When I peered out later in the day, the apple tree was bending under the burden of several plump ... birds.
Snow is not the best weather for finding insects, so I was not surprised, last week, when my brief wander up the garden found nothing. It didn’t help that I was under sustained attack from snowballing children at the time.
But as my fellow bloggers have pointed out, snow does make birds all the more obvious. When I peered out later in the day, the apple tree was bending under the burden of several plump … birds. They were silhouetted against the morning light so not immediately identifiable. As ever, it was slight struggle to find my daughter’s binoculars in one of the kitchen drawers, and when I got them to my eyes, the tree was bare. They looked a bit like thrushes, but they weren’t. Even I know a thrush when I see one.
The mystery was solved a couple of days later when I watched a bird delicately pick bright red berries from an ornamental shrub down in Purley. I made a few notes: grey head, dark cheek patch, reddish brown wings, pale grey breast, brownish bib, white side flecks, pale rump, dark tail, thrush size. Ah! Fieldfare.
I don’t remember when I last saw one of these — 35 years ago? I always associate them with large flocks settling in the grazing meadows of my uncle’s farm near Sittingbourne, Kent. As their name suggests, they are field birds. The RSPB website is on hand with the answer — they readily come into the suburbs to visit gardens when the weather is snowy.
The white is gone from my garden now, and so too, apparently, are the fieldfares, gone back to the fields. But as I’ve been writing this, a long-tailed tit just bobbed into that same apple tree, and a fox just popped through the gap in the fence and trotted up the muddy lawn. I’ve seen the first insect too — a harlequin ladybird. Normal service has been resumed.
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