birds have normally been circumspect about gathering in large numbers. But last Sunday, it was different. They were almost hysterically scrambling to get at the peanuts, for clearly their warning systems had told them that food was soon going to be hard to get.

So it proved. What early airborne molecules had warned the birds of the imminent air-mass from Siberia? How did they guess that we in Kildare should that night get a snowfall of a weight and duration unknown for a full generation? This ability to foretell snow must be a skill which the birds of our fields have faithfully transmitted down the decades, through two dozen indeterminate wet and windy winters since the last great snowfall. And this, of course, is the way of nature: he who is prepared survives the unexpected, and he who is unprepared does not.

Thus the birds brawled over their fare — first the tits and the finches, later the robins, the dunnocks and the sparrows, but then came the blackbirds and the thrushes, not able to extract food from the feeders, but able to pick up scraps on the ground below.

By twilight, the skies had turned into molten solder, a brooding grey amalgam of iron and lead, as a sun of sullen orange sank into the south-western sky. We could smell the metallic tang of snow in the eastern wind that came from the steppes. This was a descendent of the evilly benign weather that laid waste to Napoleon's armies, and to Hitler's dreams of lebensraum, 140 years later. It seldom strays this far from home, but whenever it does, it brings with it some salutary truths about history.

Because it is clear and unmitigated, people reared in such a winter take a sterner and more absolute view of life than those who are cursed to live in our unprincipled meridian of mud. Cold kills, as each morning’s harvest on Moscow's streets testifies. The unprepared perish. That is not a good thing, to be sure, but it is a certain lesson. And the need to learn lessons is one of the founding laws of existence. Mud, on the other hand, muddies.

So we woke on Monday to a mini-Siberia, the Wicklow hills shimmering like wedding cakes, and the fields around us clothed in ermine. We have often seen a false promise of this kind before, soon to be dispatched by a return of warm Atlantic airs.

But not this time, for the sky above was still a grubby metallic alloy, while below a lean hard wind stood from the east, born on the tundra's icefields, with permafrost its midwife.

Fresh falls followed, light at first, and then more heavily, in great spiralling whorls, as Wicklow disappeared, then Kildare, and all that remained were descending clouds of dense white confetti, an albino autumn in February.

The water molecules that made these deep dense flakes were not long ago part of the Don or the Dnieper river systems. Now they were making their homes in Ireland, as were their former neighbours on Russia's arid summer plains, redwing and fieldfare by the thousand, foraging across the Irish pastures.

Monday was good. Tuesday was better, because in our part of Kildare we were particularly favoured by the snow. Though it fell lightly elsewhere, it had been bestowed with a luscious and gravitational generosity upon us. By breakfast, we had a foot of it, with more still falling. It is the silence of the snow which is so bewitching: how can such a total transformation of an entire landscape occur so noiselessly? People in some parts of Northern Ireland will know, too, exactly what I’m talking about, with snowfalls in Armagh, Down and Antrim.

Our weather normally declares itself to our ears: the melancholy patter of rain on the window, the bullying howl of the Atlantic gale, or the broad birdsong that comes with the sun.

But the snow of the steppes arrives like a cat burglar, yet then behaves like a set-designer doing an overnight room makeover as a birthday surprise.

It snowed again on Tuesday, but the fall was too deep and too butter-thick for our two sledges, bought at Tramway Treasures antiques shop near Blessington 11 years ago, and only ever used once since then. No matter.

There were the dogs to be walked through the great snow banks which had gathered on the hill alongside us, and, of course, there were the birds to be fed, from the window feeders and on garden tables, so that our aria-singing passerines — the blackbirds and the thrushes — might just get enough calories to save their lives over the coming days.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009, should perhaps be remembered as the most wonderful winter's day in a generation.

It will more likely be known as the day when the leadership of the public service unions reminded us of the ancient lesson, that unless you are prepared for whatever future history serves you, death is a possible penalty; but it is a certain penalty, and a deserved one, if you resolutely fail to learn history's lessons.

The birds of the fields clearly understand this. As a people, we, apparently, do not.