Just as swallows and swifts are the constant sight and sound of spring and summer, so our two winter thrushes – fieldfares and redwings – are usually ever-present during the autumn and winter months.
Last autumn, however, the fields and hedgerows around my Somerset home were unusually devoid of these birds, while their favourite food – the hawthorn’s bright scarlet berries – remained uneaten.
That all changed with the short, sharp cold snap around new year. As I took my daily early morning cycle ride along the lanes, large flocks rose up into the clear, crisp air: small, neat redwings and the bulkier, gawkier fieldfares, the latter’s chacking call echoing across the frost-hardened fields.
Occasionally I stopped for a closer look, noting the redwing’s rusty-red flanks and creamy eyestripe, and the fieldfare’s colourful combination of grey head, chestnut back and yellowish breast heavily blotched with black.
More than 600,000 fieldfares and 700,000 redwings spend half the year here, before heading north and east in spring to breed, the fieldfares in eastern Europe and the redwings in Iceland, overlapping in Scandinavia.
Perhaps a dozen pairs of redwings and even fewer fieldfares stay to breed in northern Britain, but with the onset of climate breakdown that number is falling, and both may soon disappear as British breeding birds. Whether warming winters will eventually mean they stop visiting us altogether, we are unable to know. But for now, their presence is very welcome.
