Redwings feast on Christmas berries
DOZENS of redwings (turdus iliacus) whistled in to Kerry, where the holly bears many berries, to stoke up after tumultuous travel from mainland Europe, Iceland and Britain.
This smallest of the thrush family migrates in daylight and darkness, flocking to settle usually with fieldfares (turdus pilaris) in fields and mountainside, and later old orchards seeking apples, and eventually domestic gardens of prolific berry-bearing bushes such as cotoneaster and pyracantha.
On their journey from Scandinavia and Finland, groups keep in contact with one another, especially at night, with distinctive, soft but far-carrying ‘tseeeip’ calls. The writer John Fowles (The French Lieutenant’s
Woman) heard redwings overhead in a town in France at 3am and described their curious calls as a “very thin, high-pitched glistening whistle, an in-breath, like a sudden, small gleam on old silver in a dark room — strange, remote, beautiful sounds”.
Although they come from sparsely populated areas, redwings are wary of man but the ‘deargan sneachta’ becomes more courageous by necessity and will eventually appear in suburban gardens.
The Kerry birds were plentiful in the Brandon area last weekend, as are berry-bearing holly trees, and co-incidentally, I came upon a reference to an “attempt to breed, Co Kerry, Ireland, 1951” in Thorburn’s Birds (revised edition 1976), a splendid book found last year in an eclectic place called The
Secret Bookshop in Dublin’s Wicklow Street.
The author and ornithologist Mark Cocker feels the redwing is second only to the fieldfare in terms of beauty and that the two species in nomadic winter flocks provide a “double spectacle”. Perched redwings have a bright rufus crescent along their flanks but the bird really gets its name from the large patch of rufus-chestnut across the whole under-wing coverts seen when in flight.
I have never been close to but a handful of redwings in a field, usually with fieldfares, or three or more as garden visitors, skylark-sized, easily spooked to fly up into the highest nearby tree branches. Flight action appears leisurely, though, with bursts of floppy wing-beats alternating with brief glides on open wings and short, faster glides with closed wings.
Field guides indicate winter bird numbers into Great Britain reaching one million. They are very nomadic and keep moving, prompted by food supply and weather conditions. Severe UK weather will push many into Ireland. Later, as winter temperatures rise, these ‘Irish’ birds will return to Britain to begin their return journey to northern Europe.
A 1972 sighting of a phenomenal migration was recorded in Aberdeenshire, when for four hours redwings were landing along a 24km coastal stretch, described as “a staggering sight with the number of birds beyond estimation”. The bird’s distinctive bold cream ‘eyebrow’ gives it a ‘cross’ look as if saying ‘leave me to my berries’. The poet Emily Dickinson wrote that “hope is a thing with feathers… heard in the chilliest land”. Redwings are a weather vane and reminder of Christmas almost upon us.